everwave has been building its decentralized music community for a little more than a year now, and with the closing of our first wave, it’s time to reflect on what we’ve built, the difficulties we have encountered along the way, and what the next phase of everwave looks like.
2022, a year of challenges?
We actually started conceptualizing everwave in 2021. 2021 was a flourishing year for web3, the market was doing great, investment money was flowing, and blockchain technology was full of promises for new forms of organizations such as DAOs, but also for creative industries such as art or music. 2022 was supposed to be the continuation of that, but things played out a bit differently. We entered 2022 with a slow but steady market correction, until the Luna meltdown hit in May 2022. After a wave of bankruptcy in the space affecting everyone, FTX crash happened in November 2022, and set everyone for an extra rollercoaster ride. All that to say, it hasn’t been an easy thing to raise money in 2022 for web3 projects, and those who managed to do so deserve praises for sure.
On our end, we’ve managed to surround ourselves with Angel Investors full of conviction in what we’re building. We couldn’t have asked for better support. It allowed us to build a first alpha version of our app, delivered in April 2022. It also allowed us to reveal ourselves with style during the latest edition of NFT NYC, in May of 2022.
Finally in October of 2022 we were able to release a better version of our app (still desktop only) and launch our closed beta phase, onboarding close to 100 musicians and producers on 3 different waves. This was a major milestone for us as it was the first time we put the app in the hands of artists, and start gathering user feedback. The feedbacks were tremendously positive: artists loved the creative concept we offered them. So much so that they have blessed us with close to 50 original tracks, now living on our app and available for anyone to listen to. We can’t encourage you enough to go check them out, have a listen, and see how we put in perspective artists creation and inspiration cycles. It’s truly a beautiful thing to witness!
2022 was tough to go through. A lot of projects trying to help creators had to size down (we did), and some of them even had to shut their operations down (Rally, Mintsongs). I’m thankful for the dedicated team that we have, their conviction, and all the artists that have joined us to produce incredible music on our closed beta waves. Now that spring has come, it’s time for everwave to move on to its next phase, pushing towards more decentralization and putting artists first.
2023, what’s in your bag?
The missing piece of the everwave product cycle is our marketplace. We’ve encountered some delay around it and had to go through a bit of re-organization, but we’re finally there. Our marketplace is coming either this month or the next, and this will kickstart the next phase of everwave. Once the creation cycle for our Wave 01 is over, we’ll shut down the possibility to add any new stem or version. A list of the credits for all the versions included in Wave 01 will be published and we’ll ask our community of creators to verify it, to make sure credits are correct before we move on to the minting phase.
Meanwhile, we’ll open up a vote where only our token holders will be able to participate, and we’ll ask them to vote for their favorite versions within Wave 01. Doesn’t have to be just one, can be multiple choices. Community curated versions will then be turned into NFT, along with the whole Wave 01, and sold on our marketplace. Wave 01 NFT will be sold through an auction, as a 1 of 1 NFT on Solana, whereas versions (now called “Ripples”) will be sold at a fixed price as 10/10 editions. In the same movement we’ll airdrop the $WVE tokens locked into our “creativity mining” smart contract: every creator credited in wave 01 will receive an airdrop of $WVE tokens, rewarding their creative effort but also allowing them to have a say in the governance of the DAO which now owns the rights to all the songs created on Wave 01.
The final step of this post-creation phase will be the release of the community curated music on major streaming platforms, for everyone to listen to. Our DAO has built its own music publishing arm. We’re also working with a distributor in order to maximize our presence online, and make sure everwave’s music is available everywhere. Once this cycle is done for Wave 01, Wave 02 will follow, etc. Fast enough, our community should be able to reach a fairly high degree of decentralization and this is something we’re really proud of.
As we’re gearing towards this new phase of the project, we’re also getting ready to go back into fundraising. Since the beginning we have chosen to raise by solely selling our token, staying true to our DAO model. It has been heavily challenging in a context where more and more investors started to lose faith in tokens throughout 2022. I already lived through that moment back in 2018/2019 with Telcoin, so I’m not really surprised this is happening again, but it’s not making things any easier for us. Nevertheless, confident in what we’ve built so far in terms of tech, our community of creators, and the amazing music the DAO gave birth to during our closed beta, we’ll enter the second half of 2023 assured that we’re in the best position to achieve our fundraising target and continue develop our product.
Conclusion
2021 & 2022 have been the years that have displayed tremendous interest in web3 from the general public, either through purchasing NFTs or participating in DAOs. Unfortunately, just like ICOs in their time, most of them were not in the space for the best reasons. Despite that, we believe that web3 technologies bring several crucial elements for creators, such as transparency, automaticity of the payments, or a digital collectible market that has never existed before for the music industry. We’re doubling down on the DAO model for creators. If there’s one relevant use case for DAOs and NFTs, it is in the creator’s economy. We’ll do our best in 2023 to show just that, and we hope we’ll be able to benefit from your support in this endeavor.
If you’re interested in digging more about everwave, you can use the following links:
Our collaborative music production app (desktop only):
Our landing page:
Our discord: