Blockchain
5 Blockchain Music Projects You Should Know About
✍️ This opinion piece was contributed by Italian:musician and business development manager at Bankless ✍️
Going onchain could create new forms of revenue and connections for musicians and their fans, potentially tearing down the walled gardens built by Big Tech and the music industry status quo.
Indeed, while big tech companies feast like vampires on our data, the music industry itself is often compared to a mafia, where success depends on pleasing the right people.
This is a ripe crossroads for disintermediation, which is why blockchain technology is so interesting here: it can eliminate the middleman, giving more power to the artists. That said, what are some interesting efforts to watch in this space right now?
Let’s take a look at 5 projects that are trying to innovate in this space and that you should keep an eye on!
Hearing
Hearing is a fully decentralized digital streaming service for musicians based on both Ethereum and Solana. Owned and operated by a global community of contributors, Audius allows artists to share exclusive music and monetize streams directly with fans, while developers can build apps on Audius, gaining access to a unique audio catalog. The project’s $AUDIO tokens are staked to run nodes, secure the network, and participate in platform governance. At the very least, it’s a community-driven music experiment worth keeping an eye on.
family
family is a multiplayer music community platform built on Base, Party, and Zora. It allows music communities to collectively grow, collaborate, and fund creative projects. Think onchain record labels, fan clubs, or music collectives! Memberships help grow a shared pool of community-owned funds, for which members can propose ideas and vote. Projects can include funding live events, creating music drops with built-in splits, and more. It’s a fantastic new demonstration of the possibilities of collaborative culture creation in the music industry.
Oscillator
Oscillator aims to create a federated data layer where music apps share data, creating a “smart account” for fans to bring their musical identity across multiple platforms. This standardization unlocks new possibilities for fans, artists, and developers. Fans could seamlessly connect over their favorite music, and artists could directly engage with their top 1,000 fans. Oscillator’s protocol allows artists to own their audience and bring it across multiple platforms, while also enabling developers to create innovative products on open data sets, fostering a more open and connected music ecosystem.
Song Field
Field of songs is a Zora client that focuses on music. This means that the platform runs on top of the Zora protocol and focuses specifically on commentary and collecting around its music NFT mints, of which there are many these days. The team recently introduced Hearinga space to publish, share, and mint music on Base with a simple 30-day open edition minting process. With a persistent music player and art-rich minting pages, Audiato makes it easy for musicians to showcase their music and for fans to interact through comments and tips.
Sound
Sound is a combined platform and protocol for music NFTs. It allows artists to debut new music as uniquely numbered NFTs, making each release an event, and fans can show their early support by owning these NFTs, which come with various benefits. The platform offers customizable mint formats, end-to-end royalties, and low-gas transactions, and supports drops on Ethereum, Optimism, and Base. It also features genre-specific channels for targeted discussions, enhancing the prospects for music discovery and community engagement.