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.
Our Twitter channel audience voted for emanate.live this time, with a huge advance in votes that shows how active their supporters are.
Summary
- Very active community, thousands of musicians and listeners
- Mature platform, and yet admins and moderators are attentive to the users
- Despite being tied up to the USD, this platform shoots for the best Web3 has to offer in terms of monetization opportunities for both the fans and the artists
Day 1: First look and register
Full disclosure – Emanate was one of the first platforms I registered on back when I was an absolute newbie to NFTs and Web3. It was this guy who prompted me:
emanate.live starts the conversation with the money talk that goes beyond what most platforms can offer. And the idea to pay the musicians for the time their tracks are being played with full transparency is obviously attractive too. I remember I liked the application, and the website, together with the incorporation of Web3 features they were providing.
It’s been a couple of months since then, and in the meantime, I have noticed the release of Emanate beta. The UI changes were visible, but I haven’t had a chance to explore them closer. With that, I’m very excited to rejoin the platform.
The landing page did change quite a bit, as the platform matured, and it no longer has to provide its marketing face first. They now present the highlights, sessions, and additional materials given that a number of good pro-level content pieces were already brought into the project. Of course, starting from scratch would probably be a bit different, but as far as I see no additional complications were made to the registration screen:
I don’t remember as many social options for creating the account (like the Discord piece). But it could be because I wasn’t as attentive in the past. All in all – it’s super simple to register for the platform.
Emanate Beta iOS app is thrilling, to say the least, just look at it:
Right from the start, I was able to start listening – not sure how the featured list is formed, but I’m glad to see some filtering and sorting options. Nevertheless, I just hit ‘random’ and started listening to the first offered record – Conrad Clifton’s “Black Dynamite (I Am Smiling)” – and I did not get disappointed. You can definitely say that the randomization test is passed, and the first impression is amazing.
Day 2: Artist registration and release
Here’s some big news – once you are registered, you can upload your music. I had to re-register to confirm whether I remembered it correctly, but now I’m 100% certain – this platform does not require you to fill in the application form, there’s no pre-screening, waiting time, verification process, etc. Kind of like SoundCloud or YouTube.
Now that you’ve heard this, go ahead and register – this is my referral link! Never hurts a platform to have its own little affiliate program.
The process of uploading tracks is quite conventional, with a quick NFT twist, expressed in a switch button to open up the Token ID and Contract fields.
Worth mentioning here that the ability to upload shall not be taken with ease – you are given an option to monetize your music straight away, so it is subject to manual and automatic reviews from both emanate and 3rd parties. The process of getting your content monetized reminds me of how easy it used to be to sign up for YouTube monetization in the past until they decided to make it available only to full-time content creators.
Either way – I’ve got two of my tracks listed here already. The plan is to upload a couple more and then let the social networks know about it.
Day 3: Community and Support
Let’s start with a little beauty contest results – the Twitter voting for which platform we are reviewing this time was very heavily dominated by emanate. It has one of the most active communities I’ve joined so far – admins and moderators are active on Twitter and Discord, which is most important for me, but the platform has a lot of presence on medium.com, Telegram, Instagram, and Facebook.
About that meme on the screenshot – it’s only usual by now that every music NFT platform bullies Spotify. And yet emanate is probably the only platform so far that actually does it fairly – unlike others they pay the artists for the time their music has been played or streamed, instead of paying for the sales.
It feels a bit strange that the app and the platform itself do not yet have some more social features, like commenting on tracks. But then, thinking about SoundCloud, it’s pretty nice to keep it away from the spam people turn it into. Similar to a few web2 platforms, emanate lets you create playlists, follow artists, and like tracks.
On another note, today was the first time I stumbled upon a glitch with iOS app. After about an hour of surfing the music, I went to my profile and hit the play button – both of my tracks did not sound familiar – somebody else’s music started playing, pretty random. I couldn’t reproduce it after reloading the app. Funky!
Very few questions so far, to be honest, but I feel like the closer you get to $$$ the more complicated it gets, but that will happen tomorrow.
Note from the future – Day 4: while updating my subscription and connecting my metamask instead of the default EOS wallet (whatever EOS stands for), I encountered an issue. Clicking the metamask option did not do anything, as if the button was inactive. I posted about it on discord and got some suggestions straight away. I figured it out on my own – needed to deactivate the coinbase wallet extension in chrome, but in the meantime, 2 other admins got on the case. Thanks, guys, this is heartwarming.
