Ooh La La 🎵 The Borderless Music NFT Player & Aggregator Has Arrived
Ooh La La (💃🏻,🕺) aims to be a hub where all music NFTs eventually gather: a launch point for discovering and exploring music NFTs.
🔥 NFTs: The Revolution of Ownership in the Digital Economy
In the digital world where everything can be copied and pirated, the creators/artists have always been the largest victims of its anonymity and virality. Even when their works were cropped and remixed into memes or other secondary creations, and shared infinitely, the credit they deserve was often effaced and disregarded. Platforms like Spotify and Youtube Music hence arose to support more fixed, settled, and ‘legitimate’ revenue rates and distribution models for the artists, but the artists had to sacrifice a huge portion of their revenue to those platforms, not to mention the agencies and record labels. There have been many testimonies from artists regarding the exploitatory payout model, including Emily Lazar’s during the 2022 EthDenver and RAC’s Twitter thread. Please check them out to explore what blockchain and the idea of web3 have brought to the artists’ table.
Blockchain and smart contracts made it easier to track and record the provenance and ownership history of digital files. In this new era where codes are law, we don’t need third-party intermediaries for custody and execution. Sales and distribution and transfer of ownership have been automated and transparently recorded on blockchains, and the original creator/artists have been able to keep earning a fixed rate of royalties from the secondary sales of their works. “You create/sell, you earn. You purchase, you own.” It may sound pretty straightforward and natural, but our reality had not been following this simple rule until the idea of blockchain gave birth to its offspring called NFT.
So with all those spirits in its core values, the hype surrounding NFT has spiked over the last year, attracting several headline-grabbing deals. NFTs have been successfully elevated to the mainstream, and the size of the NFT market hit $40 billion in 2021, according to Bloomberg. Many experiments have been conducted in this intersection of technologies and art, from generative arts to the community-driven collections of which memberships are efficiently managed via fungible and non-fungible tokens. Such hype cannot be solely attributed to the investors who are leading & continuously creating bubbles in the market; more and more people are getting on board to be the real beneficiaries and participants of the revolution.
However, there are still many people holding criticism and skepticism towards NFTs, wondering why the digital tokens can be worth a colossal amount of money. As you can see, the tokens only represent your ‘ownership’ of the digital files, which could, in principle, be downloaded and used by any online user. It may sound like they aren’t even worth a penny. To explain this, I would like to bring the paradox of abundance that underlies the non-digital art space: “The more frequently accessed and exuberantly reproduced it is, the more value and rarity it bestows to its owner.” It may sound a little counterintuitive at first, but if you truly understand the meaning of this abundance-rarity dynamics, you will realize that the NFT space has been actually following exactly the same mechanism. I know that it’s already quite a lame and worn-out analogy, but let’s take ‘Mona Lisa’ as an example.
Search Mona Lisa on Google, then it will retrieve innumerable images, from the exact copies of the original one to the parodies and memes created by users all around the world. Literally anyone can search Mona Lisa on Google to view, save, and use the JPEG versions of it but the original piece is currently believed to have an astronomical value, and its ownership is in the hands of the French government. The more the public explores and desires Mona Lisa, the more value it acquires.
This is pretty much similar to the current complexion of the NFT space: anyone can view the Bored Apes on their official website, OpenSea, Twitter, and Discord and in various metaverses, and even download the digital images. Those who do not own the apes can even actually use them as their PFPs, even though most of the users prefer to use their own collectibles. However, the number of BAYC holders is limited to 10,000 (if not fractionalized), and they are the only ones who can claim their ownership over the digital apes and trade them in NFT marketplaces. So, even when an image is not necessarily scarce or rare, even when its copies are exuberant, you would wish for owning it, and the ‘digital ownership’, not the asset itself, bears the actual rarity. This rarity can be created, recorded, transferred, and traced via blockchain, and blockchain can even program and activate additional utilities to its holders, like a membership/access to newsletters, discord channels, communities, ticketing, airdrops, or governance rights. And in theory, anyone can transport their assets across platforms and, now, even across chains.
