Ice Cube Partners With Australian Tech Startup MyPremo

Ice Cube, the hip-hop pioneer, film star and basketball tragic, turns his attention to MyPremo, an Australia-based tech startup that hopes to help artists better monetise their digital creations.

After hearing the pitch, Cube, the Rock Hall-inducted N.W.A rapper, invited MyPremo co-founder Cody McDowell to Las Vegas for a catchup on the sidelines of his BIG3 basketball draft and combine.

Numbers were exchanged and “over the next six months we built a relationship, going back and forth building out the platform to the point where he felt he could back us,” McDowell tells Variety Australia. “Ever since then we have continued to grow the platform and vision together.”

Founded in 2020 by Perth-based McDowell and James Gillies, MyPremo’s enables artists to distribute their works from its platform, keeping 80% of all the money they earn. If they recruit others, they earn an additional 5% of their referral’s revenue, for life. “This ‘carrot’ will supercharge our onboarding of artists to the platform,” says McDowell, who positions his business as the “alternative” to the giant streaming brands and the paltry per-stream revenues they kick-back to the creator.

Cube, he continues, “is a very calculated mover. Very meticulous. But when he decides to go, he goes. And he goes hard.”

As a partner on the startup, Cube will be expected to help grow the platform through his knowhow and connections. Outside of the product, continues McDowell, he’ll be “building our vision. Planning how to enter our other two markets of focus being film and sport and how they play a vital piece in pop culture, a barrier we are striving to break and be adopted by.”

Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Sr) and N.W.A were inducted into the Rock Hall in 2016, a year after the release of the biopic “Straight Outta Compton,” which traced the early, trailblazing days of the west coast hip-hop act. His acting credits include 1991 breakthrough “Boyz In The Hood,” 1995’s “Friday,” and 1999’s “Three Kings.”

In 2015, he was honoured with Pioneer Award at the Black Film Critics Circle Awards, and two years later, in 2017, was recognised with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.