I'm not going to sit here and type out my whole life story. And instead of making chat GPT write this out for me, I'll just give you snippets of thoughts and stories I've had as a bedroom producer who has managed to get signed a couple times.
1.)In 2016 I clicked 'export' for the first time after polishing off my first Deep House track. The first thought that crossed my mind? "I hope nobody steals my idea!". The immutability of NFT's would've solved that issue. It seems dumb, but lets be honest, EVERY new producer has this thought, and many do not show or post on the internet without that dreadful what-if scenario in the back of their mind: "Yeah this idea might get stolen". Actually, this exact scenario played out when news broke that Zomboy stole Skrillex's shit and released it after Skrillex invited him over to hangout. Skrillex followed up with an epic Zomboy troll in one of his studio albums "Recess". All was forgiven in the end, however this issue would've been solved a lot quicker with NFTs. Particularly the time stamp on NFTs.
2.) Now, anyone can have an NFT marketplace or Minting service built. But not everyone knows how to keep producers coming back for more. Enter, the secret sauce to this whole operation - the Ranking System.
In the early days of my music career, I was obsessed with Spinnin Record's producer ranking system. Basically you uploaded a new song, and you'd see how high on the ranking system you could get. It was addictive, satisfying, and sometimes bittersweet. If you were a young house producer at the time, you knew about the legendary Spinnin' Talent Pool. At one point, it was all that mattered in your life. If you made it to the top of the leaderboard, you had a chance of having Spinnin' records sign your song. Your career would be launched. A world-wide tour would ensue.
The only problem with this was that people could use bots and just put themselves on the leaderboard. And people rarely actually listened to the song. There was a dude that posted nothing but static in the talent pool and managed to get to top 100. Comments were all like "Wow! good tune!!!! you got my thumbs up!! now can you go listen to mine?" .Good music oftentimes didn't fair too well on Spinnin's Talent Pool leaderboards. This is probably due to the fact that anyone can make a free account and thumb up a song
Together, we're going to bring this ranking system to all genres. BUT, unless you've spent money on my platform, you cannot score a song. This should filter out "static". And People who score songs accurately, will be noticed and rewarded.
3.) When I got my second song signed, it was through a service called Label Radar. Basically you pay them a fee and they give you "submission tokens". You browse labels you like, and use that token to submit your song. If the label likes it, they'll sign it. Label Radar left a good impression on me, however I felt there were a few missed opportunities to help their customers/artists. But the 2 glaring mistakes were:
A.) They Missed the web3 shift
and
B.) They don't cater to content creators, DJs, and hip hop producers(beat makers).
4.) Fast forward to today. When I google Music NFTs... All I see is cash grabs or services that don't cater to music artists in particular. They seem to be in this dreamland were average people just go out and make music NFTs. They don't realize that the market should be producers. They failed to grasp that and don't cater to them.
Chase the Moonlite will be a place where Music producers will have liquidity and power. Labels will have confidence in the quality of the tracks in our ranks. Stars will be born, and labels will be made. Together, we'll usher in a new era for anyone putting out music.
