Sound: Revolutionizing Music Ownership
How Sound Became the Leader In Music NFTs...
GM DOers!
Take your time…
“Take your time” - in the fast-paced world of web3, more foreign words have never been spoken.
But there’s a company that’s been doing just that, and have been absolutely killing it. And there’s lots we can learn from them.
Sound, a web3-native music platform, has just opened their doors to the masses. After being a limited access platform for a long time, letting in only a small amount of artists, they’re now allowing any artist to join and publish their creations.
It’s taken almost two years to carefully build its platform, focusing on keeping it small and curated. Through continuous feedback and ideation with artists and collectors, they've created a product that's ready for mass adoption. 🎶
Sound's suite of features is well thought out and proof that keeping it small, doing things that don't scale first, and only then launching is a playbook other projects should learn from.
This is especially important when building completely new and innovative products. 🤝
Today, let's dive into Sound's platform, examine its onchain performance, and see how their strategy of prioritizing non-scalable tasks has set them up for success in the long run.
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Sound In Numbers
(Do you own a music NFT? Reply to this email with Yes or No! 🙏)
Sound is a web3-powered collaborative music platform that offers artists an opportunity to share their creations (a song or album) as a collection of Music NFTs.
At its core, Sound enables artists to deepen their relationships with their most loyal fans, gives them a chance to support artists directly and stake their claim on being early adopters.
👉 Sound's unique features go beyond being just a music NFT marketplace with a media player, making it a full-fledged music platform. Some of the unique features it offers:
Local Activity Feeds to view the lifecycle of a song or a playlist;
Sound Swap for DeFi functionality;
Curator Rewards for collectors;
Open and Limited Editions, which allow artists to control the amount of owners and duration of the mints.
Up until now, Sound has onboarded only 420 artists to ensure a well-curated and intimate platform that brings together artists and collectors to help build a good product.
Sound may be small compared to global streaming platforms, but it has managed to dominate the web3 music space and achieve significant success. Let’s look onchain to see how Sound’s been doing. 😉
Song Mints
📊 Over 100k songs have been minted on Sound since its creation, with consistent growth over the past year despite a limited number of available artists.
Collectors
📊 Nearly 16k collectors so far have participated in song NFT minting, with the majority of them joining less than a year ago.
Music NFT Platform Dominance
📊 Sound has established itself as a leader in the music NFT space among competitors who also curate their content.
This is partly due to Sound's active engagement with members, especially on Twitter, where they hosted daily Twitter Spaces to showcase new artists and releases, increasing visibility and interest in their collections.
As you can see, the numbers don’t lie. Sound has achieved impressive growth despite intentionally taking it slow and keeping it small.
So what exactly were the steps that Sound took to manage its growth and prepare for its public launch?
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Sound's Pre-Launch Plan: A Playbook for Web3
Sound’s goal has always been to build an inclusive music platform for both web3 and web2 artists and users.
How did they get here? Well, it’s been a combination of listening to their users, active community engagement, and developing innovative and scalable features that cater to both web2 and web3 user bases.
Curate, engage and collect feedback
Sound took what could be considered an excessive hands-on approach to their curation - they individually video-interviewed all of the 420 artists they have on the platform! 🤯
This means that they likely interviewed many more artists, the rest of which didn’t make the cut… ✂️
Although tedious, this approach has allowed them to offer a perfectly curated platform and also, with the help of these artists, identify and tackle pain points in their product and create an onboarding experience that is scalable and fit for all artists.
Furthermore, they've also been actively engaging with the community by hosting daily Twitter Spaces, discussing issues, and brainstorming ideas. 🧠
Needless to say, this is hard, non-scalable work.
And for anyone thinking there is some magic sauce, a shortcut that will get their product a sea of users in the first month without showing up every day and engaging with users - there isn’t one.
To build lasting value, these are the steps you can’t skip. 🤌
Build sustainable features and meet users where they are
While they were busy building a strong community, Sound was also hard at work building and stress-testing their core product to ensure that the platform is ready to handle the masses by:
Simplifying the user experience (for web2 peeps)
Email sign-ups
Credit card payments
Mobile app - this is a must!
Creating valuable and engaging features that benefit both artists and collectors, such as sustainable drop methods, music discovery features, curation rewards, and more;
Building tools that help verify audio ownership to prevent illegal uploading of content not owned by the user, and avoid legal nightmares that would distract from building a better product.
This is refreshing to see - a company with a slow, meticulously executed strategy focused on being inclusive to a broad range of users and creating lasting value beyond speculation. They made a plan, and stuck with it!👌
All I can say is…
Community-Driven Growth in Web3
So yes, building a community and involving everyone in the building of a product is a painstaking process… but it pays off massively.
As builders in web3, we are operating in uncharted territory, and new innovations require fostering a dedicated community that helps build the momentum of interest and adoption while at the same time helps you understand your novel product better and refine it. 🤝
Time and time again, we at Web3 Academy have talked about the importance of community, so check out our piece on the value of community in web3 to level up your web3 playbook. ⚡️
If you’re a creator or an entrepreneur in this space, you need to be thinking about this a lot.
Community is everything. ❤️
As for Sound, we are excited to see a platform execute a business strategy that is sustainable and incredibly powerful, and it has undoubtedly set them up for success that will hopefully bring thousands of artists and millions of users to their platform in no time.
DOers keep on DOin! 🫡
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🟣 Hold on, DOers!
Web3 excellence doesn’t come easy: it's time for homework! 💪🤓
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LISTEN
Check out a recent DOer podcast episode we did with Austin Hurwitz from One Big Idea, where he explains the value proposition behind music NFTs for both the artist and the fans… 😉
Thanks for reading and we’ll see you on Wednesday! ❤️
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and not financial advice. Conduct your own research and consult a financial advisor before making investment decisions or taking any action based on the content.