DEMU is a financial platform for the music business providing tools to help music enter web3. The platform is planning to start this revolution by offering royalty payments for artists by offering its first utility as the DEMU Jukebox. The music platform will also allow users to connect their digital wallet to any DEMU-compliant music player and pay–per-stream, directly to the artist they are listening to. The incorporation of blockchain into this platform allows for creators to take back control, eliminate middlemen and enrich their fans’ experience.
The DEMU Jukebox dapp will serve as a portal into the music repository being created. Here, record labels, artists, DJs, and playlisters can also connect to this repository via APIs for their own music players.
How the decentralized music platform works
The team will build a repository of smart music files, that anyone can link to any Web3 enabled site or app. After this, any user can connect their wallet to this web3 enabled site or app in order to transact with it.
When a record label uploads a song to DEMU, an NFT of the song is minted. This NFT enables a smart contract with the royalty distribution instructions of every collaborator of that song. Therefore, anytime anyone presses ‘play’ from any platform, every collaborator that was linked to the song at the minting of its NFT is paid.
Since micro transactions are not yet possible on Cardano in its current iteration, this platform will batch transactions until a threshold set by the rights holder is reached, then send payment for the batch of music streams.
The Team
This project is steered by a big team headed by DEMU founder Session Cruz. Cruz is a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Face Time Agency, an entertainment agency which has worked with Yeezy’s, KKW, Drake, Adidas, and the Kanye/Gap/Balenciaga collection.
Other members include James Dunseith, the co-founder of Gimbalabs and Web3 educator. Gimbalabs’ mission is to educate developers on how to build on Haskell/Plutus by giving them a chance to learnby doing. Randall Harmon, 25-year software veteran, system architect, project manager, and Plutus Pioneer. Harmon also has knowledge of more than 10 programming languages and full stack expertise.
Mark Moore is the fourth member, a software engineer and product leader with 10 years’ experience designing, creating and delivering SaaS enterprise solutions. The team also has an advisor in Mateen Motavaf, CEO of SundaeSwap. Mateen will help advise in areas of business strategy, fundraising, and launching a successful project on Cardano.
Budget
DEMU is looking for $100,000. The funds have been allocated into these areas:
- Proof of concept: $2k
- Program management: $15k
- Product design:
- $5k – Graphic and UX design
- $8k – Product management
- $5k – Market/audience research and discovery
- Technical design:
- $8k – Infrastructure design
- $10k – Smart contract design
- Product development:
- $17k – Write code for consumer-grade dApp UI, access to music library and personal library;
- $17k – Implement essential track-management infrastructure and APIs
- $13k – Implement off-chain to on-chain bridge for payouts to those stakeholders.
Final Thoughts
DEMU is a decentralized music platform seeking to be the first of its kind to build on Cardano. The team has many other utilities in the pipeline whose value proposition impacts the trifecta of the artist, record labels and, most importantly, the fans. The utility that DEMU will build for the music business will lead to an influx of potentially millions of users, and thus value, to Cardano. The project is also headed by a team of well-seasoned product developers and entrepreneurs with enough knowledge and experience to understand the challenges and create solutions.
This project is seeking to introduce NFTs into the music business, area a lot of artists and creators have been leaning towards lately to the popularity of the space. This is therefore an opportunity for Cardano to create the financial platform-of-choice for an entire industry.
To find out more about DEMU, check out their proposal.
Image courtesy of pixabayhttps://pixabay.com/photos/headsets-music-pink-background-1971383/
