Mint Season 6, Episode 22 Recap
Season 6, episode 22 of The Mint Podcast by Adam Levy features David Greenstein. He is the co-founder of Sound.xyz, a permissionless modular his platform for creators, artists and fans to interact with each other, primarily through music NFTs.
web3 music continues to grow despite the bear market. Artists are releasing music regardless of the macro situation and are speaking to music NFTs as a way to release music beyond the larger cryptocurrency market in a fun, creative and autonomous way. A large part of it is the sound that allowed artists—musicians—to share their stories. As David says:
“Artists want to have their own brand, their own control.”
A song is like the atomic unit of a music NFT. Therefore, each song should be its own contract, or collection, to allow for end-to-end royalties in primary and secondary sales. Sound is designed to be open to as many people as possible, as emphasized by the newly released sound protocol. A permissionless base layer allows anyone to build on top of sound or related smart contracts. In the current web2 music paradigm, companies such as Spotify and Apple act as data aggregators, drawing attention to artists and songs, but at the expense of musicians’ creativity. These companies missed out on developing a third-party ecosystem that builds on top of content, such as creating music catalogs. Now, on platforms like Sound:
“You can still listen to music for free like Spotify, but now you collect and own your music like iTunes, vinyl and CDs.”
Collecting or owning music now has an inherent value. Additionally, artists no longer have to rely on streams to make their music impactful. Music’s existence as a digital collectible gives the song a twist of social status and rarity. It allows artists to experiment with their work via blockchain and create music that is true to themselves. The advice for artists currently participating in web3 music, or web2 musicians looking to experiment with music NFTs, is the same.
“Putting good music out and releasing it constantly. The act of tokenizing your music is a sign that you take the space seriously.”
