We’re excited to announce our fourth season as Sound continues to open our tools to all artists.
Last month, we released the new Sound Protocol, a fully decentralized and open source smart contract framework that artists and developers can freely use to deploy their own smart contracts and create their own custom drop experiences.
The Sound Application (aka Sound.xyz) remains curated – for now. Until we’re ready to open our tools, this approach enables us to thoughtfully onboard new artists while having the space to make our tools more scalable & self-service.
In line with that vision, we’ll be ramping up the number of new artists that we onboard. We’ll strive to consistently debut incredible music from artists with diverse backgrounds, different genres, and unique stories.
Oh, and we’re also introducing beautiful new Song Pages to kick it off.
Some highlights from Season Three:
-
$3.5 million in primary sales and secondary royalties paid directly, instantly, and accurately across 170 artists..
-
Launched new Collector and Artist Profile Pages. Collectors can feature a Sound from their collection and create “shelves” (our spin on playlists). Artists have a section dedicated to their top & earliest collectors.
-
Released the Sound Protocol, a permissionless, open-source, and modular smart contract framework for music NFTs.
-
Partnered with Reo Cragun to release “Frameworks”, the first EP on Sound. This drop leveraged the Sound Protocol to release Frameworks on sound.xyz and reocragun.xyz (his own site powered by Bonfire) at the same time.
-
Published the Sound Developer Docs to make it easy for developers to build their own bespoke music NFT experiences on top of Sound and our protocol
-
Introduced the Sound Lounge to spotlight artists, collectors and builders in the Sound ecosystem.
Onboarding Strategy
One of the most common pieces of feedback we hear is that Sound is too curated. We agree.
Everything we’ve done in the last nine months has been in pursuit of our vision: unlocking creative freedom for artists. The Sound Protocol is fully permissionless, and we’re now focused on transitioning Sound.xyz towards a similar level – where all artists can freely use our tools to mint Music NFTs and host their own Listening Parties.
While we’re still a few months away, here’s what we’re doing in Season Four:
-
We’ll gradually increase the number of new artists that we onboard each week. Our team will still individually onboard each artist as we invest in evolving our self-service artist tooling.
-
Hosting Twitter Spaces for new artists is an important tradition at Sound and complements our mission to amplify good music and stories, but it’s unsustainable at scale. In Season Four, we’ll host Twitter Spaces on a case by case basis and encourage artists to host their own Space that we pop into from time to time.
-
Opening Sound.xyz introduces a different set of challenges, from how we onboard new artists, to how listeners find the content they love, to how we prevent bad actors and mitigate copyright infringement. In Season Four, we’ll be investing in self-service tooling for artists, better mechanisms for listeners to discover music, and automated ways to protect the rights of creators.
New Song Pages
We’re debuting our new Song Pages to kick off Season Four.
We put on a fresh coat of paint and consolidated presale and public sales into a single page.
Collecting a Music NFT on Sound now gives you exclusive first listen access to all future drops from that artist. As soon as the release is minted, you’ll have access to play the song before everyone else…even before the presale has started.
The Movement Continues
Sound is now home to over 170 artists and more than 400 unique songs.
We’re proud to be a leading home for Music NFTs and are excited to champion many more moving forward.
We’re on the lookout for engineers, so if you or anyone you know might fit the bill - apply here or reach out to us on Twitter.
To stay up to date with the Sound community, follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.
To the next chapter of Music NFTs - Sound is ready to ship every step of the way.