ABSTRACT

CreateSafe is a digital asset management and issuance utility, built on a decentralized blockchain. It generates smart contracts for audio creators, providing authentication of authorship, provenance, and ownership of audio assets. CreateSafe also enables the transfer of audio assets in exchange for currency through a fiat and crypto-enabled wallet. Our platform marks a new dawn for audio inscription, verification, distribution and monetization. Under the CreateOS umbrella, we are building the compliance layer for the MusicVerse with CreateSafe as a foundational tool.

WHO WE ARE

We are CreateOS, the operating system for the new music industry. We are a guild of builders, music industry veterans, artists, managers, producers and imagineers seeking to improve the conditions of how creativity is valued. Daouda Leonard is CEO of CreateOS and manager to groundbreaking artist Grimes. Jon Tanners is the President and manager to multi-platinum, Grammy nominated producers Take A Daytrip. This doctrine is a collaborative work about the philosophical and technical underpinnings of our first product CreateSafe.

WHAT WE’RE BUILDING

Our first product offering is a wallet connected to tools for understanding how to run a creative business. The wallet’s current core function is the minting of audio NFTs. We view NFT’s as a vehicle for greater creator collaboration and equity, as well as a foundation for a more robust micro-licensing framework for the music business. Through our community, we will develop the standards and practices that will govern the smart contracts generated in our minting process. Our technology can lay the groundwork for the music studio of the future—a safe, on-chain conduit connecting creation, production, and consumption. We aim to simplify some of Web3’s biggest pain points in onboarding creators and collectors alike, streamlining the sign-up, purchase, and consumption experiences, while also providing a secure interface.

The wallet sits at the center of a suite of products including our record deal and publishing simulators, our A&R Manager, and rights and production management tools entering beta in 2022.

We want to work with the wider community to bring this vision of a more equitable, functional music business to life. Building the MusicVerse is going to require cooperation between Web3 creators and minds in disparate spaces. Join our Discord to help build the road ahead.

THESIS

CreateSafe’s genesis grew from a quest to determine music’s value and figure out how best to navigate the systems that commercially exploit music. Over the years, we’ve landed on a set of characteristics that contribute to music’s value:

In the creation of music, key components include:

• Intimacy (emotional resonance, connection, context)

• Energy

• Nostalgia

• Technique

In the distribution and exploitation of music, key characteristics include:

• Convenience

• Usability

• Exchange

• Rarity

• Discovery

For creators and the people that work with them, we're building the CreateOS Web3 music studio to provide a technical support layer for facilitating creation and governing utilities that aid in the music making process (a foundation for the first set of characteristics). The second set of characteristics relate directly to the CreateSafe wallet, the first tool that we've built. CreateSafe codifies our years of experience to directly address creators’ needs. Its role in this ecosystem is to form a bridge between creators and consumers to maximize the value of music. Producers live at the heart of this process. The CreateOS platform embodies a return to the essence of recorded music’s early model—a new studio, wherein producers shepherd music from creation to distribution.

To understand production’s role in music, it helps to define the term more broadly. Production is a process of combining various material inputs (facts, information, or ideas for use in creating a song, film, book or other work) and immaterial inputs (spiritual, rather than physical) in order to make an object for an audience (even if only an audience of one). It is the act of creating consumable output—a good or service which has value and provides some utility, whether practical or emotional.

In music, production comprises two broad swaths:

• The overall sound of a musical recording; the way a sound is captured, programmed, edited, inscribed, and delivered.

• The financial and administrative management process in creating, delivering, archiving, distributing, and marketing a song, album, or any body of work conceived by an artist.

Artistry relies on production. A music producer’s role is to combine the material and immaterial elements of sound and composition into an original recording that provides intrinsic value to the artist and the listener. Modern day producers typically use audio recording or programming software known as digital audio workstations (DAW) to accomplish this magical act.

