Music NFT Platforms on Tezos: an Overview
Cached copy of an article from Tezos Spotlight, 2022-11-28, served from ramine.net so it stays readable if the original goes offline.
Since early 2021, NFTs have really taken off on Tezos, with platforms like Hic Et Nunc (now defunct, but resurrected as teia.art) creating an explosion of interest among creators and collectors alike. Almost overnight, a wave of artists rushed to mint their latest work and collections on Tezos, due partly to the low transaction costs (so-called 'gas' fees) on Tezos compared to Ethereum.
It wasn't just the low gas fees that proved attractive, however. The Tezos community offered a warm welcome to newcomers, forging what is still to this day a very inviting and supportive environment for artists of all stripes. Like many other NFT markets, the surge of activity in the Tezos NFT community up to now has been largely dominated by visual art. But a new movement is starting to emerge around music NFTs.
This article highlights four main music NFT platforms on Tezos: Radion.fm, henradio.xyz, DNS.xyz, and OneOf.
Radion.fm
Radion.fm was one of the first platforms on Tezos to focus exclusively on music, with a focus on copyright protection. Radion embeds a public hash key into the audio files, which enables direct payments to be sent to the artist whenever a song is downloaded or purchased. The platform's interface will be familiar to anyone who has ever used a Web 2.0 streaming platform such as Spotify and Apple Music, featuring a billboard chart, trending artists, a radio stream, and more.
Henradio.xyz
Henradio.xyz was born out of the early Tezos NFT platform hicetnunc.xyz, and it now mints on the teia.art minting contract. It has a simple UI layout and straightforward UX, allowing users to mint their audio NFTs, and placing everything in a continuous vertical feed showing the latest mints in real time.
DNS.xyz
DNS.xyz started out as a profile platform, but has since expanded to focus on building an infrastructure around Web3 music (although not exclusively; the platform also supports other kinds of NFTs, like visual art tokens). DNS features cross-chain support, displaying NFTs from Tezos, Ethereum, and Polygon. The platform indexes and displays NFTs from a variety of popular minting contracts. An A.I. feature will detect any accounts you have associated with a synced wallet address and it will construct your profile home page on this basis, however profile customization is also possible.
According to DNS's Twitter bio: "Decentralized NFT Streaming - the best way to play music & show art on Tezos, Ethereum, and Polygon."
The DNS team is very good about working in the open, offering users the chance to talk with the team and provide feedback almost on a daily basis, and allowing the community to curate their homepage of rotating featured artists. The UI/UX in its current form is akin to a mix between a social media platform and Soundcloud.
The platform currently offers its own hyperminter, and one popular feature that DNS offers is a batch transaction cart, making the collection of multiple NFTs at once simple and easy. Pending updates will bring more features to the minter, including album minting capabilities and more.
OneOf
Boosted by early backing from music industry legend Quincy Jones, OneOf is another NFT platform that utilizes the Tezos blockchain, and has become a hub for mainstream partnerships. OneOf has helped launch and showcase NFT drops for many mainstream artists such as Doja Cat, Whitney Houston, The Notorious B.I.G., Ziggy Marley, and others. OneOf is also the official NFT partner of the Grammys.
Published by the Tezos Foundation.