I had a great call with Lucas Gonze http://gonze.com/ the other day. He’s interested in Fission and decentralized identity and personal data stores.
He is the creator of XSPF https://xspf.org/ – the open source project and spec for sharing playlists.
We talked a bit about what a next gen playlist format might look like, how Webnative could be used with personal data stores. IPFS itself likely fits in here somewhere, too.
@icidasset is of course the author of Diffuse https://diffuse.sh who could be interested in supporting new playlist types. Conveniently, since he has also been the lead developer on Fission Drive, we might also add support there.
I also mentioned my friend @depatchedmode and @robertDouglass as being interested in this topic. These two are exploring NFT land, and so we could do something forward looking that considers playlists as NFTs, playlists as bundles of song NFTs etc. etc.
The whole rest of the @fission team has lots of music interested people – I’ll let them say more in the comments, and if you’re not already in our Discord chat, there is #music-nerdery and #music-exchange in there.
I suggest we do a kick off call that others can attend if they like, to discuss a bunch of this stuff. Register below or on Luma.
A good thing to do as a group is to visualize what the following would look like:
Playlists of tracks in {NFTs, blockchains, IPFS}
Playlists in {NFTs, blockchains, IPFS} of tracks wherever they are
Playlists of tracks wherever they are, including but not limited to {NFTs, blockchains, IPFS, web, streaming services}, with different sources mixed up within the same playlist
Think of it as “advertising”—in the most benign sense. Like the radio station that plays the single, so you buy the album. Having an audio player connected to a marketplace or index for NFT’s is simply a way to discover the artists you want to support.
That is one model. There are others, that rely more on gamification and are more complex.
Another use case for music NFTs is to record ownership and enable automated royalty distribution. The NFT could document splits, permissions, publishers, and payment addresses. In the case of interactive streaming, royalty rates could be published. Any machine-readable terms could be incorporated.
One thread that I didn’t get a chance to pick back up, that goes back to the “content resolution” step that Lucas touched on:
One of the most interesting things about NFTs is that they’re database entries that live outside of any one database/domain name/era of time (if we assume the particular host blockchain lives on).
The information that’s been painstakingly assembled in Discogs/MusicBrainz is something that I’d be very sad to lose. Is there something we could do to put the blockchain/NFT tech to use in preserving the curated metadata of music releases?
