HIFI Labs is on a mission to build technology that is a force for good for artists. We want creators to be able to be their own platform, to scalably build connections with their communities, and for everyone to truly own their relationships.

We admire the emerging ecosystem for music in Web3, and we want to build things that help it reach its full potential.

Taking Web3 Music to the next level

The philosophy of Web3 Music is promising; Music NFTs are a shining example of artist and fan connections not owned by any one platform and offer the opportunity for more financial freedom for creators.

However, being honest with ourselves, there are clear obstacles and shortcomings with the current state. It is financially prohibitive, confusing, and has high barriers to entry.

We believe that the key to unlocking the next paradigm in Web3 Music will be through more social experiences, more experimentation, and more composability, and we are building musicOS to this end.

The vision of artists and fans as their own platforms is something that we are truly invested in. Building direct connections between your peers, collaborators, and friends. Relationships that are not locked behind the walls of a platform. We are on a collective journey to discover what this looks like, and how it should work, and this first release of musicOS is hopefully a step forward in that direction.

We are excited by a world where artists have full control of their story, art, and persona online. A world where great fans and curators are celebrated, and music discovery is fun and collaborative again. We’ll be launching new tools and resources consistently to implement these dreams, but more importantly, look forward to refining this vision and building with you, the artists, fans and supporters.

musicOS Friends and Family Alpha release

With this release of musicOS, artists and fans can find and like their favorite music NFTs, follow their friends, and share their profiles. You can claim a musicOS subdomain. You can write messages to each other’s “guestbook”.

We want to showcase the types of interactions that can be generated in a manner more familiar to the “social web” that we are all accustomed to. But built on technology that respects the user.

musicOS is a platform where you can find and form a direct-to-fan connection. As stated, the mission of HIFI Labs is to make these interactions personal and ownable. Future developments of musicOS will explore the solution space to this challenge, while being sensitive to the needs and wants of the community, be that through on-chain data or otherwise.

We are building out in the open, which is a somewhat vulnerable position to take, but we want this to be something that reflects the wants and wishes of the ecosystem, and the benefits will surely outweigh the additional difficulties. To this end, your feedback and guidance as we develop musicOS will fundamentally drive its roadmap.

For this “friends and family alpha” release we are paying homage to the communities that inspire us by truly leading the way, and are using their tokens to enable the allowlist.

If you are a holder of Water & Music ($Stream), Songcamp ($BPM, $CHAOS, $ELEKTRA, $PRESENT), FWB ($FWB), Seed Club ($CLUB), or Colors DAO tokens then you will have access. If you are interested in trying out our alpha but don’t hold any of these tokens then please join the waitlist and we will add you as soon as possible.

neume

The data underpinning musicOS is being loaded directly from Ethereum through neume, the open source protocol for indexing Web3 Music data; another project that HIFI Labs is supporting the development of. We believe in the core value proposition of decentralisation, that future applications should be built on open and available infrastructure, and neume is being built as a truly open project to deliver on this goal.

neume itself is in early stage development and may break from time to time. This also means that the data ingested into musicOS at first is likely to be less comprehensive than if we had spun up a centralised database. However, we believe that this is a more robust, future-proofed, and scalable approach going forwards, as detailed in the neume blog when we launched the project.

We hope that musicOS serves as a showcase for the kind of things that can be built on this new paradigm of open source and accessible infrastructure and inspires any developers thinking about building Web3 Music experiences.

Looking forwards

This is the very first alpha release of musicOS, however we are already thinking about and building future updates.

For example, Artist specific profiles and options for musicOS to write user actions related to artist-fan relationships (i.e. a follow, or a like) to a decentralised social graph.

The OS element of musicOS hints toward our mentality with regard to composability in the Web3 ecosystem. We are building an operating system that empowers artists and fans to be their own platforms, interoperable with other projects and tools. Future planned updates to the application will work towards this goal by enabling the integration of other popular platforms in the ecosystem into a user’s OS.

Closing this out, we want to build musicOS with you, the Web3 Music ecosystem, and want you to feel comfortable providing any and all feedback along our journey together. Please let us know what you think, ideally using the in-app feedback functionality, and if you have any ideas then we are all ears!

musicOS is the operating system for artists and fans to be their own platform.

