Summary of 2nd Live AMA by Musiconomi on 23rd Aug 2017
Musiconomi team did their 2nd live Video AMA with a special performance from Quake Matthews! I wrote a summary of their discussion in a Q&A format. Do note that I have rephrased the Q&A in my own words. If you feel there is a mistake or something is unclear just let me know. Also If you would like to check out the original AMA video (Highly Recommended!) check out the link below:
AMA Participants
- David Werba (Host of the AMA) — Co-founder & CMO at Musiconomi
- Dan Phifer — Co-founder, Chief Technology Officer
- Brian Byrne — Co-founder, Chief Musician Ambassador
- Elio Di Iorio — Co-founder, Chief Organizer and Spokesperson
- Quake Matthews — Independent Rap Artist
Q. How will Musiconomi help new musicians? Won’t bigger musicians just out-spend them with an advertising budget?
A. (Danp) First of all we cannot stop any artist from using their budget to promote themselves (and we shouldn’t!). However for musicians who don’t have any budget, Musiconomi has a feature to incentivise their community by sharing a percentage of their profit for helping spreading awareness about their music. For example, a small artist who initially cares more about reaching out to a wider audience will give a greater cut of his income via Musiconomi for helping sharing their tracks on Musiconomi. This will also enable several members of the community to go beyond just being a listener and earn some money by promoting upcoming artists they feel very positive about.
(Elio) To add to that, Musiconomi will also enable artists to engage with their fans in a way that they have never been able to do so before. Artists sharing some of their profit while the fans who will be incentivised in spreading their love for them is a unique aspect of the platform.
Q. Will Musiconomi run on the Musicoin blockchain?
A. (Danp) Short answer-No! As of now, we’ll be using the Ethereum blockchain.
Long answer- This is something that we have discussed heavily within the team. Initially the MCI team met each other (To know how they met check out this blog post) trying to build Musicoin blockchain. Our initial plan was to leverage the Musicoin blockchain and to build a musiconomi platform on top of that.
After the formation of Musiconomi, we had a lot of discussion with the community and our advisors. And in turn, we started to realise there are better reasons to use a single blockchain (like ethereum for example) instead of using two different blockchains as it can lead to a lot of confusion among the users of the musiconomi platform. Also having to deal with two different chains behind the scene would add more complexity in terms of development (causing the project to be delayed further). Using ethereum blockchain means that we can leverage all of the ecosystem that has been building up so far which would benefit us in reducing our time to hit the market.
Therefore, looking at it from all of the above point of view it becomes clear to us to use a single blockchain. So far, we are going ahead with Ethereum. But this is not set in stone. Ultimately we’ll use whatever is best for the musiconomi project in terms of its investors, listeners and artists.
Q. What is the coolest and most exciting part of the Musiconomi project?
A. (Elio) When I saw Vitalik (Co-founder of Ethereum) share his early vision of how Ethereum project will enable so many different use cases that we can’t even contemplate as of today. I was amazed back then what ethereum brought to the whole ecosystem in general.
I can relate to it in the same way how we can’t even imagine the different use cases Musiconomi project will enable out there in the wild. We can think of some of the use cases that we are going to build which are exciting. But what’s most exciting about the project is this element of creativity that artists and listeners will have. The desire of the community to create value for the music industry while they are being inceltivize to do so just blows my mind!
Note: He didn’t give a specific feature here but gave a more grander idea of why Musiconomi project is exciting!
Q. What are the financial benefits for the token holders apart from sharing songs?
A. (Danp) MCI being a utility token it’ll be used for enabling various features on the platform. For example blogging tools, boosting artists etc. As MCI is core part of the platform we’ll be constantly looking to add more features which would benefit holding the MCI tokens.
Check out these blog posts to get an idea:
Q. As an independent artist who has been gaining tractions already, why would you (Quake) at this stage be bothered to use Musiconomi?
