This is the hardest post I’ve written as a founder. After 3.5 years, Sound will be shutting down in 30 days on 1/16.

Sound wasn’t just a product. It was the spark for everything we’re building now. It changed our lives and united a community we’ll never forget.

This decision comes from respect for the artists and collectors who trusted us. Maintaining legacy infrastructure splits our focus, and to make Vault change the industry, we need to be all-in. We cannot build the future while anchoring ourselves to the past.

What you need to do

Starting today, we're opening a 30-day window for withdrawals through Sound. The site will stay online during this entire period.

If you’re an artist, please take a minute to check your earnings balance and withdraw anything remaining during the 30-day window.

Nothing you collected is going away. Your proof of support lives onchain, and the music and metadata are stored in decentralized storage. Even after Sound goes offline, your collection will still show up anywhere you connect your wallet, for example OpenSea.

On January 16th, 2026, Sound.xyz will go offline. The site will redirect to a thank you page with a link to Splits so artists can continue claiming any remaining funds from the contract.

We put together a short help page with step-by-step instructions here.

If anything is unclear, reach out to me (@dgreenstein1) or anyone on the team. We'll support you the whole way.

Thank you

We have endless gratitude to everyone who created, collected, listened, challenged us, and kept this platform alive. You shaped us. You made this journey unforgettable.

If you believed in Sound, we hope you'll follow what's next at vault.fm. We're building with the same heart and the same conviction for artist independence.

If you're an artist who released on Sound, we'd love to give you early access to the Vault beta: https://vaultfm.typeform.com/to/AZVzne9F

With gratitude,

David and the Sound team

As of today, Sound is officially entering maintenance mode.

As announced last week on X, we’ll be disabling new uploads and artist onboarding. But all existing drops will remain live, and artists can still withdraw their earnings at any time.

This decision wasn’t made lightly—but it’s the clearest way to preserve what’s working without slowing down the future we’re building.

What’s Changing

• Fans can still listen, browse, and collect

• Artists can still withdraw funds

• No new uploads or artist applications

This update ensures that the value artists have already created remains intact, while minimizing support burden and new tech debt.

Why Now?

Because Vault has been our focus for months.

We’re all-in on building the future of artist–fan connections, and that means tightening our focus.

Sound was the foundation. We’re proud of what we built, and grateful to every artist who believed.

We laid out the full vision a few months ago → Read the thread

Now we’re putting 100% behind it.

A Hard but Necessary Shift

Focus is life or death at a startup.

You survive by dedicating everything to one thing. This shift hasn’t been easy. Sound changed our lives. It shaped who we are and gave us everything, personally and professionally. There aren’t enough words to express how grateful we are to the community.

But if we want a real shot at building something that hits escape velocity and onboards the masses, this is a risk worth taking

What We’re Building at Vault.fm

Vault exists to solve a core problem every artist faces:

“I dropped a song. I have no idea who listened—and I can’t reach them again.”

Vault is the easiest way for artists to build and reach their fanbase.

• Upload a song, video, or image

• Fans unlock it with email or phone

• See who listened and how often (play counts stay private)

• Reach them directly via text or email

Text and email are free while we’re in beta. We’re also building a new way to collect music—shaped by everything we learned from Sound.

What’s Next

This isn’t goodbye.

The music stays live. Earnings stay withdrawable. And fans stay connected.

To everyone who’s been part of the journey so far: thank you.

If you’re an artist looking for what comes next, Vault.fm is where we’re headed.

We hope you’ll join us.

We believe the future of music discovery is social — a hive of music lovers sharing songs they love, shaping the charts and getting rewards for their music taste. Music discovery should be in the hands of users and creators, not editorial playlists.

This future can only exist by meeting music fans where they are - on mobile. From today, the brand new Sound mobile app is available on iOS. Download here and don’t forget to leave a review. Let’s explore what’s new…

The home of music discovery

The new Sound mobile app is built around music discovery. The difference is ... it's powered by you, not us. Straight away you’ll see what songs everyone is talking about on the social feed.

Follow artists and curators, leave comments and upvote the best new discoveries. Share your own favorite songs, join the conversation and start building your reputation as a taste-maker.

You influence the viral chart

Every post helps boost a song in the viral chart, alongside collecting activity, likes, playlists and streaming. The chart is designed to capture the most popular new music as it starts to break, and you can help shape it.