Since the early days of Ethereum, innovators have been looking towards Crypto as a solution space in which to build a new Music industry.

It makes sense. Despite ever decreasing barriers to access, the challenging economics and logistics of building a career as a creator have never been in greater focus. The internet has brought endless opportunities, but platform dynamics and oppressive algorithms are creating more and more space between the people making music and those listening to it. Everything is starting to feel sterile. Some are doing well in this streaming meta, but the increasing majority are not.

Blockchain and Music has been through a couple of waves. At first, we focussed on building new infrastructure; coming at the definition of rights, licensing, and payment, with a decentralized coordination approach. It worked in terms of grabbing the attention of industry. Many column inches were written and innovation deals were put in place with major players, but ultimately we failed to make significant change.

We learned that trying to disrupt the music industry through alternative rails for incumbents isn’t going to work. Artists and Fans hold the power to disrupt.

Fast forward five years and a lot has happened. The boom in NFTs and Social Tokens is hinting towards a future where creators can build a business model in parallel to the traditional industry. Artists are leaning into new ways of thinking about online engagement, through their own communities and DAOs. Fans, too, are starting to explore digital collecting and deeper value exchange with the people they support. It’s nascent and experimental, but the green shoots are there.

However, it’s trite to say, but we really are still so early on this journey. Darwinistic early years of ideation where the cost to innovate is low and the potential to build short term hype is high. There is a lot going on in different places at all times of the day. Keeping track with who’s doing what, what is working, and what it all means, is difficult.

Incentives are largely stacked towards spinning up something new rather than working with other teams, but Web3 is built on composable interoperability and optionality. We are developing pieces of a grand ever-changing tapestry that hints towards a future where there will not be one platform to rule them all. For that to work, we need to keep true to the roots of decentralization. As activity increases we need to make sure that the graphs underpinning interactions remain open for users that want the utility that brings.

More than anything else though, we need to find a place where the internet feels personal again, where self-expression can lead to deeper connections between people. The vision for Web3 is truly owning your place within the communities that you interact with. We want to help build this for Music.

musicOS

We formed musicOS to provide solutions.

At its core, musicOS will be an information, analysis, and social layer on top of the Web3 Music ecosystem. The homepage for Web3 Music and a foundation to keep pushing the space forwards.

musicOS will provide a common layer across projects and experiments to serve as a catalyst for further exploration and development. It will be built on top of open data and services, provide open data and services, be unopinionated, and credibly neutral.

Interest in the Web3 Music industry is currently dominated by NFTs, but we expect that the future market make-up will be comprised of a far more nuanced set of tools that Crypto can provide. musicOS will be developed with this in mind, empowering creators, fans, and everyone in-between to engage in the most rewarding way possible as the space continues to develop.

To users, musicOS will be a thin community owned application to check what is happening, to manage your interests, and to own your space within it. Under the hood, it will build and champion decentralization and progression of the future of music through collaboration.

Building a Web3 Organization in the Right Way

We believe that the next iteration of the internet will be comprised of entities that work in a more democratic model than those that have become increasingly dominant in recent years. It is imperative that musicOS is owned and run by the community that it is serving.

To this end, we have had the honor of being part of Seed Club’s accelerator program to learn and explore the best way to build a next generation organization. The future of musicOS is a DAO.

We are currently incubating musicOS through HIFI Labs, which provides unrivaled support to nurture conception to launch, and beyond. Great product is the basis on which musicOS will achieve its ambitious plans and so we will build in a product focussed, lean, and agile, way.

The progression toward decentralization is a journey that requires careful thought. Fortunately Web3 is at a stage now where certain success stories are starting to emerge as good execution case studies.

How To Get Involved

If this sounds exciting to you then we want your help.

Our Open Beta of musicOS v1 will be live in the coming weeks. Until then, you can head to our staging site to submit your interest.

Additionally, we are set up on the HIFI Labs discord to explore the potential for musicOS with a growing community of active participants.

Finally, if you are an Artist and are interested in investigating the potential of Web3 Music for your own career then get in contact with HIFI Labs here.