Background
As Web3 universe is expanding, it becomes more and more tedious for musicians and artists to identify the right music NFT platform 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 looking at Melos.Studio
Summary
- A very wide, promising, and innovative set of features and products
- Dev and support are spread thin for such a wide music NFT platform
- All-encompassing independent economics with strong backing from Binance
Day 1: First look and Registration
Genuinely excited to get my hands on the platform that will allow me to produce something but a review, i.e. some music. To be honest, I’m a bit skeptical after seeing Arpeggi labs’ product in the early stages of its development. I heard that with the introduction of audio samples it became much more interesting, and promise to revisit it. But generally, I saw some quite noble attempts to implement a web-based DAW on Web2, which have not been matched on Web3 yet. Maybe I’m completely on the wrong track, but let’s see what Melos.Studio has to offer.
The homepage tells a lot of promising stats on thousands of projects and creators. Then it goes straight into the market, and lists a couple of products that sound intriguing: Sonus – a way to upgrade art NFTs with music, and Metis – AI composer that takes your few notes as input. Then we see a snapshot of Virtual Band, which is really what I was expecting. The screenshot looks a bit similar to Apple’s Garage Band. I’m hitting Start Your Journey button!
Ok, wrong button for the first day, but happy that I hit it. I thought it was more like “Register”, but it actually brought me to the artist application form. As always, I disclosed my intentions to review this music NFT platform as an artist. In the end, I found out it takes up to 3 days for them to review the application. It’s not bad at all compared to some other platforms, like Catalog (6 months with no guarantees that they’ll get back to you at all).
Turned out that regular registration is much simpler, via email. I’m noticing that fewer platforms go ahead with the wallet-first approach, which is a little sad, but understandable.
First impressions from music:
- The distribution of genres is more diverse on this music NFT platform. We’ve seen the focus on the electronic genre on multiple platforms, and some general dominance of Hip-Hop and R’n’B was spilling over on others. Melos.Studio is quite rich in a few more genres.
- Rich musicality of the compositions. It is almost noticeable how many of the tracks are composed by professional musicians rather than self-made composers (nothing wrong with that). However, it doesn’t always mean great production. Kind of like book-smart versus street-smart. I’ve heard a couple of tracks that could use a bit of mastering help.
Your playlist is generated as you click through the tracks – not bad, and not the first platform to implement that (I’m thinking of Nina Protocol), but that means you can’t listen to it continuously. If you let it go, it will replay what you already heard. Since this is the “constructive” part of our feedback, I’m also going to spill out that I have reservations about the player controls hiding at the bottom. To pull them out you need to hover your mouse at the bottom of the screen, which happens to be the same trigger that pulls my mac menu when I’m browsing in full-screen mode.
But the player itself, and the playlist to it are actually great. No lags, intuitive, links to artist and track page, all as expected. Loving it.
Day 2: Artist Application
Let’s just wander around the top menu bar a little bit. “Discover” takes you to featured content, a neat collection. “Marketplace” lets you filter music NFTs by genre and sort by price, date minted, etc. Prices appear to be sensible, and there’s also a POAP tab, which I’ll need to look further into. Looking into the dropdown under “Studio” I find out that Sonus and Metis AI are available, while the DAW itself and the Inspiration cloud (something I haven’t seen announced before) are under composition. That’s a little disappointing, but given there are a couple of products to explore anyway, it’s not a huge bummer. I certainly do sympathize with how important it is to build anticipation these days.
The “Rewards” section appears to be under construction in a similar way, aside only from Activities, which arguably should have their own place on the menu instead of rolling into rewards.
With that, let’s dive into the first one of the products, Sonus that lets you upgrade your NFTs with music. The vast majority of NFTs are art, images, pictures, and animated gifs. Sonus allows you to pick an NFT in your wallet and add music created with Melos to your NFT. Currently Melos.Studio allows you to do this for NFTs from 100+ collections, and you can apply to add your own collection to that number. So, no, it’s not just any NFT. It is also limited to the Binance and Ethereum blockchains. But there’s no reason to think this won’t scale up quickly.
Very curious about the impact of “upgrading” an NFT, and how it is operating. Is it a reversible process? I’m thinking one would upgrade an NFT with the purpose of increasing the value, but can it backfire? Also, how does it work with the contract of the original NFT mint? Is it getting replaced, or is more metadata written into it? How does it display on the market after the upgrade? If it was art, will it have multimedia attached to it following the upgrade? These are the questions for FAQ, or the community, we are yet to figure it out too.
The second product, Metis AI, aka Workshop, is particularly hard to write about. The problem is that I’m writing while playing around with it, and as it’s so much fun to explore, I constantly get distracted. But here it is in a couple of sentences:
- Pick chord progressions with a synthesizer and place them in order using this funky wheel that is captured on the screenshot.
- Give additional input, like style, tempo, and the number of repetitions, and then hit Generate Music for AI to do the rest of the job.
- Listen, save, and create an NFT out of the product!
Simple as 1-2-3, and brilliant in quality. A few minor hiccups that should be ironed out as the product goes into Beta:
- Errors at generating (“network too busy” and such) and creating NFT – some of them were not self-explanatory, I wish there was an info icon with an explanation, don’t make me try 5 times;
- Wallet session is not auto-refreshed, so if you spent some time on the platform, make sure you sign in again prior to trying to create the next NFT;
But back to the main train of thoughts – I love it. And very happy about being able to share the NFT on Twitter, the world should hear it!
