Tortoise is a social music streaming platform built on Base and Farcaster. The primary goal of Tortoise is to rebuild the failed digital music economy from the ground up. Moving from a pay to access model to a pay to associate model.

People listen to music for hours every day. It's the soundtrack to work, exercise, commutes, cooking, cleaning, parties, breakups. Try to imagine your life without music. You probably can't.

The current value being added to people's lives by the record industry versus the value that it captures in revenue are so laughably far apart that it is clear that virtually everything about how recorded music is monetized right now is broken. Inflation adjusted recording industry revenue is still far below what it was in 1999 even though the world population and economy has grown significantly in that time.

Spotify users pay about $12 a month. Artists get about $0.003 per stream. After the platform and labels get their share, only a few dollars of that are going to artists. For the soundtrack to their entire life. People spend more on a single coffee.

This isn't because people don't value music. It's because streaming services are charging for access to music in a world where due to the internet, access is hard to restrict and therefore must be kept at a very low cost, otherwise people will just pirate it. Universal instant access to all music should have lead to a time of creative prosperity and abundance, but instead it has lead to a race to the bottom. Providing high quantities of music as cheaply as possible, and paying artists next to nothing.

Access to music on Tortoise is free. Anyone can listen at no cost. Users pay to associate with the music.

Association is already a vital element of how music is monetized in the real world through merch, vinyl, and live shows. You buy merch to show you're a fan, not just because you need a new shirt. You buy vinyl not just to listen to them, but to decorate your living room and start conversations. You go to shows not just to hear music, but to be part of something.

To associate with music has been a valuable economic incentive for the entire history of the record industry. Without decentralized social networks like Farcaster and decentralized ownership networks like Base, bringing the social proof economy to the internet was not feasible. But these technologies, which allow you to truly own digital property and relationships, make this is possible. Digital music brings immense value to the world. It is time to close the gap between music's crucial societal function and the revenue it brings in for its creators.

The Tortoise model is a conceptual shift in how music is valued:

1. Digital things can be owned, not just accessed

2. Ownership creates social value

3. Social value can flow back to creators as real money

Vinyl and merch sales prove people understand this for physical goods. Seventeen straight years of vinyl sales growth while streaming was supposedly making physical media obsolete. People are paying $40 for something that is already included in their streaming subscription. They're buying identity, not access.

$TORT is the ecosystem token for Tortoise. $TORT holders will be the curators of music on the platform. The holders will be the tastemakers. The better they curate, the more attention on the platform and therefore the higher the price of $TORT. Aligned incentives.

$TORT powers the ecosystem through staking and collection rewards. Users stake TORT in their "shell" to receive ETH rewards, and to unlock pro features like enhanced curation tools, premium discovery, and platform benefits. Every time they collect a song, they receive TORT rewards directly to their shell, incentivizing curation and collection.

The value of $TORT largely comes from Tortoise being a place with great people and music. Where artists want to release. Where collectors want to discover. Compare that to Spotify. Their stock price goes up when they reduce costs, including royalty payments. That's why they're experimenting with AI-generated music and promoting ambient tracks that cost them nothing. Their perfect scenario is users who pay $12 a month and only listen to royalty-free muzak. Every real artist getting plays is a cost center.

In the Spotify model, the platform wins when artists lose. In the Tortoise model, we only win if artists win.

Tortoise represents the antithesis of the status quo in music and tech. Musicians are told to constantly make content and always be available. Technology companies are all about moving fast and being futuristic.

Tortoises are slow and ancient. The message is that it's okay to move slowly and unplug. It's okay to tune out and focus on what you love. It's okay to spend time making music.

Of course I don't know if Tortoise becomes the future of music, but I know the current system is so broken that something has to supplement it.

The pieces are all here. Farcaster for social context. Base for ownership. Artists who are fed up with streaming. Listeners who miss owning music. A growing understanding that the platforms extracting all the value aren't adding much value themselves.

We're not trying to kill Spotify. They can keep shuffling your LoFi beats in the background. We'll be the place where music becomes meaningful again. Where collecting a song means something. Where supporting an artist actually supports them.

The recording industry needs a new layer. A social layer. An ownership layer. A value layer.

That's what Tortoise is building. Slowly. Steadily. One song at a time.

Tortoise.