Sonorus: Incentivize People to Discover Music by Listen-to-Earn | Jam Review No. 19

Today’s Jam Review features Sonorus, a Web3 protocol that revolutionized the way how music is discovered, distributed, and streamed.

Sonorus

What does your product do?

Sonorus is a Web3 protocol that revolutionized the way how music is discovered, distributed, and streamed. Through our promote-to-earn and listen-to-earn smart contracts, Sonorus incentivizes everyone to discover great artists and music early and promote them to others. The protocol also enables developers to embed music in their own products, such as using Sonorus music as game BGM and adding music to your social profiles, so that music can be used, distributed, and heard in various user scenarios.

What unique value does your product features bring in?

To artists

  • Unlock a powerful way to make their music spread and heard

  • Earn much more revenue from their music with our transparent and fair smart contracts

  • Keep control of their own music rights

To ordinary users

  • Earn money through discovering, promoting, and listening, to any behaviors that contribute to the music ecosystem

  • Diversify and refresh their music playlist easily

To developers

  • Have affordable access to copyrighted music catalogs as opposed to the current option of paying millions of dollars in a lump sum, a price dictated by monopolistic record labels

  • Earn promoter revenue in the process if their users keep sharing the music

What need/problem does your product meet/fix?

Big labels dominate the music industry

Big labels are now dominating the industry. Many young talents have to sign unfair contracts with big labels in order to publish their music and receive marketing resources. They have no freedom to create the music with their own style but have to follow the instructions from labels instead. The condition hurts normal listeners as well. People are complaining current music works are becoming more homogenized and commercial.

The oligopoly is killing the creativity of the music industry and making everything so boring.

The distribution of royalty fees is black-box and unfair

The royalty fees musicians should receive from streaming services are black-box and much lower than they deserve. In May 2020, classical violinist Tasmin Little revealed she was paid approximately $15.67 for six months of plays — “around 5–6 million streams” — on Spotify.

Only the top 1% of artists get attention

Currently, most traffics are going to the top 1% of artists. The same musicians and their works pop up on our homepage across different music streaming platforms continuously. They are talented, but it is also boring to see the same names again, again, and again.

Other talented musicians need opportunities to be heard, and listeners need fresh air for our playlists as well.

The contribution of normal listeners to music distribution is ignored

Although the music distribution system is outdated on paper, no one can deny that it has been entering a new stage — few people rely on music radio to get new music. People find new music from other people's playlists, from short videos online, and from home parties. It is normal listeners who spread the music out. However, big labels still take away all marketing fees, and normal listeners' contributions are never fully recognized and financially rewarded in the current system.

How does your product set aside from your competition?

There are many players in the Web3 music realm, but the distribution problem is still unsolved in the air. Sonorus joined the game because we saw the pain point regarding music distribution and we believed the problem could be solved through appropriate smart contracts and tokenomics.

While most Web3 music projects mainly focus solely on collaborating with superstars or solving the black-box issue of royalty distribution via smart contracts, Sonorus pays extra attention to discovering and distributing high-quality music more efficiently and thereby brings a virtuous cycle to the music industry.

How?

  • With revolutionary listen-to-earn and promote-to-earn mechanisms, we recognize and reward the contribution of listeners to the music discovery and distribution process, which covers a blank stage that was ignored by other Web3 music projects.

  • With tokenomics, normal listeners now have enough financial incentives to scout and share high-quality but unpopular music. The distribution process becomes decentralized, democratic, and more efficient, which is a revolutionary difference from the traditional model.

What’s your growth path in the short, mid, and long term?

Short-term:

  • Focus on the Vietnamese market and develop a validated protocol design

  • Focus on establishing a vibrant music promoter community (artists, critics, fan leaders, KOLs, etc)

Mid-term:

  • Focus on the development of native tokens

  • Focus on empowering developers via Sonorus SDKs

Long-term:

  • Focus on expanding globally and building a healthy, democratic, and financially-fair discovery and distribution system in the music industry

Welcome to check on Sonorus's MetaJam profile to like and leave comments:

For more discussion, welcome to join the MetaJam community.

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