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 happy to join the Pianity community and look under the hood of one of the first music NFT platforms.
Summary
- Huge and active community, dominated by electronic music, and yet diverse in genres
- Gamified and competitive NFT platform with mature rewards system
- Advanced thought-through economy combining fiat and Web3 concepts
Day 1: First look and register
From the first look, Pianity is built for fans, listeners, and collectors, and less for musicians. The front page lays out the concepts familiar from the early days of NFTs, i.e. value in exclusivity and scarcity. Since this is the first look, we will have to get back to the ‘scarcity’ piece, as many view NFTs as not scarce at all these days – a creator can technically mint as many NFTs and editions as they’d like: “there’s much more where this comes from.”
Sliding down to the second half of the page, you will notice the options to apply as labels and artists too, and it seems like Pianity won’t let just anybody in. We are anticipating some scrutiny into artists’ profiles before they can publish anything on the platform. We’ve already witnessed this approach on Sound.xyz and Bolero music platforms. Speaking of the latter, Pianity and Bolero both originated in France. Even before you sign up, browsing the market and the Toplist, you may notice the electronic music dominance on the platform. Thank you France for Daft Punk, Justice, L’Impératrice, and so much more!
Couple of other things hard not to notice straight away:
- Both Primary and Secondary NFT markets in one place
- Prices are displayed in Euros (not sure if it’s a local setting, but even if it is – the currency is fiat)
- Activity shown is from max. 1 hour ago, numbers of votes are in thousands, which indicates very active community
Alright, convinced, let’s sing up!
Aside from no spaces aloud in the “Name” field, this is a regular Web2 signup form but backed up by ARCONNECT option, Pianity’s Web3 tech of choice. Once signed up, you verify your email, and edit your profile – bio, profile pic, and links to social networks – took about 15 minutes altogether. Check out my profile!
While in the process I hit the like on one of the tracks I listened, and expected it to show up on my profile in one form or another, but no… my profile does not carry any info about what I like and who I follow. I also tested the wallet button at the top right, and was offered to top up my account with a variety of options, but seems like there is no specific integration directly from my browser wallet into the site. While other platforms may have it used in place of authentication, there seems to be no need to have your wallet connected here at all times.
Day 2: Artist registration and release
Time to (attempt to or) establish my presence here as a musician. On a few screens already I noticed the buttons to register as a label or as an artist already. Additionally, the Toplist page has a button to submit a track. Both options essentially bring you to the same 3 step process screen:
Pianity is shooting for the best quality – mp3 is not accepted, the only formats you can upload are flac and wav. Album art can be either an image or a single loop mp4.
Voila, my track is submitted to the toplist where it can be voted to be published on Pianity.
Come vote for my track “Open Windows” to be dropped as an #NFT on @pianitynft! https://t.co/QI5ECDT8IP
— Music NFT Startup (@musicnftstartup) August 2, 2022
So, becoming an artist on Pianity turned out to be much simpler than we originally thought. Becoming an NFT artist on Pianity is a different story, and this is how it works: the most popular tracks (according to voting) daily become NFTs on Pianity. I’m currently looking at the chart with the top one having 19k votes. I liked the second one more – Stuck in Between by Ourson, and gave it some of my votes.
Day 3: Community and Support
Socialization on this music NFT platform starts from the very moment you register. Pianity email confirmation contains the links to their IG, Twitter, Discord, and Telegram. I joined the discord straight away and dropped a note about the track I uploaded in the Promotion channel. From there I jumped to a very comprehensive FAQ and help section. Pianity also lets you connect your platform account to your discord account, which is something I haven’t been noticing on other platforms.
The only thing I’ve got to say about the Pianity community and the quality of support available is that it’s meeting the expectations for such a mature platform. I was able to learn so much from just navigating myself around, and clicking the buttons that were offered on the screen in a very logical timely manner. Additionally, as you may notice from the discord channel, the community is multi-lingual including 5 languages other than English.
If you found out about Pianity from this review and are about to register – please use our referral link so that we get some additional votes that may be used for your and others’ work.
Note from future: On Day 6 I encountered a broken link in the FAQ, and used the Chat function on the site. Despite this happening on Sunday, and the automatic status stating that they may have to return to me in an email, the very nice guy Kevin got back to me with answers to my questions.
Day 4: Business Model
I really like the marketing concept behind Pianity’s Toplist. It’s the first time we are reviewing a music NFT platform with this kind of like 9gag trending vs. homepage approach – content makers submit tons of their creations, and the most popular ones appear on the main page thread. This encourages the creators to engage with the audience, and introduces a great deal of competition to the game.
The Pianity team has built a pretty giant and complex economy, which is detailed in their FAQs and highlighted by the press, such as this Bloomberg article. It is thrilling that recently this NFT platform for musicians has received $5 millions to keep building its network all over the world and extend the Pianity platform to mobile apps.
