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 looking at Sound.xyz
Summary
- Strong partnerships established with well established artists
- Support is good, but Sound.xyz is very intuitive and FAQ is great
- Great place to land as an artist, but the model in its current state is not scalable
Day 1: First look and register
The journey with Sound.xyz starts. This time I already have some experience and at least one good platform to compare. Let’s talk about the website – the front page looks great, and very tasteful, but is it designed to irritate me with the disabled Play button on the homepage? The counter shows that I gotta wait for 5 days to be able to click it. Other songs are closer, but I guess I’m expected to look up on youtube or elsewhere whether it’s worth waiting for.
Latest sounds cards look astonishing, and I immediately fall in love with the first tune I ever play on the platform by sad alex. Seriously, check it out.
But just you look at these NFT song prices – through the roof
(later I discover that it’s actually not the NFT price, but rather the total value this song made for the artist through primary and secondary sales).
Notably – the player for the platform is extremely elegant and intuitive. Yet autoplay doesn’t play songs in the order displayed – leaves some room for imagination about the algorithm picking the order of tracks. No playlist here either.
I quite enjoy that artists listing here has a timeline to it and broken into seasons like a TV show.
Scrolling down Sound.xyz explains what this platform is about – the relationship between artists and their listeners. And here comes the explanation of the disabled play button – making an event out of song release. I like the idea, but not completely agree with putting it at the top of everything.
The expanded player functionality reminds of the Soundcloud model – leaving comments at exact point in the track, but additionally, it appears that previous comments disappear when a song NFT finds a new owner.
Finally, Sound.xyz focuses on building the community for the artist right on the platform. I’ll comment on it when I know more, but it has two edges – certainly an opportunity for some, but may turn into an overwhelming amount of work for others. Just like community building normally is.
Let’s get in.
First contact – connect wallet, standard and easy. Let’s fill in the empty profile
Took 30 seconds. Twitter account verification is genius (post a pre-generated message with a code and @soundxyz_ mention, and copy-paste url back), can’t believe I see this the first time.
Sweet. Knowing that registering as an artist may require some prep, I just took a brief look at the FAQ on how to release your music on Sound.xyz – it appears to be a contact form Fine, I’ll hide my emotions, assuming I walked into an untidy backstage (which is still a sweet spot).
Day 2: Artist registration and release
Today I will attempt to.register as an artist on Sound.xyz. Luckily I went 80% already with Bolero platform, so, hoping that the requirements are not more strict. First of all, there is no button like “Register as a musician” or “Mint here”. FAQ section has a piece for artists, where some not so familiar terms started appearing for me, like DSP – which I take as Digital Sound Platform given the context – encouraging to release new stuff, not whatever you already had uploaded elsewhere. OK, I might have a problem, as I don’t have unreleased material at hand, but let’s not give up just yet.
First time I see a platform referring to mirror.xyz – but nice to be introduced, as I may look for a good hang out spot for web3, and opportunities for funding soon. They also speak about Splits in FAQ – would be curious to see the implementation, but I generally admire the idea – it allows splitting the revenues among musicians, performers or contributors to each released track. I literally don’t understand how some platforms still don’t have this feature.
Finally, artists are entitled to 100% of the original sale and 10% of sales on secondary markets. That’s web3 for you! I also support the fixed rate for secondary sales, but seems a bit too much for flippers, and may discourage the buyer from getting it as an investment – i.e. the NFT will have to be sold for a min 10% more than it was bought to breakeven.
Artist Application Form
Alright now, that’s a bit cold. The form below is simple and dry. I’ve seen more exciting processes.
Can’t complain about the time it took to fill it though. Apart from the fear of not being accepted as an artist, the process is quite pleasant. The fear finally took over me, and I admitted that I’m reviewing the platform, and asked for a demo or temp account in case they find my application needs to be rejected.
Day 3: Community and Support
No response on my application so far, but I’m assuming it’s a fairly manual process at the moment. I’m getting curious about the dynamics of the platform. Since day 1 on the platform, the list of tracks on the homepage shifted by 1 additional release. Not even talking about the Trending section where artists and collectors are sorted by the $ amounts by default. I’ll keep an eye on it, but honestly don’t expect much movement – I bet Snoop Dogg and Pussy Riot will still be leading by the time my journey with this platform finishes. A more interesting picture comes when you switch from default ‘all time’ to 7-day view – why is this not the default..?
I like Sound.xyz’s Discord – it’s simple and well organized, not spammed, color-coding lets you tell artists from NFT music collectors and from new joiners/general public.
Had a quick chat with Ritchi Ray – the guy has a great voice, hope he reaches the stadiums!
Sound.xyz is very active on Twitter, notably, their Twitter Spaces are of the best quality I’ve heard so far. The topics are quite conventional about the space, volume, the movement, but it’s great to hear from speakers attending their spaces, such as @Cooopahtroopa, and the artists releasing their music on this NFT platform.
Unlike in my past experience, I didn’t have to reach out to support yet – finding all the info necessary in FAQs – this feels right!
Day 4: Business Model
Today I’m trying to find out how artists make money with Sound.xyz and how the platform itself is making money. There are no commercials on the platform, so forget about the web2 model for now (although not guaranteed that advertisement won’t be picked up later as a business model). I also don’t see any preferential / sponsored rendering of what you see on the landing pages.