A. (Note: This question was asked to Quake Matthews)
As an independent artist it’s all about engaging with the community and building that base wider yourself. To do that, one has to engage with the fans. With Musiconomi, an independent artist like me can build a community where I know who all are supporting him (and to what level). Thus I can reward fans in my community accordingly! If someone buys something from iTunes for example, Apple keeps that information. That information is not shared or used by artists like us. Musiconomi will enable community engagement at a whole different level which was never possible before!
Q. Are you guys going to engage by attending events, festivals etc over the next 6 months?
A. (Elio) Definitely! This will be one of our main area of focus post crowdsale. We’ll be mapping out the events over the next year and plan for them accordingly. We have a team of excellent advisors & consultants in the music industry who have all kinds of ideas on how to do this best. Offers are already coming in for us to talk at various conferences. Brian and I will make a list of such activities, shortlist and prioritise it. So yes, this will be high on our priority list post crowdsale!
Q. What about marketing? How is this platform going to grow? Will it be more organically?
A. (David+Elio) For start, we’ll be active on various social networks, doing live streams, answering questions from the community etc. There will also be something like a MusiconomiTV where we’ll be doing showcase of artists, sponsoring some artists offline, talking and working with them directly.
Other side of it’ll be partnerships. Some are already under works. We’ll be formalising them and doing cross promotional marketing activities. Hopefully we’ll see series of announcements coming in 2–3 months post crowdsale gets finished.
Q. What is the minimum contribution for the pre-sale?
A. (Danp) There is no minimum contribution in terms of donation to the crowdsale during pre-sale.
Note: In terms of how much CFI tokens you need to hold to be a CFI Priority Pass Member for day 1 and day 2 pre-sale, minimum is 5K CFI.
Q. How much will 1 MCI token cost during the crowdsale?
A. The price per MCI will be $6M / 25M MCI = $0.24/MCI.
Do note that the price will be defined in ETH, so the conversion rate from USD to ETH will be set about a day before the pre-sale starts.
Note: Above answer has been updated as per the latest information from the team.
Q. Why was the hard cap reduced from $18M (earlier) to $6M (now)?
A. (Elio) We were really uncomfortable with the idea of raising so much money we don’t need in the initial phases. While there are various ICOs out there raising a lot of money (Example, Bancor, Tezos, FileCoin etc) from day 1. Those ICOs try to justify it by arguing that they will have only 1 crowdsale so they’ll raise as much as they can.
A better approach to raising money is by reserving some tokens for future fund raise. This reserve will be used when we have a working platform, few partnerships have been made in the industry, people are participating actively on our platform (at least in the beta stage) etc. At that point using that reserved pool of tokens will give a better valuation for raising more money.
In summary, initially we’ll issue 25M MCI tokens to the public for hard cap of $6M. In future, we’ll use another 25M MCI tokens to raise more money if and when needed. (Note: The reserved 25M tokens will have a lock-in period of 12 months)
Q. When is Brian going to play live? What about doing any live shows any time soon?
A. (Brian) I’d be happy to play live on our next AMA if people want that 🙂
Also, I’m going to Toranto on 1st Oc’17 to play a few cover songs for the benefit of an after school charity program — at risk youth.
Q. Is firesofmay part of the team?
A. (Brian+David) He is definitely part of our team. He started as a great voice on our slack and started answering questions by others members of the community when Musiconomi team weren’t/couldn’t be present. He is a really calm, considerate human being and has been super helpful on our slack. He’s actually the official community moderator now on slack. If you have any questions, feel free to ask him. He’s an example of how people will become part of this team by trying to contribute to the project based on their passion for project.
Note: firesofmay (Mayank Jain) is the one writing this summary 😃 🙏
During the AMA Quake Matthews played Just Got Home & Confessions
Side note: Confessions was featured on Canada’s Prime Ministers Spotify playlist and went viral!
Info:
- For more details about the upcoming crowdsale check this link.
- For FAQs on crowdsale check this link.
- Musiconomi Official Website
- Cofound.it Official Website
- If you still haven any questions regarding Musiconomi feel free to join our slack
- To talk to the CFI team join our public telegram group
Note: This is a community post by firesofmay
