Winding down SONGS Distributor

After many months trying to fundraise SONGS, we've decided to stop the distribution vertical of SONGS. The protocol will remain there but we will not continue distributing music on platforms and giving that service to people.

We started this project believing that designing a fairer, more transparent, and open initial layer of publication, and creating the right incentives on top so users could publish sovereignly on that layer first, would scale into deep usability. We never proved that this model would work. After months of growing the user base we could not achieve the funding we needed to continue with the spending we were facing.

The supporting basic idea was this one. Tokenization enables having your royalties available to you from day one; that creates the incentive where you can sell part of your royalties to fund your music projects or to get liquidity out of your managed catalog. That incentive plus the latest advances in web3 tech abstraction would be enough to encourage users to push the metadata of their tracks onto a blockchain for the first time with minimal friction, and later monetise directly via a distribution deal we managed.

The cool thing here is that as you had your royalties before, you have a real contract that already represents your ownership structure. And when payments come, everyone who has a royalty receives a share, sovereignly, transparently, and efficiently.

The protocol underneath, of course, is not just for us as a music distributor, but for any other entity that manages royalties globally, fairly, and with the same potential incentives to adopt it. The idea here was to reach enough critical network effects to push the protocol game theory forward to the point that it would become more interesting for a distributor to outsource part of its metadata management stack to an SDK and to SONGS, as we would hold the know how and it would be x10 cheaper, faster, and easier to manage and access legal, metadata, and capital around managed music assets.

In any case, we could not achieve it with this approach. We missed the mark, sadly, but without discounting the protocol layer's activation potential, someone will push it forward. This is the way.