Through a DAW, the producer commands the record, pause, play, rewind, fast forward, and stop buttons. Additional buttons, programs, actions, equations, and effects comprise the full scope of music production, but those initial six functions form its foundation.

Digital tools condense complex physical processes into a nearly invisible sequence. Bouncing individual tracks, stems, or full records from a DAW results in files containing analog and digitally-programmed sounds and compositions. Over the last 50 years, this process moved from bulky, expensive equipment used by the savvy and highly trained few, to a series of comparatively cheaper programs available to all and used by many.

CreateSafe meets the modern music creator at the point of inspiration. Via the “Create” and “Record” functions, the user creates an original digital file of an audio recording by using the “Start Recording” and “Stop Recording” functions in sequence. This process generates a corresponding smart agreement on the Celo blockchain, memorializing the creation metadata of a CreateOS Original Recording. We refer to smart contracts as Smart Agreements™️ to highlight the idea of accord between parties and move away from historically negative connotations surrounding contracts. We aim to develop new Smart Agreement standards that honor the spirit of collaboration and push towards a better foundation for the new music business. We chose the Celo blockchain for its speed, nominal cost, and focus on low-overhead node operation that targets Emerging Markets. The generated smart contract is the token of authenticity, provenance, and ownership of the Original Recording file from the moment of creation. This file is also stored on IPFS.

The initial smart contract associated with a CreateOS Original Recording File enables the transfer of rights to the file and associated metadata through a sale in which the producer has the ability to set the price and amount of purchase.

UnderWater by nyan

Where We Are Going

We use the term producer to refer to anyone recording or uploading audio to the CreateOS platform, for which they possess all the rights or clearances to the rights usages that typically exist in music.

In future iterations of this recording protocol, producers will be able to attach additional smart agreements which append new transfers of rights in relation to the Recording Copyright or the Composition Copyright. Our Smart Agreements will enable a new extensibility layer for audio rights:

The process of production we are describing refers to the final act of producing the file that is eventually associated with the rights exchanged and monetized in the music industry.

A key requirement for the micro-licensing of music assets in Web3 and the Metaverse is that the audio files must be interoperable in order to be functional and valuable in any platform, blockchain, game or project. This interoperability will require cross-chain and fiat-to-crypto royalty adaptation—technology which needs to be developed and owned by the community of artists, managers, record labels and publishers who will build the new music industry.

How Will Get There

For this interoperability to manifest, music must be composable. In building CreateOS, we have considered a specific definition of composability: “Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.” This notion is vital in music—it is the technical basis for sampling.

At scale, Smart Agreements are the easiest and most effective way to provide secure, transparent and composable access to global rights management. Historically, this transfer has been constrained by entities with the capital to purchase or license rights, built on cumbersome administrative apparatus (or no strong administrative rails at all). Shadow forces dictated consumer experience. In a music industry underpinned by Smart Agreements, tools like CreateSafe enable creatives to properly value their music and connect it into a wider variety of spaces than ever before. CreateOS forms secure conduits into the world of traditional music rights exploitation, while forging a clearer path for rights holders to step into games, Web3 projects, and metaverse experiences.

Today, for any creator who produces audio using their own voice or solo in a DAW without the use of sampling or interpolating anyone else’s work, this marks a first step in developing a new way to establish authorship, ownership, and provenance that can enable rights extensibility. CreateOS Smart Agreements will be a new music production agreement between one or more parties that facilitate clearer, more secure exchanges of value and ownership. It is our objective to make music rights composable at the primitive file level.

Using the “Create” and “Record” functions in the CreateSafe application, the user can create an Original Recording File Agreement™️ to enable trust-less and lawful transfer of the file to another user. Additionally we’ve built an Ableton plugin which allows users to upload a final recorded production directly from Ableton (and other DAWs soon). It is a new way to provide artists with the ability to track their recordings from the moment of creation using their native tools. When using the “Record” or DAW Export functions, as long as the software or hardware settings are accurately captured when the asset is produced, correct authorship, ownership, and provenance metadata can be ascribed to the generated file. In order to ensure the accuracy of this capture, we are developing tools and processes that enable creators and collaborators to precisely log metadata from the point of creation. Our systems aim to catch inspiration as it happens, so no creator loses the value of their ideas.

