Wouldn’t it be great to earn $10,000 in one day from the sale of your music? Sound.xyz has been helping artists make it happen. One new artist, every day. At this time, they’ve released songs for about 8 or 9 artists with a limited supply of 25 NFTs respectively. Each with a price tag of about $400 in Ethereum, all sellouts earning each artist roughly $10,000 - The value of ETH at time of writing. Their mission is to help more artists make a living off of their music and change the relationship between artist and fan.

When I first came across Sound.xyz I struggled to identify what it really is, and I’m still somewhat struggling with the concept of what it is. Seemingly, it’s an artist launchpad offering infrastructure and a system for onboarding artists into the NFT space. Looking at their interface, you don’t see artist profile pages with catalogs of music. There is no playlisting feature or audio widgets for sharing tunes. It’s like shopping at Walmart, or more accurately, Barneys or Neiman Marcus. There’s pretty much just the shopping experience. You look, you buy, you leave. What else does Sound.xyz have to offer?

Features

Uniquely numbered - Each NFT in the drop is numbered 1-25 where the lower numbers carry greater value than the higher numbers.

Thoughts💭 - Conceptually, this gives the buyer not just a piece of art, but a flippable asset. Fans may value having a lower number and be willing to pay high prices for one. Plus, the lower numbers will hold greater weight when it comes to things like historical significants. This is more in line with my vision of NFTs replicating the accomplishments of the Beatles White Album. Additionally, the limited supply forces a secondary market where anyone else that wants a copy has to purchase from a current owner that can charge whatever they choose. Artists receive a percentage of every resale.

Buyer comments - Similar to Soundcloud, Sound.xyz allows users to post timestamped comments on tracks. What’s different is that the feature is reserved for buyers and comments are removed once a buyer sells.

Thoughts💭 - Something about this feature feels off. Fans of fewer means aren’t just shut out of collecting, they’re also shut out of expression within a community of other fans.

Another thing is advertising! What if someone pays $400 for the song to post a comment to promote something the artist is against? If the comment stands until the buyer sells and those are the terms, things can get real funky. A politician could buy a track of a particular artist to place a campaign ad as a comment. Sound.xyz doesn’t mention much about how its feature works so I don’t know if artists have the ability to remove comments.

Discord Community - Access pass to the Sound community

Thoughts💭 - iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon do not provide artists with access to the people consuming or buying their music. To an artist on these platforms, this feature is amazing. Having the ability to maintain constant contact with super fans is next level. At the same time, if we’re comparing it to selling directly on your website or Bandcamp where you get actual contact information like emails and phone numbers, it pales in comparison.

One central Discord blasting out notifications could get real noisy the more artists are added to the server. Sound.xyz is also in control so it’s not so different from having a fanbase on Twitter or Instagram where those platforms get to dictate everything. The good thing here is that artists aren’t restricted to using Sound.xyz’s Discord. Any artist can set up their own Discord and gate access to owners of their NFTs using a platform like Mintgate.

Golden Egg - A secret NFT hid in a randomly selected Time Stamp of the track. Whoever comments at that exact time unlocks a custom NFT chosen by the artist which will upgrade their item to a 1/1.

Thoughts💭 - I like this feature. I’ll just say this about it, number one of a collection is a 1/1 because there’s only one number one. I might be nitpicking but, you’re not upgrading to a 1/1, you’re just getting an additional NFT. Sound.xyz doesn’t mention that the original NFT will be burned/destroyed when you get “upgraded” so I’m assuming you’ll have two. As an artist, should you view this as a two-for-one sale?

Structure

Artists may not know how to set up and manage a Discord community or create an NFT. More importantly, I’d say the larger problem is the clientele. Most artists don’t have access to buyers so when they attempt to step into the world of NFTs they fail. Artists watching other artists fail makes them apprehensive about getting involved. Everyone is protective of their public image and doesn’t want to be embarrassed by promoting an NFT drop that doesn’t sell anything. The number one question I’m asked as a marketer about Youtube and Spotify is “Is there a way to get the numbers up before the project goes public?” Because the numbers are public. I don’t get asked that question for iTunes or Apple Music because the numbers are private. If an artist fails on those platforms, it’s just a personal thing only they know about. NFT sales data is public.

Sound.xyz offers a community of buyers that provides something of a safety net. Releases are promoted across their social media properties and in their Discord. The issue is music platforms with the ability to expose artists to new audiences typically focus on artists that can bring them an audience instead. Is Sound.xyz any different? Let’s explore…

Artist Roster

• Daniel Allan

  100,209 monthly listeners on Spotify

• Josh Pan

  862,417 monthly listeners on Spotify

• Allan Kingdom

  42,413 monthly listeners on Spotify

• Abjo

  14,305 monthly listeners on Spotify

• Oshi

  132,878 monthly listeners on Spotify

• Grady

  962,374 monthly listeners on Spotify

• Marian Hill

  1+ million monthly listeners on Spotify

• IBN INGLOR - NFT artist

  70 monthly listeners on Spotify

• MATTHEW CHAIM

  121K+ monthly listeners on Spotify

Looking at the roster of artists Sound.xyz has chosen for drops, How different is it from the current industry structure when it’s engaging in the same elitism of restricting access to top performers and a well-connected few? What’s the point of Sound.xyz for artists with the means to easily do what they do themselves?

