In this episode of our Blockchain Hustlers series, we feature Luke Rohenaz, Creator and CEO of TonicPow for his latest venture: Jamify, an NFT marketplace with a mission to ‘free the music’.
The platform also acts as a music player and organiser for your NFT collection – allowing users to discover new music, and buy NFTs from upcoming artists worldwide.
Rohenaz demonstrates Jamify’s toolset and explains how the platform is set to revolutionise the music industry which is still heavily biassed in favour of major record labels and entrenched streaming companies.
Artist revenue: a problem inherent to the music industry
Rohenaz says that Jamify was first started to address the inherent problems within the music industry.
‘It was designed to solve a couple of problems for me personally, just playing around with music as a hobby and releasing things into the wild. I wanted a platform that was more like a music player, something similar to what we’re all used to using. I wasn’t super thrilled with a lot of the other ideas of some of the other nifty music platforms out there.’
Rohenaz said this includes a focus on bringing value to creators first and foremost, while still offering a first-class experience for consumers. He added that the nature of Jamify is experimental and some of the benefits of this new platform are still being figured out. However, what is immediately clear is the benefits it gives to artists, he said.
‘Artist’s revenue is a huge (issue). There are a lot of middlemen in the industry that earn an outsized portion of the revenue from creative works. And what this (Jamify) gives artists is a tool to allow them to have a product and offer it to people directly.
‘It’s a little more nuanced than that because we’re not selling the actual music as entities or streaming or anything like that. What we’re selling is the ability for artists to connect with their community. To issue collectable items that then give fans the ability to either contact them or to maybe get a discount on merch or a backstage pass to a show.
Rohenaz said the goal is to allow artists not only to monetise things directly to their fans but also give them new tools using this technology that they didn’t have available before.
No knowledge of blockchain required
Rohenaz notes that neither artists nor consumers need to have any knowledge of blockchain to make use of Jamify.
‘You don’t need to know anything. You don’t need to have a wallet. You can just listen to music and browse the catalogue and see what’s on there. And that’s kind of where our approach is a lot different than a lot of other NFT platforms.
‘Most of them are more interested in using the NFT exchange process to sort of gate the content, making sure that nobody can listen to it unless they do have a wallet and they have purchased something.’
However, Rohenaz noted that the platform would not be possible without the inherent strengths of the underlying BSV blockchain. He highlighted that each song that’s listed in the catalogue is tokenised and is available as an NFT, which would not be possible with legacy technologies.
‘Not only can anybody share freely on social media and possibly be rewarded in micropayments for sharing it, but an artist may also designate some funds in BSV as sort of a bounty for people who want to get other people to come in and enjoy the music and purchase some of their NFTs.’
BSV is the only realistic choice for tokenising audio on-chain
Rohenaz noted that there is no other blockchain or NFT platform that can support these kinds of features, such as putting the actual audio file on-chain.
‘You can’t put that much data into a transaction on any other chain unless they’re using some kind of weird third-party storage solution that’s not actually on-chain. That alone is enough of a reason to use BSV blockchain and to have a major differentiator between essentially every other blockchain out there when it comes to music entities.’
Looking forward, Rohenaz expects NFTs to become increasingly popular in the music industry, and will effectively be used as tickets to gain access to concerts and other events.
‘So if you have the typical metaverse picture, which is like a 3D environment with little avatar characters running around talking to each other, you could easily imagine that if you owned this particular NFT you would be able to get access to a concert area in this virtual world.’
Demonstration of Jamify
This episode of Blockchain Hustlers also includes a demonstration by Rohenaz on how Jamify works, including:
- A walkthrough of the Jamify website and how the player works;
- How the free streaming service works, library functionality and the ability to like songs;
- The option to share a song on Twitter – with its own embedded player;
- How the platform incentivises people to share music, and possibly make money from it;
- The option to buy the song as an NFT and potentially profit from it;
- Future developments which are currently in the pipeline.