Day 3: Community and Support
I just went on to look for an FAQ, and thought maybe the About section would bring me there. Unfortunately turned out there are very few things that actually work on this pretty menu, however, scrolling down helped me understand a few more things about Melos.Studio, partners, and investors. I also jumped into the platform’s Discord channel from here, and gm’ed everyone.
Melos.Studio Discord is a beast with a couple of dozen of channels. I stuck a question that I had yesterday about what happens to “upgraded” NFTs into the one called NFT-discussion, but not too hopeful, as I’m seeing a long list of useless “hi” messages from folks. There is however a channel that offers to create support tickets. I’ll use that if I don’t hear anything sensible back by the time we dive deep into minting.
“Melosians” appear to be a friendly people. I love the gems some more active members of the community leave in discord. Here is one:
Makes you think about how badly the music industry has been doing between 2007 and 2015, and how big the music NFTs will be, what kind of footprint Web3 music will have on this chart.
Another useful piece I found on Discord was the Melos.Studio roadmap. And to be honest – many projects have to learn to build the roadmaps from this one.
I stumbled upon it while looking for information about “Melos official” referenced in the popup with rules you have to agree to when creating an NFT. I thought there could be a predecessor project, but I’m guessing they just didn’t want people to duplicate their own work and pretend it’s coming from the creators of the Melos.Studio.
Day 4: Business Model
Melos.Studio has the funding from the Binance Labs, which allows the team to run a few trial and errors on their path to success. It also explains a lot of choices in terms of which blockchains and currencies are available. They have their own token (MELOS) which is about $0.017 USD as of late September 2022.
It is typical for platforms with solid funding not to rush to disclose their profit sources. The only available info I found was in the platform’s Terms and Conditions which reads that NFT transactions “may be subject to” fees, commissions, etc. that the platform decides to impose.
As it is highly unlikely that I will get featured as an artist here this week, I won’t have visibility on the conditions for music NFTs sales unless somebody buys one of my Metis AI products. So I went on to list one of them, and discovered that 2.5% fee is charged for the initial transaction, while I would get 97.5% of the price. I didn’t put a huge price tag on it, but maybe I should’ve valued it a little more, given the 0.002 BNB gas fee, which is about half a buck in USD. It’s pretty low, but makes you think twice when listing cheap.
At least that’s what I thought until I read the instructions – turns out it’s a one-time transaction with the gas fee, first-timer. The following listing transactions are free. Similar to Polygon transactions on OpenSea, although somehow it was waived for me there even the first time.
Other than that – how do musicians make money here? You guessed it, by selling their music NFTs in the marketplace. The look of the marketplace is fairly similar to OpenSea with the difference that the metadata is populated better than your typical music NFT on larger marketplaces.
Day 5: Artists
The first suggestion on discovering artists – do not go into the All Artists list from the discover page. It does give a nice story about the collections of NFTs with large numbers of owners. Music-wise it’s not a good way to discover musicians.
Masew – lo-fi, chill
k3nn3di – well-produced pop music, also happens to be the most favorited
I’ll finish at that. I tried multiple ways of discovering music and listened to a bunch of good and bad material, but it was a very uncomfortable experience. I should’ve limited myself to just looking at Melos.Studio featured material, but I dug too deep and couldn’t tell an artist from an NFT owner, clicking the play button in different places would not stop the previous song from playing, and they would start playing simultaneously. Obviously, not every user is a musician here, and going to their pages was confusing me in the same way as other marketplaces do – I get lost in myriads of editions of the same song.
Filtering by genre in the marketplace helped to a degree, I was able to listen to some good beats. Sorting however didn’t help too much, for example, sorting by price highest to lowest will result in seeing some crappy track where an artist just randomly puts 10,000 value. Why not a million? [Drop the mic]
Day 6: Mint
So, my question about what happens to an art NFT when it gets upgraded went unnoticed in discord. I went on to create a support ticket, right in the Melos.Studio discord – pretty cool how they’ve set it up, may be a good tip for other platforms too. But we are yet to see how efficient they are.
What do we know until now about minting music on Melos.Studio:
- You can do it in three ways: by upgrading an NFT in your wallet, by creating music with Metis AI, and release it as a registered artist
- Melos.Studio charges a commission from the sale (we’ve seen 2.5% but it could vary)
- There is a primary and secondary marketplace, where NFTs can be traded, functionally very similar to OpenSea with all the trading history available
Day 7: Results
Isn’t that all you were looking for from the music NFT platform? My take on this is that if you are an artist on Melos.Studio, and you are getting a hold of it fairly well – you will do well anywhere, on any other platforms. Because it combines all the NFT features in one place. And I haven’t even spoken about the Mystery Box and Melos Idol – not sure if there was a competition, but the k3nn3di mentioned on Day 5 is kind of a super-featured artist.
The downside of that is that the management and dev teams’ focus is all over the place, and it takes time to finetune an enormous ecosystem like that. This is becoming a trend in Web3 music world – we’ve reviewed a few platforms already where teams are unable to serve the demand efficiently. They need to scale, and they need to do it quickly before their market share spills over to the competitors.
As for my own results on this music NFT platform, I did not manage to sell any of the tunes I generated with Metis AI, but to be honest, I’d argue there’s little chance to do it just yet. It sounds good, but it is generic, and one has to put little effort into creating it, hence paying for them may not be as efficient as creating one yourself, even if you have an idea on how to put them to good use to extract value off of them. I wish support was more responsive because my next question would be whether once somebody buys them as NFT, what can they do with them? Is there a chance for a utility to accompany them?
I’m wishing Melos.Studio and platforms in a similar position on product diversification lots of power and focus to keep pushing until you find the golden set of features and balanced support they deserve. Keep up the good fight!
