Introducing Blend Market

We know the music industry is a mess. Musicians are tired of opaque platforms and dealing with middlemen. No one knows whether it’s best to sell a song for 99¢ or to stream it. No two experts can agree on whether Taylor Swift’s spat with Spotify made business sense or not.

What we do know is that musicians need more options. There is more music creation software and platforms for listeners than ever before but very little interactivity between artists and fans. In the music streaming debate, we believe a number of key issues have not been properly addressed:

1. There is no easy way to sell music in an interactive format.
2. Musicians still do not know WHO is interacting with their music.
3. Tracking pieces of songs is nearly impossible once they are “in the wild.”

Blend is uniquely positioned to solve these problems.

Today, we are introducing a new way for musicians to earn money with Blend Market.

Since we started Blend, we have seen artists and fans collaborate in new ways. Pulling parts of songs and uploading new versions for everyone to enjoy, or to continue to revise, or learn from. A growing and highly engaged community of music creators helping define this new, healthy music ecosystem. So engaged, that we’ve transferred over 1 million files to date (20 TB) on behalf of our users, all backed in the cloud by Dropbox.

With Blend Market we are empowering artists to grow even further.

Any artist can create a song and then sell all or a part of that song, for example, an acapella or melody. They can track who uses that part of their song, and get paid directly. Using Stripe Connect for payments, artists will receive an immediate direct deposit when an item is sold.

We know there is a community of passionate producers and creators that are happy to pay for great work. Of course it’s unlikely an artist is going to buy a private jet through selling one vocal track but we believe in the ‘long tail’ theory of the Internet economy: that once something of value is created and available for sale in a smooth marketplace, lots of small payments can add up to a significant source of revenue.

We are excited to offer artists a new and more personal way to engage listeners, offering direct insight into their creative process. We believe this is what artists and fans crave. And we believe fans and other artists understand the importance of transparent compensation.

With Blend this has never been easier.

blend.io/market