Part 3

I’m in over my head. Already, and it has barely begun. I did a quick check on Loopring’s discord earlier and got this reply:

You could host the songs on ipfs which is common for nfts. The dynamic part of Loopheads is there is a smart contract that uses uniswap oracle’s to check the price and returns a metadata.json file for the token based on its token id.

I know what a metadata.json file is. That’s about it. It’s time to quickly google and pretend I know what’s going on.

nftschool.dev/tutorial/minting-service has guides on how to start with minting and creating your first NFT. I’m going back and forth and can’t decide if this audio project should or should not include NFTs. The player and hosting might be a big enough step, at least for a prototype, more on that later.

I got in touch with a talented old friend, asking: “Do you happen to know anything about NFTs, or adaptive audio?”

I got a positive reply which started a brainstorming session. It turns out he’s already succesfully minted NFT, connected a gaming site to Metamask. I also know he’s very efficient in both programming and composing music.

We spoke for a while and landed on a few keypoints, mainly hinders, or decisions that has to be made.

Let’s pretend we’re going with my Loopsong with 5 variants to start with. Where do we host it?

Traditionally I’d release the song on Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube and so on. But where does that leave us in terms of making the audio adaptive? Even though we could technically use 5 different audio tracks, and create a playlist on SoundCloud (as in my example), we cannot affect their player, at least not on their own platform.

The same thing goes for Spotify, YouTube, and I’m assuming all other music platforms as well.

Continuing with SoundCloud, we could store the music on their platform and have a seperate audio player on this website, with the drawback of losing listeners. You would already have to be familiar with me, my music, and I would not get any regocnition on SoundCloud’s own platform.

This also raises the questions:

1. Are we making this adaptive audio player for me specifically?
2. Are we making this adaptive audio player for other artists?
3. Would other artists prefer to self-host the player on their website, or integrate it into their existing distributors platform?

So you want to get paid for your music? Would you prefer to distribute on Spotify and get paid for listens, or sell your track as NFT?

Going the NFT route means we likely have to skip out of popular audio platforms and use our own built-in player. I think I am starting to see two roads ahead.

I’m going to let this simmer for a couple of days.