2025 is coming to a close and we shared a quick overview on some key stats from last year.

Before we do - we announced the Midnight Diner Tokyo Pass - an exclusive access pass to our new event series in Tokyo starting in April in partnership with Soneium.

Everyone loves big numbers - but there's a lot more to the story than 4 metrics.

The top of 2025 was what felt in many ways like a full on bull market. We were onboarding artists at a faster rate than ever and averaging between 15-20 drops a week. We were full steam ahead on running campaigns to support new artists and deep in the weeds on building out the Coop Recs site. Despite this - we were still "behind" the market and had just launched our very first songcoins in December of 2024. These 3 canonical coins - $IJN $DAYS and $SWEET - were our first step towards exploring fungible tokens in what later become a full on protocol that tied collectibles with coins in the current version of Coop Recs that exists today.

We caught a bit of a wave with some of our early coins - but the truth is we were chasing the market more than following our own intuition and building tools that mattered most for the artists we worked with. Getting artists paid is great. It will always be a focus of ours. But the reality is most artists don't care about crypto - and they probably won't anytime soon.

This is why we've been building a new app - clip.energy - focused on rewarding fans for sharing videos from shows. It ties directly in with our first traditional label release - a partnership with Daniel Allan where we own 50% of the royalties generated across DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music. This is a huge step forward for us, and we're stoked to see that the track already has more than 100k plays less than a week into release.

The real question now is - how do we leverage the engine we've built at Coop Recs to drive more streaming growth and impact the song in the real world? Well the truth is - it probably has less to do with tying ownership rights to a songcoin (for now) and more to do with using onchain incentives to drive more UGC on TikTok.

That's why we're bullish on our new clipping app - it pays fans USDC for sharing viral videos of songs. Our theory is that the more we can show artists we have an app that drives content creation on TikTok, the more those songs will be seen and heard, and the more it will drive streaming. It also helps artists sell more tickets, which is debatably more important to them than how well their music streams.

All in all - its a long winded way of saying we're ending this year by trusting our gut, and leaning into KPIs that matter most to the artist we're talking to on a daily basis. It might not seem massive at first, but we have a strong intuition that getting fans to create onchain accounts by doing things they're already doing (taking videos at shows) AND getting paid to do it is a great way to kickstart our new label engine.

So if you've made it this far - thank you for supporting our journey to date. We learned a ton this year and have high hopes for the year to come.

We can't wait for you to see where we go.

Subtronics - Fibonacci Pt 2: Infinity, Sam Day - SPINNING (with Zeli), 33 Below - _HALO_, Felly - Red Wing

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You're all caught up! See you next week.