🌊“The Frozen Stream”.. Now is the Time to Let It Go
But to be honest, when it comes to the music sector, our proud slogan of “open source, borderless blockchain” has been quite deceitful and lukewarm. Whether 1) its infrastructure has been insufficient or 2) the metadata or the locations of the actual audio/video files have been unrevealed by the dev team, the music NFTs have often suffered from a lack of utility and transportability. The owners have not been able to save the files quickly and simply with the right clicks, and those assets have not been as easily ‘boast-able’ to anyone as Twitter or Discord PFPs. Streaming and asset management have not been any easier; buyers and owners had to wander various platforms and marketplaces to browse, discover, and stream their music pieces that are scattered over different chains and Dapps. OpenSea would probably provide the most integrated and compiled platform for Ethereum assets, but the marketplace is not specialized in music and thus failed to provide the best user experience for music lovers. Therefore, Ooh La La aims to provide the borderless experience of managing, discovering, and utilizing the music NFTs, assembling them into a single interface to help you consume the music content more efficiently.
Music is borderless, and blockchain is borderless. Then why can’t music NFTs be? 😉
While building our product, we’ve been trying to locate and aggregate the digital files behind the music NFTs as many as we can, but many of them were hidden or unpublished by the teams. There has already been a collaborative effort to set up a metadata standard for music NFTs, and we believe that it would be a vital component of the industry’s next steps toward its missions. With the launch of Ooh La La, we hope that it would create the need for complying with such standards and thus accelerate the growth and stabilization of the infrastructure.
Our slogan for Ooh La La’s early phase is simple enough: 🎶 Stream and discover music whenever, wherever you want. Let’s untether the music NFTs!
👨👩👦👦“Losing the Average Music Fans” .. Bring All Ears on Deck!
The newly fledged web3 music marketplaces and platforms have indeed opened the door for the age of digital patronage and improved the labor conditions and revenue streams of the artists. They have succeeded in building its first layer, and although its database and artist/fan pools are not as vast and rich as those of the web2 ecosystem yet, its growth rate has been remarkable enough to prove its infinite potential. However, the problem is that their appeals have been pretty much limited to experienced crypto investors and NFT maximalists.
The challenges that lie ahead of us would be in onboarding all those art lovers and artists who are still reluctant to step into the crypto landscape. NFT space needs some accessible on-ramps for new users. And this is what Ooh La La aims to support, via music NFT aggregator & streaming platform in particular — we strongly believe that music fans, listeners, and artists, including those who don’t want to recognize these art pieces solely as a means of investment, indeed need some anchor point to gather around to discover their tastes and songs to add to their playlists. At Ooh La La, no one needs to connect their wallets to discover and listen to the music NFTs. Wallet connection is only required for those who want to browse and manage their music assets and create playlists to show off their musical tastes. Everything is a snap with Ooh La La!
Ooh La La (💃🏻,🕺) aims to be a hub where all music NFTs eventually gather: a launch point for discovering and exploring music NFTs. There are many steps and foundations to be built in order to realize that vision. We believe aggregation is simple, but an important first step. There are tons of things on our roadmap to be built, and we cannot wait to bring the next billion people to web3 music! 💕
There are hundreds of cool ideas from the team, but at this moment we can drop here a few that we will deliver in the beta versions 👀:
- 👛 A single wallet interface that shows what music NFTs you own across these platforms and communities: Sound.XYZ, Catalog, MintSongs (v1 & v2), Noizd, Deafbeef, Nifty Gateway, Eulerbeats (Genesis, Enigma), Song A Day, Soundmint, Songcamp (Genesis, Elektra, and Chaos), hedsDAO, Dreams Never Die DAO, and Good Karma Records DAO (and there’s more to come in the future!). Essentially, it will work as your music profile on blockchains. This can help:
- the collectors who want to easily share what they have curated.
- the listeners who are curious about music owned by someone else.
- the artists who wish to expose their creations to thousands if not millions of people through this low-friction interface.
2. ⏯️ Playlists can be created by anyone who connects his/her wallet. However, you don’t necessarily have to own any NFTs; our bottom line is that everyone should be able to create his/her own playlists that live in his/her own profile.
3. 📈 Discover trending tracks that have been dropped across different web3 music platforms.
Of course, we are in a highly experimental phase. We are currently recruiting a small group of users for testing our product, so please contact us at gm@oohlala.xyz or DM us on Twitter. We would sincerely appreciate your insights and feedback! Please support our mission to benefit the community and web3 music as a whole. 🌱
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Twitter — https://twitter.com/oohlala_xyz
Discord — https://discord.gg/PhfPN6YBHF
Email — gm@oohlala.xyz
