Announcing a New Market, providing Decentralized Creator Economy for Music Artists through partnership with μ-zomia

mayu

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Dev Protocol — Accelerating Web3 with Clubs

8 min readAug 1, 2021

Taking the first steps to build a decentralized economy for all creators

I’m excited to share this announcement with you.

With the vision of “maximizing the creativity of all creators”, Dev Protocol finally takes the first step in supporting new creators alongside support of OSS!

The appeal of Dev Protocol is that it provides proof of creator activity (“Proof of Creations “) and a sustainable means of monetization for creators through DeFi’s incentive scheme. Furthermore, it can be connected to various web platforms through its proprietary oracle “Khaos”, allowing all creators to build their own decentralized creator economy.

We are partnering with a great Japanese music startup, M-zomia to start a market for music artists. We plan to start with SoundCloud and then expand support to other platforms. They will work together with us to create a world where all music artists have the ability to be supported by their fans and community on a long-term basis.

Please stake your DEV tokens to them and support them realize their Dapp ”μ-zomia”! https://stakes.social/0x973F66AaA87961CeaD2DC93C15a1D81e7EDC4A32

What is “μ-zomia”?

A world where music artists and fans live in harmony with Dapp

The Music Industry has a large barrier to entry — imagine in the past, for a musician to launch his own album, he would have to buy equipment that were so costly (huge fixed costs) that they couldn’t do it by themselves. Only a few individuals or businesses could afford to do that. Labels that could afford those costs, dominated the market and formed Oligopolies, they have so much market power that they could control the prices of the market and make artists sign terrible contracts.

Blockchain, because of its decentralized nature, with one of its main features — removing the middleman — can take this revolution started by web2 to a new level. It allows Artists to really be the owners of their own music (NFTs) and properly monetize themselves, building their own economy around their music and fans (Creator Tokens), without the need of a middleman.

With the goal of giving artists the ability to be sustainably compensated while regaining control and ownership of their music , M-zomia will start to propose sustainable artist careers for both major labels and independent artists.

Through blockchain, they aim to create a world where everyone involved in music, both creators and fans, can live in symbiosis.

μ-zomia and Dev Protocol

μ-zomia took the lead to create a platform where musicians and everyone who works with them — composers, lyricists, musicians, performers, singers, track makers, sound engineers, performers, etc. — can be sustainably funded. By creating their own economy and empowering their community through the Dev Protocol, they will find a solution.

Fans can stake DEV tokens on their favorite Artist’s pool and financially support them by doing so. Both the artist and the fans receive DEV token rewards. This unique solution is a win-win situation for both parties. Artists also have the ability to mint their own token and could distribute these tokens to their most loyal fans. These tokens can be designed to have many utilities, which could range from access to premium gated content to voting for the style of the artist’s next album.

Driving Change in the Artist Business World

One of the main motives for Creating μ-zomia was to find a solution for the impact that Covid-19 and lockdowns had on music artists. With all public gatherings, concerts and festivals stopping out of nowhere, most artists were left without any sort of income or any prospects of future jobs.

Using Dev Protocol allows fans to mitigate that problem entirely. Imagine a situation where a single fan, funding his favorite artists with Staking — supposing, for simplicity, a constant 30% APY- , sustainable funding is possible.This source of revenue doesn’t depend on any events happening, or a direct donation from this fan. They would only need to comprehend the choice on how much to support the artist and for how long.

Traditional ways to fund artists are usually not consistent over time. From a single fan perspective, funding depends on the music, albums being released, shows happening, or just the fan being able to donate. These events usually don’t happen all the time and any exogenous shock (like Covid) could be terrible for the artist.

Dev Protocol’s and μ-zomia solution has the potential to completely change the music industry. Giving the power to the artist to fully monetize their work and the community to actively participate and benefit from the growth of their favorite artist.

What is staking?

The Dev Protocol’s “Staking” feature is a mechanism whereby a crypto asset, the “DEV Token”, is “deposited by a supporter (fan) with the person being supported (creator)”, resulting in rewards for both parties.