I’m not going to disregard the possibility that they could be leveraging artists with followings for their audiences. It’s similar to streaming platforms, where you have people that want to hear the hits. Once you attract an audience using the hits, then you have an audience to expose unknown artists. The questions are, if and when do we get to that part and to what extent?

What’s Missing?

As a consumer, there’s no unlockable content so you don’t get a download of the music. It exists in the cloud and without the ability to download, one can argue that you just bought a receipt that says you bought a song and not an actual song. How are you supposed to access your track when you’re offline?

What the Tweet?

Let’s analyze what the people behind the company have to say about their platform.

I’ve been critical of Spotify’s monetization structure but I’d say this is a mischaracterization and a bit misleading. First, Spotify has mechanisms that help more artists get discovered, like their playlists Discover Weekly and Release Radar. Those two playlists alone can take an artist from less than a hundred listeners to thousands overnight. The reality of the situation is, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. If listeners aren’t moved by the music enough to become fans, the artists will struggle to earn anything other than the per-stream revenue.

Let’s also make the distinction between artists that feel they should be paid more for their streams on Spotify and artists struggling to make a living off of their music. We have artists that make a good living because of the fans they earn through Spotify’s system. They do live performances, virtual performances, sell merchandise, etc. For those artists, it’s about being paid what they feel their music is worth, not so much about making a living. Artists struggling to make a living are a whole other bag. We can look at those struggling on Spotify who also struggle to sell anything on a platform like Bandcamp as evidence. The monetization issues are due to either a lack of knowing what or how to sell or not having anyone that cares to buy.

I feel like Sound.xyz could showcase their value without attempting to paint Spotify as a Boogieman.

How is Sound.xyz a remedy when Spotify releases 60,000 songs a day, and they’re doing 1 song per day? Why highlight how many songs go unheard as if their system does any better? Is comparing Sound.xyz to Spotify even accurate? I’d like to see them compare themselves to Bandcamp which I feel is more accurate.

In order to join Sound.xyz, artists must apply and be approved. How is a platform artists must apply and be approved to use, not a middleman? It’s like submitting music to a blogger, radio station programmer, or A&R. A person - or group of people - gets to decide whether an artist’s work is good enough to be permitted to be exposed to an audience. Sound.xyz is a middleman and a gatekeeper. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. What it comes down to is, what kind of middleman is it?

Wrap Up

Sound.xyz has dropped about 8 songs from 8 artists with a maximum supply of 25 copies of each song and releases one song from a new artist each day. So far, each release has sold out but it appears to be a small community of buyers - which reflects the NFT market in general. It’s questionable whether there are enough buyers to sustain anything like the 60,000 releases Spotify pumps out each day.

How wide is the sea of music fans able and willing to pay upwards of $400 for a song? Additionally, is it ethical? Fan is short for fanatic, people are fanatical and have obsessive relationships with their favorite artists. This reminds me of the debate around Jordan’s where people would criticize the price of the sneakers as a result of poor kids killing each other over them because they couldn’t afford to buy them. People idolized Jordan and wanted to connect with him in any way they could. He was emulated and revered. The “Is it the shoes” commercial theorized his sneakers as being the source of his powers which gave the impression that owning a pair of Js was a way to “Be like Mike”

The language used to incentivize buying establishes a financial hierarchy around fandom. “Show off the sound NFTs you’ve collected and prove you were a fan from way back in the day” - What about the fans that give you thousands of dollars in free advertising by shouting your praises on social media, are they not a “day one” simply because they can only afford a 99¢ download and not a $400 NFT? The language can undervalue some fans and drive other fans to spend what they can’t afford in order to prove their loyalty. There’s a reason the NBA is careful not to frame people that pay for floor seats as “bigger fans” than those in the nose bleeds. The fans in the nose bleeds cheer the loudest.

Turn Off?

It’s nice to just think about the potential profit but there’s always a duality to things. Coming off a Pandemic with so many financially struggling, seeing your favorite artist put their work behind a $400 paywall could drive a lot of resentment. Reddit and Discord recently announced plans to integrate NFTs and the backlash was so swift and severe they ended up backtracking and deleting their Tweet announcements.

Wen token?

Considering buyers fans within this type of system could be heavily flawed. People’s intentions may not be to support the artist or art in general. They may not care about either. Crypto platforms often Tokenize and create a coin that finds its way to exchanges. The platform will airdrop tokens to their users based on the level of activity and length of time they’ve been a user. ENS, a crypto domain name server, recently airdropped tokens to their users which turned out to be worth tens of thousands of dollars for some, even more for others.

A lot of early adopters are really just investors waiting for a payday. “Wen Token” is Crypto terminology for asking when the platform plans to tokenize. The practice of jockeying for token allotments is very common in the space. You can take this Tweet as an example.

Nothing like organizing an event for everyone that holds your music NFT only to not have anyone show up because they’re investors and not fans.

At the end of the day, I think what Sound.xyz is doing is a good thing. Sure, I have questions and concerns about it but we’re in the baby stages of this whole movement so there’s a lot of room for growth. What they’ve built looks great and works. I’ll be watching their future drops to see if the types of artists diversify and how the platform develops. You can learn more about it here: https://www.sound.xyz/