Music has been a part of composer Frances Pollock’s life for as long as she can remember. “The joke in my town was that my family was the Partridge family,” she says. In addition to performing holiday concerts and singing in the church choir, Pollock grew up helping her father, a jazz pianist, arrange songs for his band. “From early on, I saw the challenges of forging a sustainable career as a musician,” she says. “As I got older, I not only wanted to study the craft of creating music but also to better understand ways in which artists can insert themselves into the production and distribution processes.”
The internationally acclaimed faculty at Yale School of Music was an alluring draw for Pollock. “Martin Bresnick, David Lang, Christopher Theofanidis, Aaron Kernis. They are titans in the world of contemporary classical music. Everyone wants to study with them,” she says. Another draw was the freedom to explore interests outside of a traditional conservatory curriculum. “I knew that Yale would be a great place to develop big ideas for how to sustainably make a career in the arts.”
Her interest in artistic entrepreneurship and ownership inspired Pollock to seek opportunities at the Yale School of Management and Yale Law School. Then, in 2020, as the pandemic lockdown shuttered theaters and performance venues across the country, a big idea began to take shape.
“We live in a world in which the starving artist is the norm,” Pollock says. She and other artists she spoke to around Yale agreed that the inequities in the entertainment ecosystem would likely only be further exacerbated by the pandemic closures. “To allow artists to make the content they really want to make, we need to recast the artist as entrepreneur and change how money and creative ownership work in our industry.”
In 2022, Pollock and eight other co-founders launched the Midnight Oil Collective (MOC), an ecosystem that tackles the problem of the starving artist through technology, investment, and mutual economics for the artist participants. Their goal is to prove that, like the tech sector, the arts can generate a substantial economic return that will benefit artists and investors alike, especially when the artists maintain majority ownership over their own work.
Pollock, who serves as CEO, calls MOC’s unique investment model “a living study in cooperative economics.” Projects for the stage and screen by various artists are selected through a democratic process and bundled together into a portfolio. As the portfolio moves through MOC’s incubation and funding pipeline, artists provide feedback about one another’s projects, a process that incentivizes collaboration and ensures that everyone is invested in the success of the portfolio. As projects scale and evolve, artists also receive legal and business training to equip them with the knowledge and practical skills they need as the primary managers of their work. Once certain thresholds are met, artists are cut into the upside of the fund, providing a safety net as projects in a portfolio do or do not take off.
Yale has proved to be the perfect setting for developing and launching this industry-shifting venture. “With its wealth of arts and humanities resources and a campus-wide emphasis on innovation, the university is uniquely positioned to be the thought leader in the space of cultural production,” Pollock says.
Early in the process of researching business models and the intricacies of fund structures for MOC, Pollock and the other co-founders received invaluable support from Yale Law School’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Clinic. There, current law students helped them navigate the various transactional matters that can arise when starting, managing, and growing a business. “They are the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Pollock says.
To date, MOC has invested in ten arts and entertainment ventures and has created jobs for over 300 artists. Pollock is excited for audiences to soon see the first glimpse of one of the fund’s early investments in an off-Broadway production this year.
“I sometimes look over my shoulder, worried I’ve stopped embodying anything that looks like a composer—especially when we think of the archetype of a composer scratching away at sheets of music in a room by themselves. But people realize the world has changed, and so far, I have received only tremendous support from Yale for what I am trying to do. I’m going to keep going.”