Music NFT is booming in 2022, regardless of the crappy market condition. We’ve seen a great number of music NFT masterpieces that come with real utilities offered by talented artists, which have already been covered by a lot of articles. We as a social engagement protocol also pay close attention to this trend. But we think there is one question that not only us, but the whole industry is keep asking - how far are we from the mass adoption of music NFT?
In this article, we will first list some of the existing problems that we identify, and what can be done to help resolve this on a web3 social standpoint.
Problems
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Within Music NFT
Segregations between communities, between community and platform, between platform and platform happen everywhere. For example you won’t know Oshi’s new song on Catalog while listening his previous work on sound.xyz or audius.
Moreover, there needs to be right tool to meet the need of Web3 pioneering artists, such as @DanielAllan and @RAC, to keep leveraging the equal opportunity of communication with their fans.
What do I mean by “right tool”?
A tool that can motivate huge fans to spread the word about the artists and their work; a tool to keep tracking such efforts and aggregating all the music-related activities and achievements as a whole to present the context of this user in Web3 music.
And Twitter/Discord/tokenized websites in our humble opinion are far less than satisfying in this purpose.
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Music NFT ↔ Other NFT & Web3 Sectors
Music NFT is lack of exposure in Web3, even though we hit 10k unique collectors this year, it is still very small comparing to general NFT collectors market. We need a better medium to connect music NFT with massive web3 users.
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Music NFT ↔ Traditional Music Industry
Music NFT is lack of exposure in Web2, even though big artists like Snoop Dogg and One Republic have entered Web3 for a while. The barrier still exists to onboard Web2 fans.
Admittedly, so many great music NFT Dapps, DAOs, and other entities have emerged this year, as outlined in the Music NFT Landscape curated by @Coopahtroopa.
But we think this is just the beginning - only the network effect of Web3 music can lead to the mass adoption of music NFT. Currently there is no easy way for people to communicate with each other in a cross-platform and cross-Web3-music-scenario manner, while aggregating, tracking, and presenting all their social activities as a proof of involvement in the long run.
Our Logic
To be more specifically, let’s dig into the current communicative relationships of Web3 music parties.
We categorize social scenarios of Web3 music into two types: on-chain conversation and off-chain messaging. The on-chain part simply means that all conversations within these scenarios are worth to be stored on-chain for reasons as follow:
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Users are motivated to engage with each other actively as all activities will accumulate into their web3 music portfolio, which essentially proves users’ substantial influence in this sector.
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All such activities in different scenarios will be based on the sole DID, either .eth or .bit, so that they can always present a full version of themselves at any corner of Web3.
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These on-chain engagements will positively boost the vibe of engagements in any platform or community, and eventually form a network effect.
On the other hand, the off-chain messaging, which tends to be more exclusive and private, will be largely affected by the on-chain conversation, or public opinion.
Our Solution
So the above are just all tentative tactics. What exact solutions are we proposing here?
We think a standardized comment widget embedded in place will be a great start. Here is our widget embedded in Mirror as an example (yes it’s live):
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Comment in place means I can tell everybody how lucky I am to find this artist since he released his first song.
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Comment in place means I find out someone collecting my latest music also runs a web3 label that we can have a potential collaboration.
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Comment in place means the new friend I met on Uniswap commenting on Dogecoin also likes collecting 1/1s so I introduced him to Catalog.
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Comment in place means a fan who doesn’t have crypto wallet but met the web3 fan club and uses his email address to sign in to interact with people.
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Comment means all possibilities, as it is the short form of content creation, to prove yourself how much passion you have towards music. And it deserves to be permanently stored on chain……
To better serve this purpose, we built some specialties in our widget as follow:
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All social engagements data (comments, tips, likes) are built into our data standard and store on Arweave permanently, at 0 gas cost to users.
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Tracking all contents by token ID, aggregate them and across different platforms and present them in the single widget that can be embedded in any website that supports iframe widget.
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Auto-integrate user’s DID such as .eth and .bit, and present their achievements in Web3 music seamlessly with multi-chain, multi-wallet, email, and phone# login.
In such way, the most composable, decentralized, ubiquitous, user-friendly social engagement layer is created.
But what specifically for music NFT?
We think that comments, opinions, stories that connect with music have a much higher value to be stored on-chain permanently. Doesn’t matter if you are a huge fan since day 1, a music critic, an agency, a collector DAO, or simply an degen player of NFTs, this is the most straightforward way to build your on-chain portfolio and influence. And that will mater so much in the future, as this is the first time that such data becomes your real invisible asset.
Just like what our slogan goes: Long live our opinion.
And to simplify this into three most important parties: artist, fans/collectors, and platforms:
So music NFTs, we are coming.
Who are we?
ECHO is the first decentralized social engagement protocol based on Arweave. Our goal is to provide the fundamental infrastructure of Web3 social by introducing the first comment widget that can be deployed on any Web3 website with permanent data storage, so that users can speak up for themselves in a decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant environment. It is our conviction that every person deserves to be heard, and we strive to create the right tool to make that happen. “Long live our opinion”, as our slogan goes.
More importantly, as we are providing a multi-chain, multi-platform, and multi-disciplinary solution, ECHO will energize the social mobility in an aggregated manner to address the current social segregation issue in Web3. And our protocol-based data structure of social activities both on-chain and off-chain will be the cornerstone of the future Web3 social paradigm.
We are a team of three Web3 digital nomads. If you like what we are doing and want to give more suggestions, definitely reach out to us. We are developing more products for content creators on top of this widget, so please stay tuned. Let’s boost social engagements in Web3 together!
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