Coop Records is officially a year old.
When we started the label last July - we set out with a general direction and an optimistic hope for what it could become.
The idea of bringing music onchain felt obvious - as all of us on the core team had been doing that for the better half of the last 3 years prior to formally starting the company.
However - the tangible nature of how to execute and build an onchain label that could truly scale was more of a desire than a reality.
Zoom out and we’ve put 300 records onchain from close to 100 artists. We’ve generated those artists over 130 ETH in revenue from 250k mints. You can view all of this via our Dune dashboard here.
This is complemented by projects like The Midnight Diner Pass and the Coop Records Podcast which have driven an additional 50k mints and 20+ ETH in revenue in the last few months alone.
Thanks to our many onchain partners - we’ve been able to build a distribution funnel that allows great music to see monetary success without needing to be fully immersed in the space.
This has created a system for us to get our favorite artists comfortable dipping their toes in and giving them a taste of the power of direct onchain earnings.
Compound that with a strong desire to truly make Coop Records a community owned label and we have a very clear vision for the next year ahead.
Here are some of the key highlights and learnings along with plans for what’s next.
Our Origin Story
We launched Coop Records very quietly.
Record labels often operate behind the scenes - and that was our approach when we first started.
We always want the artist and the music to be front and center and saw our role as a background operator that made it easy to use the technology - and a connector to our network of collectors and onchain enthusiasts.
We quickly realized that panhandling to the same small network of collectors who believed in onchain music (realistically probably less than 100 people in the world) was not scalable and we were boxing ourselves into way too narrow of a niche.
Despite having some major wins early on with projects like ROHKI’s “Cerulean” or TK’s “Origins” or WesGhost “Faceless” - these projects felt very isolated.
We found ourselves doing custom engineering and dev work every time and the amount of energy going into the rollouts wasn’t being met with an equal amount of excitement or demand.
RetroPGF Round 3
Despite this - we were able to tell a compelling narrative about the work we did put in submit for Optimism’s RetroPGF Round 3 in January.
This resulted in us getting a grant of ~50k OP - which in many ways was the first real validation we got as a business that our work was impactful.
Our application tells a very accurate story of what we built, who collected it and why.
This grant was a major part of our story because it unlocked the next chapter that allowed our business to start to scale.
Enter Boosts & Quests
As we’ve been very vocal about - the core driver of mints at Coop Records is partners like Boost, Layer3 and Coinvise.
I won’t go too deep on it in this post - but the TLDR is that we began incentivizing our mints.
We had OP to give back to the community, and we felt this was the best way to spend it in a way that was a positive sum for our artists and the label as a whole.
So we started experimenting - instead of sending Telegram DMs to collectors, we started offering rewards to collect.
Collect a song for 0.000777 ETH ($2.70) and get 1 OP back ($2).
This funnel quickly became the engine to use getting dozens more records onchain - as we saw our first viral mints start to happen with songs like Baker Grace’s “Coming Home to You” (45k mints) and Memba’s “Back Online” (12k mints).
In that moment we realized that our vision for an onchain record label was not only possible - but scalable.
If we could recreate viral mints at scale, we could build a real business on the back of it.
Since then, Coop Records has generated ~39 ETH profit from onchain royalties along with ~19 ETH in profit from referral fees.
This allowed us to scale to doing at least 1 release a day - and created a system where artists were seeing meaningful revenue that made them feel very compelled to keep putting their music onchain.
We have releases slotted everyday through August with a huge backlog of inbound requests from artists wanting to release more music onchain and wanting to get their friends involved.
But that wasn’t all we did.
Building Products
This past year marked the first time that Coop Recs embarked on its product journey.
We started with Onchain Curator - a way to showcase which songs you collected were your favorites to listen to.
We branched out on a couple side quests before landing back on a mobile app called Boombox that let you add and share your favorite artists and earn BOOM when other people added them too.
In the midst of this process we decided to wind down Invest in Music and launch Sonata - a music discovery client built on Farcaster.
Without going into too much detail on any individual project - there were major learnings every step of the way.
Crypto has a weird tendency to overly hype up new shiny things - and a very tough time maintaining that attention and momentum after the first few weeks. We found ourselves falling victim to this multiple times - having to learn the hard way that building and kickstarting products is far more about building for the long-term than expecting something to go viral and be able to sustain that hype post-launch.
We currently have our sights focused on a new Coop Records product that will serve as the core of everything we’re doing at the label which we’ll talk about more in depth in what’s coming next.
Events
Last but not least - our events were a major focus this year.
We see events as the glue that really ties together the online and IRL aspects of building a niche music community - and we started by doing that at just about every major crypto conference you can think of.
From ETHCC to ETH Denver, NFT NYC, NFT LA and many more - we took a lot of pride in curating events that felt less like crypto parties, and more like a fun concert you’d want to go to with your friends.
Meanwhile - we hosted dozens of showcases, pop ups and releases parties at my house in LA, which quickly ballooned into something way bigger than house parties after a few unpleasant visits from the cops. (note: don’t put subwoofers on the balcony and play Skrillex at full volume. Your neighbors will be very angry).
The combination of crypto events and house parties lead to our newest ongoing series - Midnight Diner.
We teamed up with Base and Onchain Summer to release the Midnight Diner Pass - an all-access pass to our summer event series here in LA with a new event the first Monday of every month. We stacked the lineups with Coop Records artists and are using it to be the foundation for where the crypto and music world’s collide.
The biggest learning here is that events are super expensive and very resource intensive. They need to be consistent, and they need to constantly be evolving for people to keep coming back.
Our biggest focus for this year is trying to bring as many elements of our events onchain - from minting the live sets to using them as a trojan horse for onboarding by gating a free drinks wristband behind a flow to download a Coinbase Smart Wallet.
What’s Next?
This year is the year that Coop Records becomes a truly community owned label.
If you think about what we’ve done to date - it’s been highly curated and highly driven by the core team.
We’re responsible for bringing all the music onchain, building our products and throwing our events.
What success looks like this year is having a more involved and direct relationship with our collectors, curators and community that make all the above have value.
A community owned record label means being able to align the incentives of collectors with artists - and needs to go deeper than just finding new ways to get artists paid.
If one thing is clear to me as someone who’s spent the last few years endlessly collecting music onchain - there needs to be a special sauce that keeps people coming back. Just asking people to support time and time again gets old very fast.
This is why we’ve been such power users of platforms like Boost and Layer3 - and we really want to be leaning into that even more this year.
Collecting a Coop Records song is at the core of everything we do - and we need to really drill into why someone would want to build a collection and how they are getting rewarded for doing so.
This is the main focus of our product efforts - building core Coop Records infrastructure that is the home for our catalog along with a very clear place to be rewarded for collecting music and earning status and upside for being a consistent advocate of the brand.
Today’s record labels have a weird way of keeping all the pieces separated. We see Coop Records as the blueprint for a new generation of labels - one in which all of the artists are able to see tangible upside in the success of all the other artists dropping on the label.
We’re starting to do this with our Coop Records Club subscription - giving ETH back to our subscribers.
This is the first in a larger intention this year of making sure our core community is the biggest benefactor of everything we do.
In doing so - we hope to tangibly move the needle on making crypto a cool place for artists to hang out, and inspiring collectives and curators with a model that can be replicated across every corner of the internet.
So with that - I want to take this moment to be appreciative for the work that has been done to date.
Building an onchain record label is truly the most rewarding project I’ve ever spent time on and the vision has never felt more clear.
Thank you everyone who’s supported us this far and we look forward to bringing you as close to the source as possible in the year to come.
With love,
Coop
