Pausing SONGS

After an intense period building and growing SONGS, we have decided to pause the project's operating activities.

We wrote an open letter here: https://songs-tools.com/

I tried to frame my thinkings here:

SONGS started with an ambitious thesis: applying real-world asset tokenization to music to organize, finance, and distribute value in a more direct, transparent way, less dependent on the industry's traditional gatekeepers.

The idea was simple to explain and hard to execute: turn music royalties into more liquid, traceable, and participatory assets. We built real technology, operated a real product, and navigated music distribution, payments, contracts, UX, blockchain, regulation, artists, labels, and fundraising.

I believe we achieved something especially valuable: finding a vertical where blockchain created real product value as infrastructure, not as a speculative narrative. We reached full technology abstraction to the point where users with no prior knowledge of wallets, tokens, or onchain transactions could participate in digital distribution royalties from artists they liked. The technology was there, but abstracted to deliver a clear value: access, participation, and a more direct economic relationship with music.

The key to our growth was that we built a better music product, not a blockchain product. That used technology to create a new experience in the music industry.

But the deeper problem SONGS was trying to touch was not only financial infrastructure. It was also the noise problem in music.

We live surrounded by music. Every day there are great songs, artists with identity, and projects with something real to say. But if you look at the total volume of music being released, those projects are a very small minority inside an enormous and increasingly noisy environment. Distribution tends to zero. Uploading music gets easier. Generating music will get easier. The hard part is no longer only putting music online; the hard part is building value around music that deserves attention.

That is why we kept coming back to the same conclusion: an artist does not necessarily need millions of passive listeners to build something meaningful. They need a real community. Hundreds or thousands of people who listen deeply, share, buy, attend, support, and want to be part of what that artist is building. Not just reach. Relationship. Trust. Context. A more direct economy between the people who create value and the people who want to sustain it.

I have also been thinking a lot about the role of curators in this system: playlist organizers, labels, podcasters, diggers, DJs, collectors, remixers, event organizers, and all the people who read cultural signals before they are obvious. These people turn noise into signal. They help music find its context and its audience. The relationship is rarely only artist to public. Very often it is artist to curator to public, and I do not think that layer can or should be fully delegated to algorithmic recommendation.

In that sense, SONGS was also a kind of Trojan horse for a more direct economic pipe between artists and fans. Streaming does not generate meaningful economics for most artists, and I do not think it will solve that by itself. The long-term direction I still believe in is one where streaming platforms become a secondary layer for listening, discovery, social context, and cultural movement, while the primary economic relationship can live closer to the artist, their community, and the people helping the work grow.

SONGS sat at the intersection of ecosystems that still do not speak the same language. Music is not used to managing this technology through the lens of investment, liquidity, and direct participation. Clear regulation is not there yet, so we spent enormous energy articulating a grey area where this technology was living. In the investment world, the music market is often understood as legal madness, something "you need to be careful with" or you will face consequences.

I deeply believe this model will represent one of the next technological steps in music infrastructure. Maybe it was not the right time yet, and maybe there was not enough economic incentive to sustain it with the structure we were building. But the foundational model is just a matter of time.

And if this direction does arrive, I do not think it should exist as closed infrastructure controlled by a single company, but as a relatively neutral common layer that multiple agents can build on and have incentives to maintain.

The industry will have a global, neutral source of truth: a point where an artist or label can, sovereignly, register a work, its metadata, authorship, and initial identity before taking it into different jurisdictions and commercial contexts, avoiding walled gardens where the creator's legal relationship to the work becomes obscured.

If I were starting again, I would not start from a fundraising logic. I would bootstrap from day one, move more slowly, start with a smaller scope, and validate each commercial layer before expanding the ambition of the system.

I take with me deep experience building at a difficult intersection: product, technology, fintech, rights, music, operations, and strategy. I also take a clearer conviction about complex markets: less narrative, more focus; less artificial speed, more validation; less dependence on external capital, more patient long-term building for projects that have no VC hype fit. I feel this project could be the perfect foundation for a future crowdsourced protocol, but the economic and usage incentives still need better alignment. They are not there yet.

I still believe in direct participation in music assets. Maybe not exactly in the format we imagined. Maybe not yet. But the current relationship between creation, community, and value is incomplete, and that tension will generate new models.

SONGS is pausing its activities, but the baton is still there for us or others to pick up. The economics for a project like this to exist still need to evolve. It was not its time.