Background
As Web3 and NFT universe is expanding, it becomes more and more tedious for the musicians and artists to identify the right platforms to partner with. We are going to investigate the platforms one by one to identify their value proposition and help musicians to build their path to success by prioritizing their participation in NFT projects.
This time we are going to look at Bolero.
A platform to Invest Own Share
Summary
- Bolero is playing chess in music, not candy crush saga - you've got to be serious and have solid plans to develop.
- They invest a lot of effort into their artists, so it's a great community to set as your goal if you are just beginning.
- Perfect learning opportunity for the young artists to understand the expectations.
Day 1: hello bolero!
Just like most of the information about NFT space comes to me via Twitter, I found out about Bolero from Twitter (@boleromusic_). I had little to no idea how this platform differentiates itself from others at the beginning and visited Bolero website to take the first look.
Day 2: Registration and onboarding
Registration as a member of the community is super quick, not asking any questions you wouldn’t expect. You do need your wallet available to connect.
day 3: prerequisites FULFILLMENT
Perks
Well, the perks took a while, and at first seemed like a very weird thing to require as part of onboarding. It took me a bit of playing around and looking into existing artists’ perks to understand – this is actually a game changer for a musician’s platform to engage with fans. Comparable to utilities in any NFT, perks allow the artists to be creative in how they would like to reward their fans and investors. You can come up with just about anything – from a personnal chat on discord, to concert tickets giveaway, or even a mention in a song.
I guess making it part of onboarding is a pretty good idea from education point of view, as artists may postpone this to later unless they have to start thinking of it as a required task on the list.
Social
Bolero asks you to point your account to your social accounts straight away – going forward this becomes a pretty important attribute for investors or fans to see where and how you are already engaging with your community, and how big your reach is. One thing that stands out is two required profile links an artist must provide – Spotify and Genius.
I managed to register on Genius straight away and fill in the link on my onboarding screen. Yet the reason for this one to be mandatory stays unclear to me. Spotify is a different story. Either way, pretty easy, you can now find me on Genius. I haven’t been active in the music industry for a while, and back in the day, when SoundCloud was just starting up, registering on any platforms like Apple music or Pandora was an absolute discouraging hustle.
Welcome to 2022, and signing up as an artist on Spotify turned out to be quick and easy with just a couple of steps I managed to google in no time.
- Getting music on Spotify guidance from Spotify itself
- List of preferred distributors
- Distrokid – $20 and they do everything for you
- 12 later – I was able to find my music and artist page on Spotify and a whole load of other platforms. Distrokid does not make promises to make it happen so quickly because of dependencies on Spotify (officially it can take up to 5 business days), but I guess I was lucky.
Far from completing the Onboarding, but I can’t be more grateful to Bolero for teaching me how easy publishing with distributors has become.
day 4: hello community and support
I would describe Bolero’s community as active (my messages didn’t stay unanswered for longer than an hour), but leaning towards the French-speaking audience to a degree that I couldn’t help wondering how come people are not more active on their Twitter and Discord. It was a bit hard to get the guidance when it came to perks – I might have experienced a technical issue, and couldn’t find definitive guidance over the weekend. It was resolved on Monday, and I was happy to see that the support icon on the site itself is probably the most efficient way to get technical help.
Bolero team is active on Twitter, and I was happy to see them replying to comments, and reposting reviews on their platform, which is always a positive sign.
DAy 5: let's talk about business
I will praise Pastel again when describing the Artist community into which I looked the next day, but here is what you see when you look at his artist page:
day 6: artists
I spent this day to listen into music and trying to get artists’ feedback on their use of Bolero, and encourage everyone to use the ‘Explore’ page for this, but here’s a couple of bullets on my own experience:
- Techno, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Alternative and more genres
- Developing, Emerging, and Established levels of Artists
- Either they don’t speak English, don’t use Twitter messages, or too busy with their carriers – tried to contact 4 different artists whose music stood out to me, said I was happy to find their music on Bolero, but received no response. This is understandable to a degree, and as I’m learning I will try to find different methods to get in touch with the artists too.
day 7: head of music
I just know what I want my title to be in the future – it’s Head of Music. I don’t know which company, and maybe I just want to start my own business to give that title to myself, but this is very cool that Bolero already has one. I had the pleasure to speak with him, and it just felt like the guy is so sensible and he represented Bolero’s intentions as so legit that I didn’t even feel bad about not being able to onboard.
Finally, we agreed that letting people see how Bolero functions from the artists’ point of view could help encourage more talented folks on the platform. Bolero offered me to be the first person to experience the demo version of this functionality closer to June, and I will do my best to shed as much light on this fantastic product again!
Amazing review Seva! Thanks for joining the family <3
It’s certainly a great pleasure for me! Wishing lots of growth to you guys!
Excellent post. I certainly love this website. Continue the good work!