A new chapter for Coop Records is here.

A few months back - we debuted cooprecs.fun as a launchpad for dropping songs as coins on Base.

Today - we’re doubling down on that vision and bringing coins to the front and center of cooprecords.xyz

With over 750 songs in our catalog as collectibles - today marks a shift in focus to start releasing songs as coins on a consistent basis.

We’re starting with two new coins from San Holo and BLOND:ISH and plan to release new coins every Friday.

There’s a lot of nuance and a lot to unpack here so let’s dive in.

Songs on Coop Records are released as coins with 1B supply on Base.

At inception - songs will have the following distribution:

• 5% - Artist(s)

• 5% - Coop Records

• 90% - Liquidity

Coins are deployed with Doppler and start at a market cap of ~$4000

There is no migration - coins trade directly on Uniswap from the first purchase for immediate price discovery.

Coins allocated to the artist(s), Coop Records and the incentive pool are vested over the course of 90 days to give ample room for discovery to occur.

A 1% swap fee will be charged at the protocol level, and an additional swap fee will be added via the Coop Recs front-end for providing a more curated music discovery experience.

The fees will be split according to the agreed upon percentages by Coop Records and the artists, collaborators and labels involved.

Music-lovers have always competed to be early - to be the first to know about an up and coming song before it blows up. With the advent of memecoins, - we were inspired by the ability to speculate on the perceived attention of different cultural trends. Coins present a new opportunity to deepen that experience; to not just prove you were early with collectibles, but do so in a global market and community of enthusiasts, collectors, and traders. 

We believe the same can be true for music - and we want to create a platform that users can trust are official coins from verified artists making waves in the real world.

Our goal is to create a compelling trading experience for songs, and to provide as much context and ways to earn by supporting artists and driving attention to new music as possible.

We’re starting with a few new coins today and plan to release a new batch of coins every Friday.

The first focus tracks from San Holo with his iconic track "We Rise" and an exclusive BLOND:ISH track "Take Control"

We want to be extremely intentional about which coins are brought to market first - experimenting with a mix of popular songs from our back catalog, new artists joining the platform and new songs dropping in real time.

The goal is for the community to be involved in curating which songs get released each Friday - so stay tuned for more on voting rounds and how to participate in which coins come next.

Collectors have been racking up COOP points from supporting artists on the platform over the last year or so - and those points will be the main way the community votes on which song(s) get coined every Friday.

Our north star is dropping coins the same day or even before they go live on Spotify - allowing people to truly participate in these markets in real-time as they gain relevance in the real world.

A big focus of ours in the coming weeks is building new distribution channels to earn coins for supporting artists and their music.

We’ll be exploring a variety of integrations with popular music platforms to find new ways to reward fans for the actions they already take - all with the goal of giving them a positive first experience with Coop Recs by being able to earn their first songcoins.

We’re starting by airdropping 10% of the supply of “We Rise” to existing collectors.

Collectibles were the backbone of Coop Records and we want to make sure we do right by collectors who took the time to support the 175+ artists on the platform today.

We’ve made artists over $1m from selling collectibles on Coop Recs since 2023.

It’s allowed us to bootstrap an incredible pool of talent and get artists and their teams comfortable with putting their music onchain.

While our focus is shifting to coins - we’re not getting rid of collectibles.

Collectibles will continue to drop in the background and we’ll continue to run quests to help bootstrap consistent earnings for our roster.

Coins present a ton of new dynamics, and we can’t expect everyone who was down to drop collectibles to immediately get on board with coins. Volatility adds a whole different energy to the equation and while we believe it will supercharge what we’re doing at Coop Recs - we want to be clear that this will be a gradual process to get to the same cadence with coins that we currently have with collectibles.

It’s no surprise that the industry has naturally moved towards a more coins centric world and away from collectibles in recent years.

In addition, as we’ve moved along this journey we were surprised to learn that artists and fans seemed to resonate a lot more with the idea of fungible coins, even if that means a floating price.

In retrospect, form factor made sense, and people could very quickly understand the product when they saw a list of songs they recognized and began to make inferences about which were more valuable than others.

We believe this is the tip of the iceberg and have a very clear vision for providing more clear information and context about how songs are performing in the real world to better inform their markets onchain.

We’re stripping back the Coop Recs product to bring coins front and center.

If you’re a regular user of the site - you’ll notice that we rolled back things like the Activity Feed and Collectibles.

We’ll slowly bring these back into the fold - and are going to focus on providing the best discovery experience for this new format.

Our goal is to bring a mobile app to market in the coming months centered around coins and make it extremely easy for anyone to participate with no prior knowledge of crypto.

We couldn’t be more excited to usher in a new chapter of onchain music and look forward to getting your feedback every step of the way!