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.