DAO Proposal: Loft Radio 🎧

🔥 DAO Proposals
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Sup MetaCartel! A few months ago my friend Michael and I launched Loft –– a free, 24/7 radio where listeners can tip artists directly in ETH while their music is playing. We’re live now at https://loft.radio.

You may have seen our ETH Denver project (Bound), another project focused on helping artists make money doing what they love. We both produce music, make web apps, and are passionate about exploring new ways of supporting creators online using crypto.

Vision :rocket:

Loft was made to explore new ways of exchanging value between listeners and artists. We’re creating experimental listening spaces centered around supporting creators directly. Loft empowers listeners to support the work they enjoy, and artists to collect money themselves for their creations. On Loft, artists receive 100% of every tip directly into their Ethereum wallet.

We’d eventually like to have stations for:

  • Different genres
  • Record labels // collectives
  • Listeners // curators

To support something like personal stations, we need to move away from our current broadcasting service, Radio.co. We’d like to create a custom solution to broadcast live audio in a decentralized way. We’re considering building of building on top of the Audius protocol, and think this could be beneficial to both the music industry and web3 ecosystem.

We’re also exploring other ideas around tipping including “streaming" money, tips that earn interest, and “investing” in songs/artists. Ethereum opens up endless opportunities to support creators in new ways monetarily. Loft will become a novel destination for listening to, discovering, collecting, and sharing music online, all while supporting the artists who make it.

Progress :building_construction:

  • MVP built with Vue, AWS, Firebase, & Radio.co
    • Direct tipping in increments of 25¢
    • Logging all tips on our backend
    • Live chat - tip to customize your name
  • 34 artists on the stream (w/ ETH addresses)
  • 2 labels (Inner Ocean & Dust Collectors)
  • 8+ hours of original music
  • 71 tips (0.0807 ETH) from 31 individuals (not from us)
    • Enabling custom chat names drove 23 users to tip

What we can achieve :jigsaw:

  • Engage a new audience with the magic of crypto.
  • Incentivized curation (get paid for having good taste)
  • A lower barrier to entry for artists to gain exposure and generate revenue
  • Create a new way for people to discover, listen to, and engage with music online

Why would artists submit music to Loft? :man_shrugging:

Revenue :money_mouth_face:

We offer an alternative revenue stream for digital music and radio. Listeners can tip artists directly in ETH, and artists receive 100% of every tip. Loft does not take a cut, and we’ll continue to introduce new incentives for listeners to tip.

Exposure :busts_in_silhouette:

We support artists with promotion and exposure by providing a platform to showcase their music. While an artist’s music is playing, we link to their SoundCloud, Spotify, or any other URL. Upon acceptance, we promote them on socials and debut their music at a specific time for 7 days.

Community :handshake:

We invite and embrace community feedback. We aim to involve artists more directly in the evolution of Loft. Their feedback guides the future of a small project that embraces technology, values transparency, and believes in fairness for creators.

What’s next? :hot_pepper:

  • We love the amazing community and collaborative energy that is MetaCartel. With the help of your guidance and support, we hope to grow our community of listeners, artists, and labels tenfold, drive more exposure and revenue to artists, and fulfill the vision of Loft.

  • So far we’ve spent $420 on the project (no joke). We’re asking for a grant of $1000, which would allow us to focus significantly more time on Loft. The funds would go to:

    :man_technologist: Development time (view our priorities here)

    :radio: Radio.co subscription

    :incoming_envelope: G Suite subscription

    :framed_picture: Commissioning art

  • We’re exploring options for becoming self sustaining and profitable, but our number one priority right now is to create a product that brings value to artists.

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Awesome project! Tons of cool stuff to come. Will definitely be using and contributing to this :sunglasses:

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Awesome stuff, I approve!

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Sounds great. Makes a lot of sense integrating with Audius for sure. You’ve got my vote and support. Good luck and we’ll be listening!

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This is really cool!

