Part 3

Speaking with talent

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.

IPFS

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system.
Reading on docs.ipfs.io/concepts/what-is-ipfs/#decentralization I gather that instead of looking for a locataion for storage (as I am familiar with in web development) IPFS looks for content first (content addressing) and asks all and any computer that has the right information to display it for you.

NFT school

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.

Speaking with talent

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.

Storage and hosting

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?

NFT or not

ɛn-ɛf-tiː ɔː nɒt tuː fiː
that is the question

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.

NFT

NFT, IPFS, Pinata

  • I’m going to build my own music player with adaptive selection based on external factors

We’ll mint our music, upload it to IPFS, either on our own or by Pinata. Since the music is stored on IPFS we’ve removed any music platform such Spotify or SoundCloud from the equation and have to display our songs on our own website.

No NFT

“no capes!”

  • “No capes!”

We can experiment with existing music distributors such as Spotify and SoundCloud. We can create a player on our own website, but there’s also a possibility of perhaps a Chrome-plugin that can influence one’s experience on Spotify’s site.

This also opens up for developing a plugin for let’s say Spotify, that they can use directly in their product. This however takes us a step away from improving our own music, and instead becoming external developers.

In this scenario I don’t see NFT as a possibility.

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

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