Enabling Musicians like Never Before

Recapping Mint Season 6, Episode 22

Season 6, Episode 22 of the Mint Podcast with Adam Levy features David Greenstein. He is the co-founder of Sound.xyz, a permissionless, modular platform for creators, artists, and fans to engage with one another, largely through music NFTs.

Music in web3 has continued to grows despite being in the midst of a bear market. Artists have released music regardless of macro conditions, speaking to music NFTs as a way to release music in a fun, creative, autonomous way that transcends the larger crypto market. A huge part of that has been Sound, which has enabled artists, namely 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 music NFTs, therefore each song should be it’s own contract, and therefore collection, to allow for end-to-end royalties across primary and secondary sales. Sound has been designed to be open to as many people as possible, highlighted by the newly-released Sound Protocol. With a permissionless base layer, anyone can build on top of Sound or the associated smart contracts. In the current web2 music paradigm, companies like Spotify or Apple act as data aggregators to get eyeballs to artists and songs, but that comes at the cost of creativity to the musician. These companies missed out on developing third-party ecosystems that build on top of the content, such as minting a music catalog. Now, with platforms like Sound:

“You can still listen to the music for free like it is Spotify, but now collect and own the music more like iTunes, vinyl, and CDs.”

Now, collecting or owning music has inherent value. Additionally, artists no longer need to rely on streams to have their music be impactful. Having music exist as digital collectibles adds a twist of social status and scarcity to songs. This opens up artists to experiment with their work through the blockchain to create music true to the themselves. For artists currently in web3 music or web2 musicians trying to experiment with music NFTs, the advice stays the same:

“Put out good music and release consistently. Just the act of tokenizing your music is a sign you’re taking the space seriously.”