The Soniq Mission
“The Soniq Project wants to become a world-wide music movement through helping the modern-day music aficionado turn their passion into a full-blown profession!”
-Soniq team, 2018
“Brace yourselves, this is going to be a lengthy one.”
-Me, 2018
We hope that anyone who has been keeping up with our super fun posts regularly (like, really, they are totally fun) has been able to wrap their mind around our general idea.
Now, unfortunately, some of you haven’t paid close attention; some of you are reading this for the first time; others, who are bored by my content (which, by the way, how do you have so little taste), have probably been reading between the lines. Like, literally, the empty spaces between the lines.
To whomever of this bunch it may concern, here’s what the gist of our mission is:
We want to grow a community of music industry professionals and aficionados and help them cash in their skills.
In this entry, we’ll be answering some of the major questions that seem to be concerning you, as our community.
Where does the “infamous” Blockchain fit in?
Yeah, yeah, everybody is like “eeeh, I don’t know” about the crypto world, especially when it comes to the music industry. I understand you completely. As a musician, I used to share your attitude towards cryptocurrency.
Ever since I started working for Soniq, though, my attitude has changed. I no longer take the crypto world for granted, thinking it’s nothing more and nothing less than a ruse, and that Bitcoin is nothing but a bubble that’s waiting to burst, with a bunch of wannabe investors gathering surrounding it like flies do a fresh pile of, well, you know…
I’ve learned that the cryptocurrencies and tokens are built around a noble idea; one where they are used to provide a simple and easy way for exchanging value with lower legal and bureaucratic overhead, in comparison with traditional payment methods, or fiat money. This means less centralization. Still confused? This means lower fees and much, much less government control over your money!
The cryptocurrencies and blockchain (the technology that makes this all possible), in general, have numerous applications in the world of business, especially so when it comes to freelancers and hobbyists, people who don’t actually own or work for a company. Although the cryptocurrencies are, indeed, for all intents and purposes, currencies, they have become more of lucrative investment ideas than typical financial instruments; they are now considered to be securities.
Blockchain technology-based smart contracts have actually made a world-wide revolution, by providing trustless transactions between peers. They are incredibly useful for more serious projects than blockchain games, such as Crypto Kittens (still wondering what the devil happened there).
What does the blockchain technology have to do with Soniq? Well, we’ve managed to recognize the opportunity to use this bleeding edge technology and all the involved research (which is a really, really lot) that we have at the palms of our hands; research that is available now, for the first time ever. We want to use this technology, this vast pool of knowledge, to grow a world-wide music community. An ecosystem of music aficionados who work together. A music expert-oriented economy that is powered by none other than yours truly; powered by the SONIQ token.
How are we going to do it? (Strategy)
Look, we promised full transparency. In fact, we’ve been promising it for a while now, and we somehow failed to address the most important aspect of transparency. Something that the vast majority of modern businesses, no matter how big or small, never seem to talk about.
Well, we realized that this trend is downright ridiculous. Seeing as how we aren’t a pump-and-dump effort, we figure that there is no logical reason to be secretive about the way we’re doing business. We’re doing nothing illegal and we won’t profit any more from you lot knowing less about us.
We’re going to do what we want to do by being a Lean Startup. We do not aim to achieve success by reinventing the wheel, but rather by means of through research of the music industry and by harvesting knowledge from you, our community!
As we speak, we are learning about how the music experts and aficionados earn money. Our idea is developing software solutions to help them solve the burning problems. We want to help the music aficionado remove all friction from the entire process of turning their passion into profession. We stand by all that we claim on our website; we are a team of IT professionals with many years of experience in blockchain/cryptocurrency-based solutions (present company excluded; I’m wanna be a real rockstar, not some programmer, thank you very much). As such, we know that blockchain isn’t a silver bullet for solving everything that is wrong with the world. Like every essential tech innovation that the mankind has been blessed with throughout the history, blockchain is a tool that has made it easy for us to recognize and solve a number of key problems in the music industry.
At the moment, our primary goal is product development. Finding a sustainable business model and making revenue is currently our main concern, business-wise. That’s the essence behind us being ‘not another friggin ICO’. We take pride in what we do. We don’t owe anybody anything. We are not going to promise anything we cannot deliver.