Get push notifications

Push notifications mean you’ll get notified every time someone likes your post or follows you on Sound. If you connect your wallet in the app, you’ll earn curator rewards and get a notification when someone collects from your post.

Lastly, you can build playlists, create your own personal library and stream new music.

Where to start

Head to the iOS app store to download the app now and sign in with your email or mobile wallet.

When we get more clarity from app stores, we’ll introduce collecting directly through the app. Until then, you can tap “View song on Sound” to open your mobile browser to collect.

Lastly, don’t forget to leave a review in the app store. It really helps boost Sound up the rankings and bring music collecting

The Sound homepage is now a fully customizable feed. You choose which artists, curators, friends and genre channels to follow. Real-time activity surfaces new music for you through social posts, stories and context around the music.

The Vision

After we opened up Sound to all artists, we faced our biggest challenge: How do we highlight all the amazing new music coming onchain?

We only knew one thing for certain: we shouldn't be in charge of curation.

The world of new music discovery is already controlled by platforms. Tik Tok algorithms, Spotify recommendations, editorial playlists. This creates a sea of similar music all chasing the same formula.

We don’t need more platform curation

Instead, we need a place for organic discovery, powered by passionate, diverse music lovers. We need real connections and stories. Reviews, debate and conversation.

We were inspired by the blog era where anyone could write about music and have an impact. A small blog could help break a new artist or champion a new sound.

It was a decentralized way to power music discovery.

At the same time, we noticed a social layer building organically on top of Sound. Communities, curators, collectives and new indie labels were all driving most of the activity. This is where the magic is, so it makes sense to give *you* more power to curate on Sound.

Anyone can shape the Sound homepage

From today, everyone has the ability to shape music discovery on the Sound homepage. Share a song, make a playlist, write a post about why you love it. Every post will help boost a song up the viral chart and give it more exposure.

When someone collects music from your post, you'll earn curator rewards. Now there are hundreds of people that can elevate new music, help artists get seen and earn more money for their art.

Try it out

Visit the new homepage, start following your friends, artists and curators. Post your own favorite song and help others discover new music. The Sound homepage is now yours!

Today we’re launching channels — dedicated spaces on Sound to discover and discuss different genres of music. We’re starting with Hip Hop & Rap, EDM, Pop and Latin so you can quickly see what music our community is sharing and join the conversation.

Inspired by the success of Channels on Farcaster, which allowed for deep conversations within a particular topic, we created a place where you can come and discuss your favourite new music with others in the community.

If you love hip hop, scroll through the Hip Hop & Rap channel for the best new posts about this genre on Sound. Collect songs directly from the feed, leave comments, and connect with others in the community who share your music taste.

Anyone can contribute by sharing a song or playlist alongside a short post about the music.

Earn curator rewards for sharing new music

Curator rewards are built into all channels, so if you share a song and someone collects based on your recommendations, you’ll get curator rewards. Read this post for more details on how curator rewards work.

Music discovery should be powered by you … not us

We believe that human curation and social sharing is the best way to surface new music. Inspired by the blog era where a decentralized web of music lovers could break new artists, we’ve created a home for people to share new songs and write about why they love them.

There aren’t many places left where music lovers can come together and discuss rising new artists. Music is dominated by short-form video, algorithms and background playlists but we think there’s magic in bringing people together to share music with each other, especially if music fans can earn rewards for sharing.

Starting with four channels…

We know that music is more than four genres but we’re starting here so we can learn and focus on quality content before expanding. We’ll eventually open up more channels and let you create your own.

Get started by visiting the channels and write your own post:

We’re experimenting with Channels on Sound first and exploring building on top of Farcaster in the future.

• Hip Hop & Rap

• EDM

• Pop

• Latin

Artists boost their streams and unlock their fan data, while fans get to hear the song first. It’s the definition of a win-win!

For artists

This tool helps you build a complete rollout strategy for your music across Web3 and traditional platforms. Mint on Sound first for your closest fans and collectors. Then release on DSPs for max reach.

This strategy allows you to build hype for your next release and reward your closest fans by granting them early access to your music. You’ll get full access to your audience data through email addresses when people collect, and the more Pre-saves you get, the bigger the streaming boost when your song drops on DSPs.

For fans

You get exclusive access to hear unreleased music from your favorite artists before anyone else in the world. The free collectible — dropped to you for free when the song is later released — proves that you’re an early supporter.

