musicto: The Place for Playlists on Warpcast

The vision for the musicto channel is a curated space where people on Warpcast discover and share music through the context of playlists.  Starting with traditional artists, the goal is to move the focus to on-chain artists.

Good for the Listener

Music discovery has a cognitive switching cost - even if you’re in discovery mode, there’s a decision to be made as to whether you’re going to spend your time listening to a recommendation.

What I prefer about playlist over single track recommendations is that it reduces the risk of striking out when you choose to act.    If I’ve switched from seek mode to listen mode, I don’t have to switch back so quickly if the track doesn’t resonate. I can skip to the next track and so on, which saves me time and cognitive spend.

Good for the Artist

New artists have little reason to be heard.  Adding context in the form of a playlist informs the listener what kind of music they’re going to get. It creates an association between the new artist and the theme of the playlist, whether that’s genre, emotion / behavioral or even direct artist association. 

This creates an expectation in the listener, making it possible for the artist to meet that expectation thereby pleasing and connecting with the listener in a deeper way.

Good for the Curator

Playlist curators are artists.  They’re spending time to express an idea and create an experience that is communicating something meaningful.  This creates opportunities to connect with others through the response to their work.

While the act of creating speaks to self-actualization, the opportunity for positive reinforcement from both listener and artist also speaks to esteem needs.

Good for Warpcast

Beyond just these roles, playlists add significant value to Warpcast as a platform. By bringing together three distinct groups—listeners, artists, and curators around a single piece of content, playlists can drive user adoption and engagement.

Warpcast becomes more than just a place for music discovery; it becomes a space for collaboration, connection, and shared experiences, amplifying the overall richness of the platform for all users.

I’m looking at how music is shared on Warpcast, when I see someone post a track with the text: “It’s a banger” or “check this out, it’s great” or even nothing at all, it makes it hard to choose to listen - see switching cost above.

We need to ensure we don’t do the same with playlists.  Our playlist casts should always have a title, a single sentence summary plus a list of 8 artists that feature on the list.  This approach creates multiple expectations in the reader / listener which can then be met.

Populate content from existing musicto playlists to gain attention

musicto.com has hundreds of unique collaborative playlists already formatted that can be brought across to the /musicto channel on Warpcast.  They have interesting titles, single sentence summaries and featured artists along with playlist cover images and longer form descriptions that can add additional context.

We have a number of musicto community members already on the platform who can host, moderate and share playlists and tracks to the channel.  This will provide a steady and consistent flow of playlists and tracks, all with interesting context that encourages followers and listeners to engage.

Channel membership & Hypersub

Channel membership will allow people to post their own playlists, increasing the amount and diversity of channel content.  Early stage membership will be hand selected, potentially with a simple signed agreement around accepted behaviors (i.e.no spamming, jamming the feed, etc)

(Need to look at implications of public channel on basis of Dan’s post today)

Need to examine the logistics but can we have a close to zero cost for gated access through Hypersub that then increases over time as desire for membership grows?

Ideally we would keep the channel sub cost the same throughout a members time in channel, i.e., if you joined the channel when membership was $5 a month, then it stays at $5 a month for you for as long as you subscribe, regardless of the channel price going up for new members.

Need to delve into basic tokenomics but if there’s a way to reward early adopters over time through airdrops - it’s something we should look at.

Shift priority and focus to on-chain playlists and artists

Once momentum is achieved and the channel is self sustaining and mods are getting compensated for their time, we move focus and reward to championing on-chain artists.  How we do that is tbd but the end goal is potentially minting playlists where curators and artists all benefit equitably.

Create the /musicto channel