Day 4: Business Model
Everything about emanate so far tells us that we are dealing with a very mature platform, and as such, it is understandable that the economics behind it may extend to some additional complexity. I don’t feel like rephrasing what emanate explains best in their handbook, but here are some basics:
- MNX is the internal platform currency, 1 MNX = $0.01.
- You can convert MNX into $EMT, which is a trading currency
- Listeners and fans can monetize playlists, but they are not paid just for listening to music
- Artists are paid for the time their music is played. The amount of payout depends on the type of tracks, whether your audience pays for a subscription, and how well emanate platform is doing, i.e. how many paying subscribers there are on the platform.
- 1 play of a 5 minutes track currently gives back about $0.01 to an artist, and as we remember – that’s 1 MNX.
Looks like my two tracks, 2 minutes each, must have been played about 40 times together – I see $0.20 on my account. On that note – good to see my own stats, but if I may allow myself to make a modest suggestion – bring in some more stats, and make other artists’ stats public, numbers can spice it up so well! People love to see what’s possible in contrast to what they achieved.
The platform is subscription-based. Today I became a pro-connect subscriber by buying 10,000 EMT tokens using Sushi service. It was $60-ish + $7 in gas, as opposed to the regular annual billing method – that would cost me $165. In addition, I’m now hodling on to 10,000 EMT, which I can trade back later. In this light, paying $165 annually is lacking sense.
Day 5: Artists
Look at the emanate fam so far, and recognize some familiar names! emanate.live is based in Australia, but they sure do succeed internationally. As I’m writing this I’m listening to a song in German, Urlaub auf Hawaii, by whoiswelanski. deadmau5 is Canadian, NERO is British, and the diversity goes on. The emanate discord has 7 language channels in addition to general chat in English.
Collaboration on this Web3 platform is truly awesome. When uploading the track, you are offered to name the other artists who participated in creating the track, and the % split for the earnings is defined. Check out “trade my heart” by The Great Wave, Charlie Lim & Keyana – it’s a 5-star production:
And the awesome part is that you can actually click on The Great Wave (DAO project for musicians) or on Charlie Lim, or Keyana – you will be taken to that individual project, band, or artist page. Simple and brilliant, this is the difference Web3 offers against Web2.
Day 6: Mint
By now we know that you don’t mint anything directly on emanate – at least at the moment. It is interesting how different platforms leverage NFTs in a variety of ways: when we were looking at Vault.fan we discovered that you don’t mint the music but the keys to the vaults where the music is stored. With Sound.xyz we discovered that artists mint right on the platform, but then leverage secondary markets for consecutive sales.
Now, emanate.live does not mandate the music to be on the blockchain, although the integration with OpenSea, Etherium and Polygon networks is quite smooth. The focus here is on artists’ Web3 presence. Another thing to support that is the implementation of splits – in Sound.xyz the split is counted for the sales of the tracks, while emanate enables it on the level of the streams.
Yesterday I uploaded a couple more tracks to the platform and they have been verified within 3-4 hours. Today the plan is to twit about it and see whether it brings any streams, and drop a message about it on the self-promo channel of the emanate.live discord.
Day 7: Results
Last week I saw a report that emanate.live counted 17k monthly users. I would say it’s because in many ways emanate.live successfully replicated the good parts of the web2 platforms including SoundCloud, YouTube, and Spotify, while significantly improving the product with Web3 features including split ownership, crypto economy, and NFT trading.
There are no downsides to this platform, but I would love if emanate took some improvement opportunities, such as:
- Provide transparency on artists’ stats – streams, downloads, likes, even earnings (or especially earnings)
- Allow some more social interaction on the platform, like leaving comments, enhancing sharing the tracks and artist pages on the social networks
And I know that emanate.live dev team is working their butts off to improve the cash-out capabilities – if they tackle that properly, this platform will have a huge advantage against competitors. It’s likely to give a lot of headaches on how to prevent fraud with auto-streaming, but it’s not something new in the Web2 world, so it shouldn’t be a showstopper.
And yet emanate.live is already way ahead of the competition for the general musician market share. The functionality that they’ve built is exactly what both the listeners and the producers are seeking for to replace Spotify and SoundCloud, and shoots for monetization to superscede that of Spotify and YouTube. I have no doubts that I will be returning to this platform again and again in the future to follow up on their improvements, upload new tracks to it, and follow projects like The Great Wave.
Thanks for your blog, nice to read. Do not stop.
Thanks for following! We’ve got a long way ahead, and the most interesting parts are yet to come!