So I googled it. TechChrunch wrote that Sound.xyz raised $5m in funding from the campaign led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). They partnered with a few crypto-friendly artists and sold out their NFTs instantly. Great and shiny product attracts the eyes of many.
Now, speaking about artists – the NFTs listed on the landing page appear to be insanely expensive at the moment. Very few are priced at .5 ETH, but I see the range going up to 86 ETH, while the median appears to be around 2 ETH. I already mentioned earlier that Sound.xyz looks to provide 10% of the price back to the artist from every sale. That tells me that the folks listed on the site already are well-accomplished artists. Now, all of a sudden getting published on this platform appears to me a really bright goal.
It’s great to see a really good integration of Sound.xyz with OpenSea – I’m a big fan of the idea of re-using other platforms’ capabilities rather than attempting to rebuild them.
One more note, and something I’ll probably be doing going forward, especially when it comes to well-established platforms – looking at the bottom of the charts. From Trending -> All time I am able to see 130 artists, only one of which did not have any sales indication. The second best is already doing quite fine on the secondary market.
Finally, I read that Sound.xyz aims to provide the monetization means to artists that would supersede Spotify (poor Spotify, their ‘greed’ is recently attributed just about everywhere). Although I fall completely in line with such objectives, it’s worth reminding that so far Sound.xyz and many other music NFT platforms are not paying artists for streams as Spotify does. While I’ve been writing this, I’ve been listening to Sound.xyz as I would listen to radio (a pretty nice one, I must admit, although unlike Spotify they haven’t collected any data on my preferences yet).
Day 5: Artists
Quite curious how I unintentionally landed the previous day on Gigamesh’s page, and read a super interesting mini-novel about this guy’s journey. The ending shook me a bit ‘and then I co-founded Sound’ – nice!
Back to the landing page and I see my beloved Kate Nash “Try to forget it” – I was relistening to Mouthwash, Foundation, and Pumpkin Soup just yesterday after a long break – must be a good sign!
I really like that the ‘Behind the music’ looks very sincere, and in a lot of cases looks like the artists actually took their own time to write it (whether it’s true or not, I don’t know, but looks very authentic).
Received an email from Sound today, which appears to be the response to my artist application. Felt almost personalized, although I’d assume a lot of it could be copy-pasted for anyone applying these days.
“Hi [MusicNFTStartup] –
Thanks for reaching out! We’re a small team and we get an insane number of inbound requests, so I appreciate your patience as we work through all of the applications.
We’re working quickly to open Sound up for more artists, but we’re currently tied up for the next 3 or so months through our current season. There are no specific requirements that an artist must have in order to do a drop with us, we just look for quality music. This season’s curation heavily focuses on the recommendations provided by artists of our previous seasons.
In the meantime, let me know if you have any other questions! Feel free to also stop by our Discord and say hello.
Thanks
-Kaden “
The bolded line explains a lot about the NFT artists currently in the season. Not a bad approach. There’s also an answer to the question I tried to get answered on discord – when does this season end? – my discord message was overlooked by the people with answers.
I’m missing the indication of style or genre from the song cards – but the upside is that it leads to more nice discoveries. Listening to Sound.xyz autoplay helps discover more gems like @grentperez (on Sound.xyz). So far I noticed the tendency among multiple artists to price NFTs at .1 ETH, some are cheaper, which is quite adequate. The quantity of 25 edits seems to be common, I’m curious if this is the platform’s defaults.
For the first time, while being in NFT space I catch myself thinking that the collectors or backers are not rushing to flip or sell and people investing or buying won’t feel bad about just sticking to the item. It just feels right.
Day 6: Mint
By now it’s clear that I won’t get to mint my own track on Sound.xyz in the next months (or maybe never, but it’s the second platform that doesn’t really give me the closure I’d expect). So, we can only rely on what we see from the audience’s perspective.
- You can sell the original copies of NFTs, and they can then be sold on secondary markets such as OpenSea (well integrated, and provides good summary stats for both primary and secondary)
- Listening Parties are a unique product of Sound.xyz, which is an event organized to celebrate the new song releases.
- Audience is built around each track and consists of backers/collectors owning the NFT.
- They can leave comments while owning the NFT, and have a chance to win a golden egg if they leave a comment in the secret time signature of the song, which is not revealed up until all editions of the NFT are owned.
The last part appears to be the most confusing in terms of governance, i.e. what if the golden egg is not specifically on the minute:second that all comments were left on? After a golden egg is revealed – the NFT is sold at a higher value? Artists also appear to have a degree of freedom in terms of what to put into that golden egg.
Day 7: Results
Over the last seven days, artists’ earnings on Sound.xyz went up from $2,034,000 to $2,045,000, i.e. fans contributed $11k to artists they like. Or not – ETH might have gone down against USD in the meantime. Maybeit’s worth putting both numbers here in ETH and in USD. Stats get complicated when you add a time dimension to them.
The tracks that were released in the meantime successfully generated some decent revenue for the artists. As for my own results – I learned quite a bit and am very grateful for it. Sound.xyz shows that there are a great many artists who are willing to partner on projects with NFT platforms. Web3 platforms like this one have significant investment and allow artists to get rewarded very quickly too. I was very pleased with the amount of information I was able to get with FAQ, get all answers without reaching out to the support or community. Mirror.xyz came as a nice side track for further investigation.
Looking forward to the moment when Sound.xyz becomes a bit more open to developing musicians, because with the current model it appears to be quite exclusive, and hardly scalable unless they hire a fleet of moderators.
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