What did Oliver Tree leave behind, and to whom?
Oliver Tree built a career on contradiction: a Bay Area kid who started out making dubstep and DJing before reinventing himself as the bowl-cut, scooter-riding antihero of a run of alt-pop hits. When he died on 14 June in a midair helicopter collision over Rio de Janeiro, one of six people killed, the question of his estate had, unusually, already been answered. Tree had decided some time earlier that his money would not pass to his family. When he passed, he said, no one was going to get a penny; the fortune would instead seed a foundation for young artists. With his body now repatriated to California, his family has confirmed they will honour exactly that.
What is Dr. Oliver Tree's Extremely Epic Grant For Baby Geniuses?
The foundation, named with the absurdist humour that defined him, is built to channel his music-catalogue earnings and estate into grants for emerging, up-and-coming creative artists. By his design it runs on the residuals his recordings keep generating, paid out each year, with a committee of past collaborators deciding who gets funded. Relatives are provided for only to a limited extent, such as education costs; the rest is for the so-called baby geniuses. "This is something that Oliver had put together before his passing, written in his will," the family said, pledging to "make sure his wish comes to fruition so that more joy, love and art can be spread into the world."
"When I pass, my family, no one's gonna get a penny." Oliver Tree, on directing his estate to emerging artists.
Why does an electronic-music publication care?
Tree's roots are in the Bay Area's bass and dubstep underground, and his entire persona was a running argument about image, authenticity and what an established artist owes the next generation. A musician converting an entire estate into a perpetual grant for unknown young creators is rare. The model itself, catalogue residuals funding a rolling artist endowment, is exactly the kind of posthumous-economics question the whole music industry, electronic music included, will be watching, especially as catalogue rights become an asset class of their own.
