2022 In Review
It’s Our 3rd Anniversary 🥳
We’ve come a long way since we started our journey around this time in 2020, a time when DAOs we nascent and there wasn’t an Audio NFT in sight!
Fast forward to 2022 where the real story begins
As we observed many of our peers pursuing the creation of their own platforms based on the “Crypto Art” NFT model, we decided to take a different approach. This is not surprising given our history and past endeavors. Our alternative route led us to participate in the MetaBUILD Hackathon about a year ago, which resulted in the development of our FonoRoot NFT minting factory. This project laid the foundation for what we are currently working on and building out.
Drawing inspiration from The Popup, our first Metaverse music event series, we fleshed out a new series called SoundSplash, which kicked off at the beginning of May with the support of grants from Near Foundation, Creatives DAO & Marketing DAO.
Some of the Highlights from SoundSplash include:
- The launch of our FonoRoot NFT Minting system
- Customized drop pages at soundsplash.daorecords.io
- A global collaboration of artists from 13 countries
- Our MetaYield liquid kickstarter with MetaPool
We also faced a variety of challenges and learned a lot of important lessons in the process. Managing a team of 8 people from around the world remotely as we build on the fly has proven to the most challenging of them all. What’s the saying? Building the plane while learning to fly it. Exactly. It was trial by fire, the best (and most exciting) way to do it!
Drops & Drops
Following up from SoundSplash it didn’t take us long to plunge into more collaborative releases, all while continuing work on our core product. As with anything in an fast evolving industry, we made more adjustments to DAOrecords behind the scenes, edging ever closer to how we imagine ourselves in 2023, and excited to turn this passion project into a set of tools any independent label and musician can use to blaze trails in the wild world of Web3.
Tracks From MetaJAX
Like a fine wine, good things take time. As is with our collaboration with MetaJAX for the release of Arturo Sandoval’s “Rhythm & Soul”. Moving from the individual song drop pages we featured in SoundSplash, we developed an album version that was deployed in August, together with a live show broadcast into our HQ in Voxels.
Little did we know that Rhythm & Soul would be nominated for Best Latin Jazz Album at 2023 GRAMMY Awards coming up this 5th February!
1st NFT Album to be nominated for a GRAMMY!
We will be co-hosting A New York New Year’s Eve together with some friends in our HQ and the TokenSmart Discord.
31st December 2022
7PM PST / 10PM EST
The Rebirth Of A Classic
When we set out to participate in the MetaBUILD Hackathon, the project we pitched was the re-release of Vandal’s 2007 album TROACO. The concept was simple enough. Vandal had already removed this (and his previous) album from all the popular streaming platforms in preparation for ‘back catalog’ release and DAOrecords was ready to make it happen, using the template created for Rhythm & Soul, TROACO dropped late September just after NEARcon 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Sample & Collect at rarevandal.daorecords.io
BeatSplash & BAYOR
One of the most active DAOs in the realm of Music Production is BeatDAO. It’s mission is to grow a community of music producers and enthusiasts and support the budding Music NFT ecosystem on the NEAR Protocol. To date, the DAO has collected 140 Music NFTs and is one of our most active collaborators.
In October we dropped our long-awaited collaborative release entitled BeatSplash. Featuring 4 tracks from 4 amazing producers in the DAO, BeatSplash was the first Instrumental release we’ve done via FonoRoot and was accompanied by a virtual listening party in the BeatDAO Mansion in NEARHub.
Take a listen to the dope beats over at beatdao.daorecords.io
Buy At Your Own Risk
In December 2022, BAYOR was released as the final drop of the year. This project was a collaborative effort between multiple DAOs, initiated by VanDAO after the creation of The Rare Vandal in April. The initial batch of beats for BAYOR was provided by producers who had contributed to previous releases, and the community used these beats to create new songs for the project. The final result was a collection of five songs, featuring artwork from Noyz134 of YinYang Club and Graffbase. The release of BAYOR was celebrated with a listening party hosted in NEARHub.
Collect & listen to BAYOR at bayor.daorecords.io/
This release was also the first to use our new release templates, featuring our “Mixtape Template” as we continue to evolve and prepare the tools we’re building. Here, have a look!
So What’s Next?
We’ve got big plans for 2023, but if 2022 has taught us anything it’s patience. Things take longer than you think when you’re trying to build something new and with all the lessons we’ve learned this year we definitely trying to be as realistic as possible in predicting our progress. So without going into too much detail, here’s the plan…
Introducing Cypher Alley
Another initiative we are kicking off in 2023 is Cypher Alley, a collaboration with Lowkey Giant, BeatDAO and On The Bloc Chain.
Read more here
ODDio3
More content! That’s the moto for 2023 and we’re bringing you a new Web3 Music focused Podcast called ODDio3 hosted by our very own ‘metaverse misfit’ Vandal.
Info on this coming soon…
Thank you so much for riding with us in 2022 and we wish you all a Happy New Year!!!