A few questions:

  • How are artists/tracks chosen? Seems like a really cool opportunity for a community run radio station. Maybe you could DAOify it…
  • Are there plans to integrate multiple channels with various genres?
  • Have you thought of launching chats along with the stations (could just be Telegram chats at first) so that people listening could talk about the music? (this might be a terrible idea lol)
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Thanks @burrrata - appreciate the questions :grinning:

  1. We’re curating the station ourselves by reaching out to artists and labels individually. Onboarding creators is a somewhat time consuming bottleneck to getting more music, but outsourcing to labels has improved that process. We’ve considered DAOifying the playlist, which comes with many upsides and complications, but for the time being we’ll continue curating to taste. Let me know if you have any ideas here! (:

  2. Yes! Our current streaming service provider (radio.co) isn’t scalable (fixed price per station), so we need to move to a custom, decentralized solution (ideally built on Audius) before spinning up more channels. What genres would you like to hear next?

  3. We have a chat live on the site and a Discord. Anyone can chat anonymously, or send a tip to create a custom name. As we create more stations they’ll each have their own dedicated chatroom.

Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions/feedback - I’m @jzstern on Twitter & Telegram. Would love to hear from everyone :slight_smile:

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Some things to consider about DAOifying curation:

Benefits

  • Novel, community-driven stations. Possibly the first decentralized radio?
  • No longer have to curate those channels.
  • More listener involvement w/ potential for cool incentives (e.g. you voted a song in that was popular & earn some revenue for it). Users get to promote their favorite artists.
  • Larger reach. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and we’d all hear more music that we otherwise wouldn’t have exposure to.

Challenges

  • Copyright. It’s a major issue we’re avoiding by sourcing original music. How do we collectively verify that tracks don’t contain copyrighted material & aren’t signed to a label?
  • Quality. How do we ensure the quality of music meets our standards? Does it even need to? Does an approved track stay on the playlist forever?
  • Identity. Who can submit music? How do we ensure people don’t pretend to be an artist?
  • Onboarding. How can we create a seamless, automated signup/submissions flow for non-crypto literate users?
  • Infrastructure. We’d need to build a system to handle all of this so it could run without us.

With all this in mind, we’re focusing our efforts elsewhere for the time being. A submissions portal + crypto onboarding experience is on our roadmap and is a great first step towards getting to a community-run playlist. We’d need to move to Audius (or another streaming solution) before implementing a truly automated process as well.

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So as you clearly outlined: DAOs, esp governance: aka decision making, is hard. Def a good call to first focus on creating value for your users, then decentralize.

Want to support you guys, but need a more varied diet than just lofi lol. I like higher energy music, also movie soundtracks, but everyone’s different. Would be cool to have more variety.

Speaking of, if would be really cool (and like DAOifying this is a future thing) if people could stake tokens to reserve slots on the airwaves, and then people could boost the sets to A) support the artist, and B) create a cryptoeconomic prediction market on the future value of that set to listeners. Could create an interesting curation game

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Huge fan, love music, obsessed with Crypto so the intersection of the two had me hooked from the first track :two_hearts::notes:

+1 for a hip-hop station :hippopotamus:
+2 for deep house/ hacker tracks, focus music etc :control_knobs:

I’m sure this has been mentioned but why not use DAI to tip artists ? Seems like $1 = 1 song would be such a great fit, where as 0.0074 ETH which could equal 10,15, 50 dollars in a few years will just make me resent giving tips lol

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Thanks @Yalor!

I think a deep/chill house station will likely be the next one we curate.

We’re limiting tips to ETH right now because the onboarding process for artists (nearly all of which are unfamiliar with crypto) is already pretty daunting, and we think adding another layer of complexity would make it more difficult to get music. That being said, we do think DAI tips are ideal and are working on a new wallet solution for artists & newbie listeners :slight_smile:

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@jamesyoung @OKDuncan might be able to help you out. They’re rolling out a super easy user onboarding flow via DAO Ops that allows people to onboard to DAOs and/or dapps via a few simple bot interactions. It’s super cool

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Working on getting new stations :smiley: Just a few more important features we want to roll out before expanding there.