Just a few bullets from us to summarize our understanding of the economy behind it:
- Artists who win the voting and get their tracks minted on Pianity receive 80% of the primary sale, and 8% of the secondary sales.
- Pianity charges 20% fee and redistributes 10% of it to the community
- The more NFTs you own, and the higher value they are, the larger piece of pie you get
- Pianity has its own token to run the transactions – $PIA
- Prices are set in fiat currency, but collectors can buy NFTs using either crypto or fiat (debit cards)
Day 5: Artists
We’ll need to put an effort into keeping it short this time – there’s just so much good stuff here worth mentioning, where do we start!? Maybe it’s just because I’m a big fan of EDM in general, but I’ll do my best to go cross-genre with a few suggestions below:
- Ross Geldart – amazing EDM + strong profile
- Eric Pan – pure jazz piano
- Seedjay – the authentic flames of the latin music
- Blacksketch – softest indie vibes for soul healing
A couple of observations while browsing the Pianity NFT platform and its Topchart:
- Noticed some tracks with confusing genre label. Assuming some musicians do it because they consider their own genre less popular – please don’t, Pianity could benefit from diversifying from the electronic music domination. Others may do this to stay consistent with their profile, on which they publish mostly the songs of a specific genre.
- Quite a number of artists in Topchart only have one track, which may mean that artists on this platform actually strategize their releases instead of just dumping everything they have up until now.
Day 6: Mint
The more time I spend on the platform, the more noticeable was the lag in loading the tracks. I think it might have something to do (with my internet, but also) the very high quality of tracks artists are expected to upload, i.e. no lossy compression allowed.
But back to minting and NFTs – I have just bought one of the Legendary editions of the track called A brand new life by LeDav, and I’m trying to wrap my head around the process I just went through and the outcomes.
Checkout my Legendary NFT #7/10 of “A Brand New Life” by LeDav (@DjDavidDuriez)! https://t.co/Ntx7hpRx7Y #musicNFT #NFTmusicians #web3music @pianitynft
— Music NFT Startup (@musicnftstartup) August 7, 2022
First of all, it went smooth enough for me to do it in under 10 minutes only having my Metamask wallet, and 25 Euros worth of ETH in it. However it didn’t go without a small hick-up: at first my intention was to buy some $PIA and the link leading to FAQ article on how to get $PIA was giving me an error, claiming I am not authorized to view this content. This issue was successfully resolved by Pianity support quite quickly.
Nevertheless, I was able to successfully transfer .014 ETH to get 25 EUR in fiat to my Pianity wallet. From there the process was simple, picking the favorite from Primary or Secondary market page and hitting the Buy button. Once purchased, I was offered to download the .flac of the track + some graphic goodies, like this:
Day 7: Results
1. Community loves their Pianity – Twitter post with the voting for this review continued getting comments like “good”, “value adding platform”, etc.
2. My upload got 4600+ votes within days since uploads – which implies that a few people voted for it, and it feels very rewarding. 
3. The economy that the Pianity team developed is times more exciting to dig than any other platform we’ve reviewed so far.
I wouldn’t want to leave the Pianity team without ideas on how to improve though. One thing I missed in this platform that I liked on other platforms was the ability to create playlists. There’s just so much good stuff here, I wish there was a way to capture it in a playlist to come back to. I wish I could see the tracks I liked or voted for.
One more thing that stays unclear to me (which is expected given that 7 days to explore is not enough for such a vast platform), is how the votes are getting replenished. I haven’t spent long enough here yet to tell you about getting rewarded with $PIA for owning an NFT.
On a personal note, every platform I’m reviewing keeps getting me even more excited. Every single time I think I found the best one, and the next one won’t be as good. But so far I’m wrong every time, and reviewing Pianity was not an exception – once again I feel super eager to engage more, and certain that I will come back to this music NFT platform full of Web3 musicians and enthusiasts.
**UPDATES**
Not even a month passed after this review was published, and I was prompted to write an update, because of how many features were introduced – the work on playlists was already underway, likes were introduced, and so much more.
Awesome write up 🙌🏻…playlists are in the works and us in the DAO are testing them and have been the past week so won’t be long before that’s integrated into the site…along with likes aswell when you like a track you will have a list on your profile page next to where you have your releases and collection the playlists will also be here…,you cAn also change the “euro” setting to dollar or GBP or yen the option to do this is at the bottom of every page on the site…everything else you nailed mate 🙌🏻
Thanks very much for your kinds words about my tracks and especially “Jo Smile” — worth to note that there is one available on the 2ndary market 😉
thanks for this excellent article, for such great platform !! and please continue your review of others platform, that’s super interesting, I will keep an eye on your articles (so far I didn’t found better that pianity, but the market is extremely dynamic 🙂
Thank you, your music very much deserves every stream, every vote, every mentioning of it, and every NFT purchase!
Hi to all, how is all, I think every one is getting more from
this website, and your views are fastidious designed for new users.