What are we doing now? (Tactics)
We want to offer you a concrete preview into something that we’ve been working on for some time now. Without further ado, here’s a little sneak peek into our product development process and our team’s “thought process”.
We’ve spent quite a few hours, nay, days, brainstorming and refining the details about our Skills Exchange Platform, choosing and defining the features that would be most useful to the music experts, and filtering out those that are not necessary for our Minimum Viable Product. If you strip our idea down to its bare essentials, everything starts with the Musician’s Profile. We need registered music experts with public profiles before we can think about any kind of community or skills exchange/economy.
We need rockstars if we want to make a sold-out rock concert.
Scenario 1: Musician profile creation
So, you’re a musician and you’ve decided to give our Skills Exchange Platform a go. As per the featured preview, you can add all your relevant personal and professional info, as well as videos of you showcasing your music skills.
You can also add any number of music-related skills to your Soniq profile; “Guitar”, “Drums”, or even “Triangle”. Ooh, ooh, or “Bass”. Get it? ’cause of all the bassist jokes.
Now why would a musician create a profile on our poor-man’s version of LinkedIn? Good question.
Scenario 2: Selling instructional videos
As a registered musician on Soniq’s Skills Exchange Platform, you can upload video tutorials and courses on your profile and give other users access to your content, in exchange for SONIQ, naturally.
Now, the music aficionado (boy, do we seem to love this particular trendy term in our company, don’t we?) can earn a SONIQ (because ‘earn a buck’, get it? Aah, classic comedy) by selling their videos!
“Well, why not use Udemy or something similar for gathering music knowledge, instead of our platform?”, you may wonder. The reasoning here is transactional by nature:
- No bank-declined payments
- No credit card chargebacks
- We handle buyers’ questions regarding payment processing and all the “fun” stuff you don’t want to be bothered with
- We protect creators’ rights
- We protect you from fraud
After some thinking, we realized that the reasons above are still NOT ENOUGH to incentivize the musicians to come, so we took off our shoes and decided to step into yours.
Scenario 3: Buying access to instructional videos
As a registered user, you’ll want to buy quality instructional videos from competent music experts.
We chose to emphasize QUALITY and COMPETENT because these two adjectives helped us recognize the opportunity to use some of our blockchain magic to guarantee that the user gets what they truly want.
Scenario 4: Trustless certificates of skill
As a registered musician on Soniq’s Skills Exchange Platform, you can buy a blockchain, smart contract-based, trustless certificate of skill (for example “intermediate metal guitar player”). Of course, in order to get this certificate, you’ll want to make sure that you have enough SONIQ to cover the particular price of the certificate in question, but this, in itself, won’t get you certified. You’ll also want to include an adequate proof of your skill on your Soniq profile (see Scenario 1).
This blockchain-based certification guarantees users that every author is, in fact, competent, because their peer of equal or higher ranking issued them a certificate in a transparent manner. The certificate recipient can further issue certificates to other users, which is another way of earning money for the music experts and aficionados on our platform.
This is a rough outline of our certification system, but it left a lot of questions unanswered. For example:
- What prevents musicians from issuing certificates to everybody just to earn more money?
- What prevents top-tier experts from holding a monopoly on their certificates and not issuing them to anybody?
- What prevents me from plotting a scheme with a friend? For instance, they pay me for a certificate and then I give them the money back, and we rinse, lather, repeat, with more friends until all of us are certified. What exactly prevents me from doing this?
Well, we are doing a lot of research regarding different ranking/certification schemes used all around the world. We’re studying game theory and we’ve come up with a super-cool reputation system!
Yes, we did claim full transparency, but we are not going to spoil all the fun for you guys by blatantly giving out all the tasty details. The best we can do right now is tell you to join our community and fire your questions away! We’re eagerly waiting for you out there!
TLDR: We are building a platform where:
- Musicians can get trustless, blockchain based certificates of their skill, issued by their peers
- Musicians can make money by issuing certificates to their peers
- Musicians can make money by selling their quality instructional videos to anybody who is interested in learning how to play an instrument, sing, make music without worrying about payment processing problems (chargebacks, fraud etc.)
