In my previous articles, we underscored how the current music industry sucks from different perspectives. However, it is never enough just to point out the problem. We need to find a solution.
In our second blog, we introduced the current attempts from different Web3 projects on revolutionizing the music industry. However, as we concluded, the currently available solutions cannot bring us a new world where we can encourage people to scout new talents and music pieces.
Where is the bottleneck?
Sonorus believes it is in the stage of distribution and promotion. In the traditional music industry, music distribution and promotion are under the control of a small group of people who are working in big labels and voicing as super KOLs. They recommend, and normal users follow. With zero financial incentives, normal listeners are not motivated to discover and scout those talented artists with less promotion visibility. Thus, we believe if we want to make those unpopular voices be heard, we need to decentralize the recommendation channels and empower normal users.
Our Solution
Specifically, Sonorus proposes two incentive mechanisms to encourage normal users to scout and promote music. Both two mechanisms are built on the à-la-carte model, which means selling music for a per-unit price. For the anti-cheating purpose, only those who have paid the streaming fee for a song can share the streaming fee generated from the piece.
The first mechanism is called listen-to-earn, which aims to incentive users to be early listeners of a song and thereby shift traffic from the hottest pieces to a broader pool. Consider this, if you can share the streaming fee if you are the first 25% of listeners who’ve paid for the song, you will have extra motivation to listen to those with fewer clicks because you can get rewards earlier and faster.
In detail, each piece of music has an individual token pool with 30% of total streaming payments for it. Tokens in the pool will be used to reward listeners in the order of the user’s payment. For each user, they are allowed to have a token return rate capped at 20%.
The second mechanism is called promote-to-earn, which is designed to encourage users to share their favorite music with the network and let more people find it.
Sonorus believes everyone should have the decision power on which piece to go trending. At least for myself, I found a lot of new songs from my friends’ playlists. Every time I “steal” the music name from them, I think “oh, they should get paid for their promotion” but unfortunately it never happens.
To change the condition, Sonorus is building a transparent music distribution system through trustless and permissionless blockchain smart contracts and a stable tokenomics system to reward contributors fairly. Revenue from each additional user is shared among all previous promoters, while the most direct promoter gets the biggest revenue share besides the artists.
Sounds complicated? The graph below is a good example: user1 found music on Sonorus directly and shared the music with user2, user2 then shared music with user3. The payment of user1 will only be shared with music NFT holder, that of user2 goes to NFT holder and user1, and that of user3 goes to holder, user1 and user2, etc.
Want to know more details about the mechanism? Read our whitepaper.
Excited about seeing how you can join our exciting revolution? Or have advice on our solution? Come to join us at:
Website: https://sonorus.network/#/index
Discord：https://discord.gg/rQf4Vz2Brp
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SonorusOfficial
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SonorusProtocol