Creating economics around music curation is a really interesting subject that we’ve been thinking about for a while. I think allowing people to make money off their taste is an excellent use case for crypto that aligns incentives across the board (good artists get more exposure + revenue, curators monetize their taste, & listeners get a better/wider selection of handpicked music). Happy to chat more on this if you’re interested!

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Good looks! Will reach out to them :smile:

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Yeah this would be awesome.

Since Loft Radio is currently tip only (no subscriptions) you could also introduce curated content that people could tip as well. Stations could be curated by whoever manages the station and/or playlists could be curated by whoever puts together the playlist. Anyone who listens can tip the curator.

Another idea is to introduce signalling. For example: you could say you want to start a station for ABC style of music, and that you need X amount of commitments to get it started. People can signal their support, and if there is pull the station can launch. Then as people listen they can tip the station manager, who can then share that with artists if need be. This assumes a tipping only system, but you could also make it a direct (not signalling) fund raise. In this case there would need to be some perk to initial supporters - which could be anything from ad free listening (if there even are ads, and I hope there aren’t!), NFT badges, the ability to signal/prioritize features on the roadmap, etc…

Another idea would be an auction mechanism where you could start a station, then auction off slots based on a harberger tax type mechanism where you pay the taxes to the station for your slot based on your self assessed valuation, but anyone who wants to pay more for it can buy it from you - but then they have to pay a tax on that valuation. 80% of taxes could go to the station manager and 20% to Loft Radio as a whole.

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thanks @burrrata, give a shout @jzstern! OKDuncan on telegram ; )

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What would it take to get our own “MetaFam” station on LoftRadio @jzstern we haz developer :smirk:
Loft.Meme

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We have a community.
We have tokens/ETH.
We have a music channel.

All we need to bring it all together is Loft Radio :headphones:

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Yeah community curated stations would be Sooooo money, I already get so many good recommendations from our community channel. Okay I’m going to find Loft Radio peeps DM’s incoming :mailbox_with_mail:

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Really interesting ideas here.

One big feature on our roadmap (that requires some hefty infrastructure changes) is allowing people to create personal stations w/ custom backgrounds (possibly NFTs) & subdomains (e.g. jzstern.loft.radio). You can only add songs to your station by tipping them, but anytime someone tips a song that’s playing on your stream you get a small cut of that tip, with the rest going to the artist. You could potentially do the same thing with backgrounds.

Another idea is to introduce signalling

I like this. One of our biggest challenges is ethically onboarding artists (see the challenges outlined here), so to avoid these issues we’re handling onboarding ourselves for now. I wonder if there’s a way to allow people to be rewarded for both signaling their support for certain tracks/artists and helping get them into the system. For example, you really want artist X on the radio, and if they register w/ your referral link you get some ETH in return.

NFT badges

This would be dope. We’ve talked about unlocking emoji badges next to your name in the chat, but NFTs would be way cooler.

an auction mechanism where you could start a station, then auction off slots

Could be a good way to generate revenue, but want to be conscious of brand here. We’re proud of the current playlist and want to be careful around paid placements; at the end of the day the main goal is to support talented artists and not those who have money. It’s another reason why we’re hesitant to DAOify adding music.

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@Yalor @burrrata Would love to talk through a MetaFam station! Was discussing with @META_DREAMER awhile back.

Some things to note with getting music on Loft:

  • Copyright. It’s a major issue we’re avoiding by sourcing original music. We need to verify that tracks don’t contain copyrighted material & aren’t signed to a label.
  • Quality. Less of an issue for a community channel, but still some considerations around our brand.
  • Onboarding. 100% of every tip goes to the artist. Without ETH addresses our mission statement falls through, so the MetaFam community would need to help onboard every artist they want on the stream.

We love MetaFam :heart: :octopus: and spinning up a collaborative station isn’t technically challenging, but keep in mind we do still want listeners coming to Loft Radio for the full experience. On of our biggest challenges with Loft has been onboarding artists into web3 and getting them to send us royalty-free music. Let’s get a telegram chat going to discuss further - I’m @jzstern (: