Phlote (pronounced "float") is a music label for independent creators. We’ve built technology that allows us to scale our ability to identify, invest in, and amplify talented emerging artists alongside our network of partners.

Our process for creating music relies on a passionate community of music makers who collaborative create together using a process that’s open and new. We offer artists a straightforward deal structure that’s available to all, bypasses the power dynamics, politics, and barriers of the traditional music industry, and encourages them to proliferate the Phlote brand.

To unlock the power of the internet for artists, we’re formed to allow anyone with an internet connection and crypto wallet participate in forming a next generation music platform. We love music and the artists who create it. Our mission is to provide a path to creative freedom for artists by helping them maximize the value of their work by removing all barriers to collaboration.

Collaboration on Phlote transcends music and extends to the label itself. We’re interested to see what happens when a new business model is introduced that allows creators to be owners of the label itself.

What if the economic interest of a label is less concentrated and better aligned with it’s most valuable members, the creators whose music brings eyes and dollars to the platform? Instead of creating a incentive is not $.003 per stream, but something akin to .003% equity per stream.

Today, the challenge for artists to extract value from their music is nearly impossible to overcome. To put things into perspective, a recording artist must cut through Spotify’s 120,000 daily uploads and generate one million streams today to receive a check for $3400 nine months from now.

This is a problem faced by millions of independent creators globally, regardless of their level of talent.

Fans are not immune.

Early fans break artists across social media every day, but have no way to be compensated for the work they do. The most passionate fans helps elevate emerging artist out of obscurity and onto the radar of editorial outlets and big labels. Think about the DJ, who spends much of her time finding obscure music to introduce to an audience, effectively helping to break new music. There’s tremendous value early tastemakers deliver to the music ecosystem, although there has been no way for them to capture it. Just like artists, fans are not getting paid for the value they create!

What if we built a system that allowed artists and fans to get compensated fairly? All of this is now possible using today’s technology to reimagine outdated systems that have been prevelant in music for decades.

In the old world, labels provided the capital and distribution. Those resources can now be offered to artists, in part, by their super fans. Decentralized labels can enable this by using two components:

1. Decentralized Curation Protocol (voting)

2. Decentralized Marketplace (monetization)

3. Distribution (music sharing)

Decentralized Curation - At the foundation of Phlote is a curation protocol that rewards curators who are able to identify good music as voted on peer-to-peer.

Our music curation process relies on a global community of music lovers who decide the music we sell as NFTs in exchange for a share of proceeds from NFT sales. The curation engine capitalizes on the public nature of blockchains to create a system that’s 100% transparent, permissionless and globally accessible to anyone with an internet connection and crypto wallet to participate in.

Decentralized Marketplace - Breaking new artists now requires finding hundreds of fans versus millions and is likely to happen on marketplaces as much as it happens on streaming platforms. Number of transactions is the new follower count.

For a decentralized label, the marketplace serves two functions. The marketplace is how the community monetizes it’s taste in music and enables artists to identify their core fans.

By connecting our curation protocol to Zora’s decentralized marketplace protocol, we’ve created a pathway for any artist to mint music on the Ethereum blockchain without the restriction of gas fees. The bridge will allow for curation on phlote.xyz to automatically launch NFT auctions on Zora, protocol-to-protocol. Phlote operates a custom contract that directs funds automatically to curators and artists. The DAO’s share of the sales proceeds is recirculated to the DAO treasury and used to fund fees for future artists.

Distribution (music sharing). Once an album is upvoted through the curation protocol, and sold on Zora, the next step is to amplify the artist and music. Today, the best interest of the artists and early supporters to look to traditional distribution platforms as the best place to reach a mass audience because that’s where they exist. YouTube and streaming platforms are utilized to serve as marketing for digital assets that exist on the blockchain. A wholly owned terrestrial radio station placed as distribution on top of a label would be powerful. Trad radio is a space that’s undervalued to new media/social media platforms, but for music continues to hold high value and cultural significance.

Music social media is an interesting way to conceptualize what decentralized distribution could look like that takes advantage of music ownership as status, music collection as connective tissue, and the power of human recommendations over algorithms. Imagine a social music network where each user’s profile is a playlist.

We foresee a future where all next gen media networks are designed to be powered by the human recommendations of their community using the components discussed above. Using blockchain technology to combine community curation, ownership, distribution unlocks the global power of the internet for artists and enables a new class of participants to create, curate, and invest in media and IP for the first time ever.