Beyond Spotify: Direct-to-Fan Music
Tezos Summit · Industry talk · 2022 · 32 min
It takes roughly 600,000 streams a month to earn minimum wage. The case for direct-to-fan, and the platform we built for it.
My talk on what we built with @DNS: a music and social platform where the song comes first and ownership is part of the product, not a gimmick bolted on top.
Streaming solved access but not artist economics. Social solved distribution but not who owns the audience relationship. NFT marketplaces made the media feel secondary to the transaction. We tried to fix that order. Artists could publish, build community, and sell directly to fans; fans could listen, collect, and support. Some artists earned materially more from direct fan support than from streaming, which is the only version of this category that interests me.
Tezos Commons covered it as one of the most ambitious consumer products in the ecosystem. The point was never "music NFTs." It was making direct-to-fan music feel like a normal, well-made product, with the music at the center.