wave.ac | An Introduction

Music is hard and uncertain. There are so many people in it chasing dreams and chasing their goals to produce great music and get it out there. Others are helping artists pursue their dreams by promoting their content, reposting it, or writing about it. Others are just there to listen — and perhaps they are the most valuable asset that this industry has. So with that said, it’s frankly disgusting how we have treated the listener: we force them to endure ads, circumvent DRM, and even pay premiums to listen to “exclusives.” This of course is not apt to change on major ‘pro-business’ firms, but we were tired of hypocritically using these services and not doing anything about it.

So we’ve decided to do something about it.

And what we’ve decided to do is not to post rhetoric, or to paint an idealistic picture of a ‘better music industry.’ We’ve instead decided to build our own outlet to remedy these problems we see so recurrent: we’re building a music streaming site, but also building services to accompany it so that it might better service artists and their fans.

So why do we mention this now? Well, I think a lot of people were put on notice this afternoon when XXL Magazine and several other sources reported that Soundcloud was insolvent and had only fifty days worth of money on their balance books. Whether or not this statement were true or not didn’t matter — it put artists, fans, promoters, and other creatives and listeners on notice. This fear of losing the sources that you find great music from is far too common. But these problems stem from a bigger problem that has to do with the corporate music industry and these companies losing sight of their core audiences: artists, their fans, and everyone that interacts with the music in between.

While we didn’t want to build a platform that shunned corporate music, we wanted to build a platform that shunned the corporate model that has built walls around the music. We genuinely affirm that access to good music shouldn’t be blocked by exclusives, DRM, and low quality streams. As a result, we’ve prided ourselves on building three core elements into wave.ac and its products:

• High-fidelity audio with minimal compression;
• Ease of access & use, no paywalls, “sign-in” walls, DRM, exclusives, or bullshit;
• . . . and most importantly — a core service that is essentially free and has everything that artists & fans should need to enjoy an unrestricted musical experience.

So that said, we know it’s easy to have a whole lot of talk and not a lot of action. However, we’ve been working on our core service for about a month and a half now and have every intention in getting it out to the public in the best form possible. While we’d like to not think ourselves as competing with anyone else in our niche, we’d like to think that artists and fans alike will appreciate our ‘artists first’ mantra and support our service and its products as we move to launch them next year.

In the meantime, I highly encourage you to get in touch. We’re not just looking for artists, promoters, and creative types to come chill with us and help us understand their needs — we’re also looking for music fans, bloggers, techies, and other people who wanna support and refine this radical idea. We know it sounds idealistic to talk about a product like this, but we know from first-hand experience that people are fed up with the corporate music streaming sites that nickle-and-dime artists and fans. We’re tired of it too, and instead of complaining about it, we’re offering a solution — and it’s one that we hope you will support.

Thank you,
Noah Weidner
CEO, wave.ac

For more updates, be sure to follow our Medium Blog (this place!) for updates regarding development and progress. You can also follow wave.ac on Twitter or join us on Discord. Our mailing list will becoming soon !