This system is already in operation at Dev Protocol’s Stakes.social, providing a means of monetisation for OSS developers around the world who release open source software for free. Some OSS developers have received support of up to almost 700K USD through staking, which is different from donations.

Future expansion

Dev Protocol does not only allow for Creators to get continuous funding from their own community members, it also provides Creators with a powerful tool which is the tokenization of their projects. With their Creator Tokens minted on Dev Protocol, musicians could empower their own active community by providing utility for their tokens, which could range from access to premium gated content to voting for the style of the artist’s next album, for example. This would also be a great way to further monetize themselves, pay for their costs, help the people that work with them and aren’t properly rewarded as well. This way, fans can help artists grow and artists can reward their community for that.

The team of μ-zomia

The M-zomia’s team is made up of two long term entrepreneurs with vast experiences in the technology and music worlds. Each brings different expertise to the table and their visions align with those of the dev protocol team closely. The team at M-zomia has past experiences that have shaped their goals within the company to help as many artists as possible find a sustainable way to live from their craft. We hope working together we can change the music industry for the better!

Kaoru Kimura

In addition to his career as a businessman, from being in charge of the strategy and operations of the office of the president of GMO — the biggest internet company in Japan- to the COO of a start-up. He has been participating in traditional Native American ceremonies for over 20 years, and continues to learn about the relationship between people and nature. To give back what he received from music, he founded M-zomia.

Ko Matsushima

A lover of music and beauty. Former Spotify Japan, he is the №1 music marketing influencer in Japan, he has a radio program with celebrities, and constantly appears on TV shows to talk about music and current trends on art. Current Head of arne, a data analysis, digital promotion and marketing company specialising in music, dedicated to providing artist services for DIY independent music artists and digital business support for major record labels and management companies in Japan.

From the founders about their thoughts on the partnership

Comment from Kaoru, CEO of M-zomia

“”In the age of Web 3.0, creators have the opportunity to connect directly with global networks. We have many good friends and acquaintances who are music creators and make a living out of it. However, due to the effects of the Corona disaster, many of them have had to give up music because of difficulties in their lives. They are still trying to support others by making videos and cheer them up by doing what they can in these trying times. We all have a connection with music and those who bring it to us, many times for little compensation. We want to live in a world where those who spread joy and happiness, are supported financially to continue their work.

The Dev Protocol was the ideal solution for μ-zomia to solve this problem. Having already achieved a system that allows creators to continue their activities, and their team being an ideal form of Web 3.0, we agree with all of Dev Protocol’s “technology”, “team” and “vision” and are happy to start the challenge together.”

Comment from Mayumi, CEO of DEV NULL AG

“Dev Protocol has been in development since 2018 with the intention of supporting the challenges of all creators. As a first step, we’ve been working on the OSS monetization challenge. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from the creator community around the world about the ability to monetize OSS without changing the license, as well as the ability to publish it on the internet for everyone to use for free. Even in its infancy, at this point the Dev Protocol has been a great success for many OSS creators.

In order for the Dev Protocol to become a more useful technology infrastructure for users around the world, it is essential that more and more DApps are made available to users and, most importantly, that more and more creators are involved in the daily creation process. We are excited to partner with M-zomia to create an amazing platform for music artists that our team could not have imagined yet.”

About Dev Protocol

“The Dev Protocol is a technology that brings sustainability to the creative process by tokenizing their works. It proves the creators’ activities through blockchain and provides a means for all members of the community to monetise their creative work by staking. Creators can use social tokens to build their own decentralized economy. It is a fully decentralised, on-chain governed middleware protocol that allows anyone to participate in the ecosystem by developing a variety of applications (Dapps).

Learn more about how Dev Protocol will expand the creator economy here.

Creator Economy — How Can Successful Art Dealers Predict The Future Of Dev Protocol

https://initto.devprotocol.xyz/en/20210713/

Decentralized Creator Economy — Music

https://initto.devprotocol.xyz/en/DecentralizedCreatorEconomyMusic/