KHEPER by Daouda Leonard

We are developing the CreateOS Original Record File Agreement™️ to provide an authentic digital audio file asset that can be accurately valued by either the buyer or the seller when transacting. Accurate capture of the following available metadata at the time of the minting of the smart contract will facilitate this valuation:

This set of metadata comprises a kind of rarity measurement. Some or all can automatically be captured at the moment of source creation, some or all can prove to be very valuable. Two factors typically dictate these characteristics:

1. Whether or not a song is released.

2. How the public receives a song (i.e. some songs and albums generate greater financial or cultural value than others).

Our plan is for these metadata fields to also mirror the ID3 standard. ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself. ID3 is a de facto standard for metadata in MP3 files,  the dominant post-2000 standard for binding information to music in Web2. We are developing the characteristics in our Original Recording File Agreement to be the basis of a new standard that can be called ID3v3 (for Web3). The wallet address, waveform, and musical notation images are our proposal for the extension to the current ID3 standard. Additionally, we are developing new ways to visualize the rights governed by qualitative metadata. You can see the ideation of our rights visualizer here.

The ownership of an original one-of-one authentic music recording is the closest a fan can get to ownership of an original work at source by an artist. The producer captures the magic of this moment, recording material audio components and preparing them for consumption. They bridge the vision of the artist and the experience of the consumer, a link between the visceral release of creation and the equally poignant moment of listening (projection and reception, respectively). The producer transmutes the intangible into the tangible, sounds flying through air into WAV files and physical forms.

The CreateOS platform provides artists with the tools to build direct, monetizable relationships with their audience. Its development is similar to Discord as a direct-to-fan tool. Both are platforms that enable a creator to build an audience that they monetize. We are imagining the future of the new music studio and, ultimately, the modern conglomeration amorphously known as the music group. We are building tools to enable community governance of everything from the ground rules of collaboration to the ensuing financialization and consumption of that creation. By embracing novel technologies and approaches often feared by incumbents in the industry, we want to lead a new era in maximizing and bettering not only the creator experience, but the consumer experience as well.

In addition to the direct-to-fan relationship, CreateOS’s Smart Agreements will support a licensing layer for the new music business and help build a bridge between the existing recording industry and what looms on the horizon. We see value in NFT’s beyond speculative bidding; they are a vessel for designing a more equitable and transparent music industry. Our platform will allow anyone who makes audio to track, transact around, and properly value these creations. CreateSafe provides a system of record for masters and songs, and a transparent ownership history—all wrapped into a programmable, Smart Agreement™️ that replaces cumbersome processes and costly middlemen.

Examples are:

• Sell the original recording/production

• Sell editions of the original recording/production

• Sell original compositions and printings of compositions

• Author and sell fractionalized ownership of copyrights (master/publishing - coming soon)

• Multi-platform direct licensing of copyright (master/publishing - coming soon)

• Direct sale copyright ownership (master/publishing - coming soon)

With CreateOS you can:

• Produce and record your audio.

• Manage your catalog of authored and collected audio.

• Manage your money.

• Sell your created or collected audio in your own store.

• Distribute your audio to traditional and emerging marketplaces, games and metaverse experiences.

• Understand how the music industry works.

• Enable access to new consumer experiences through audio.

We are creating an exchange layer for the new music industry. We want to build the foundation for the millions of creators around the world awakening to the potential of new technologies for delivering music to niches and the masses alike.

The CreateOS platform is now in beta and can be accessed via desktop, mobile or natively in our iOS app. Over the next months we are looking to build our community, test and iterate the platform and improve the user experience. Contact one of our MC’s to join our movement and CreateDAO together.