Building An Open Music Ecosystem, Together

We have the opportunity to build a new music industry on shared, open data.

We see a world where music data is no longer trapped on platforms. Instead, artists own their audience, fans own their musical identity and data flows freely between platforms, allowing them to build collectively.

Done right, this could open up billions of dollars in value currently trapped in the traditional gated music industry.

This future is possible but only if we build together.

We've made good progress by bringing music apps onchain, but the next stage is building something bigger than the sum of its parts.

Our ability to coordinate on shared infrastructure will be our defensibility against incumbents.

Music legos. A base layer protocol for music with shared standards, open to everyone and owned by all through token distribution.

This would allow the free exchange of music data and enable new music apps that were not possible before.

Blockchains make this future uniquely possible, and there are now millions of data points onchain representing artist-fan relationships to start building with.

However, it’s not that simple …

“Building onchain” alone is not enough. Although the data is open by default, it’s fragmented, incomplete and difficult to aggregate.

Continuing the music legos analogy, the lego blocks don’t neatly click together out of the box. And there are lots of missing pieces.

One option is to build a centralized index to aggregate and make sense of the data. But that just recreates the old problems — a single point of failure that can be dismantled, acquired or turned off.

To really force change and build leverage over the existing music industry, we need to work collectively on a sufficiently decentralized data stack.

So far, in our original blogs and manifesto we’ve painted a golden picture of what’s possible, but truthfully there are lots of problems we’ve encountered while building this out.

Any data onchain is open and transparent by default, but it’s also fragmented and difficult to aggregate. Platforms have different ways of deploying contracts, using inconsistent fields of metadata. For example:

Releases on Nifty Gateway are all on one shared contract. To aggregate the data, you need to search and index by the Token ID. On other platforms, every piece of music or artwork has its own contract.

There are problems on the fan side, too.

We often use different wallets for different activities. Cold wallets for long-term storage, hot wallets for day-to-day interactions, delegate wallets for minting, etc. How do we accurately map these and attribute them to one fan?

There are now millions of artist-fan data points onchain, but they’re all different. NFT songs, fan clubs, editions, 1/1s, album art, snippets and dozens of others.

They all represent a touch point with fans but there are inconsistencies between all of them.

Many useful data points around music are not captured onchain, such as play counts, followers, likes and direct purchases.

For example, you can stream and like songs on Sound. You can follow artists on Zora. You can make playlists and stream on Spinamp. These are all offchain actions on blockchain-based platforms that are not openly available.

While they’re not necessarily useful in isolation, they’re valuable in aggregate.

There are many more ways to capture data onchain that we haven’t taken advantage of yet. Some examples include attestations, DIDs, verified credentials, encrypted assets and many others.

We need a way to collectively aggregate this data in order to build on it. 

As we explained, a centralized indexer is not the answer as it simply inherits all the problems of the existing status quo.

We need a decentralized way to parse this data.

Oscillator is a protocol for this reason. It will belong to everyone.

Doing it in a decentralized, but concerted effort may be the hardest route, but it’s the only way that gives us leverage. It is our true innovation.

Our ability to coordinate on shared infrastructure will be our defensibility against incumbents. Collectively, we can’t be disrupted or acquired or turned off.

Sign our manifesto to join our Telegram group or follow our /music-tech channel on Farcaster. We’ll have more details on how to contribute directly and be involved in the protocol soon.