A seamless experience

We made this a completely frictionless experience with no gas fees and no mint fees. Sound covers all gas costs to ensure it’s smooth for listeners and collectors.

As always, artists have complete control over their drop. This tool is completely optional and the digital collectible is a simple cover art (no audio included). Artists remain in control of the price and supply of their Limited Edition.After the song is released on Spotify, the Pre-Save tool turns into a normal Free Edition where artists earn fees on every mint through Protocol Rewards.

Try it out

We’re launching this feature with an incredible selection of music on Sound:

• Ayokay - Naked Love

• Angelbaby - i broke time

• Domino - Intro: E G O

• GHST - She’s Outta Yo League

• Maty Noyes - YOOHOO

• Ezi - She's Back

• LOUD HOUND - Vanity & Sex

Want to try it out? Head to the upload page and toggle on “Spotify Pre-Save” during the Drop Configuration part of the upload flow.

In a whirlwind few months we built an early version of the website and released the first song in December 2021. A lot has changed since then but the heart of the product remains the same and our vision to unlock the true value of music has only grown stronger.

Thank you to every artist, collector, and listener who’s been with us along the way. Let’s recap the journey so far

Sound in numbers

We launched in December 2021 with one song and 25 editions.

From there, we’ve grown to more than 253,000 collectors with over 1.2 million editions minted.

A total of 2,555 artists have joined us on this journey, releasing over 5,500 songs.

Along the way, you’ve listened to 6.8 million minutes of music on Sound.

Most importantly, you’ve helped artists earn more than $6 million with no middle-man.

Memorable moments on Sound

The Genesis Drop - The first ever song on Sound was Childhood by Oshi.

The Snoop Dogg Spaces - When Snoop released a mixtape on Sound and dropped into our Twitter Space, highlighting many of the artists from our community.

The first EP on Sound Protocol - Reo Cragun launched his Frameworks EP on Sound Protocol, allowing it to be collected on Sound and his website at the same time.

First drop on Optimism - Earlier this year we launched on Optimism, enabling 10x cheaper gas fees. To celebrate, the Optimism Foundation released a song which reached 732K mints — the highest on Sound so far.

Coinbase Quests - We teamed up with Coinbase to shine a light on six rising artists, and introduce thousands of Coinbase Wallet users to onchain music.

Opening up to everyone - In July this year we fulfilled our biggest goal by making our tools available to every artist.

We shipped a lot …

Our community knows we have a reputation for shipping new features, and we’ve built a lot over the last two years.

• Layers 2s - We integrated Optimism and Base to reduce gas fees by more than 90%.

• Curator rewards - Curators earn referral fees just for sharing music.

• Magic uploads - Uploading and withdrawing is totally free.

• Forever editions - Making it accessible for everyone to collect.

• Protocol rewards - Artists get paid on every mint, no matter what.

• Social feed - In November we launched a social feed giving music fans a place to come together and share their favorite music.

The future of Sound.

Now is the time to scale Sound to millions of music fans, while making sure we always put artists first. We just launched Protocol Rewards that flips the traditional music model and enables artists and the community to participate in the success of the platform.

With this foundation in place, we’re building a social music experience centered around valuing and scaling music curation on Sound. Every artist needs a street team and we’re going to help them find one.

Thank you to everyone in the community

Building every day over the last two years meant adapting to changing environments but we always try to put artists and our community first in every decision. Even if we don’t get it right first time, we deeply appreciate your passion for Sound and your support.

We wouldn’t be here without all the artists, collectors, curators and communities that show up every day to support new music.

Here’s to the next two years!

This is our chance to build a new model that rewards artists and creatives directly. Going forward, artists and curators will earn onchain rewards on Sound.

Protocol Rewards for artists

Starting today, artists will earn rewards on every single mint, whether it’s free or paid. Here’s how it will work:

Free Mints (Forever Editions & Free Limited Editions)

• Artist: 0.000555 ETH

• Platform: 0.000222 ETH

Paid Mints (Paid Limited Editions)

• Artist: 0.000222 ETH + 100% of sales proceeds

• Platform: 0.000555 ETH

Artists still keep 100% of sales on paid limited editions.

Protocol Rewards for curators

Curators have always been at the heart of music whether it's blogs, playlist makers or content creators. Even sharing music with friends. Everyone is a music curator.

What if you could earn $1+ for every song you refer?

We're changing curator rewards from a % share to a flat cut at the protocol level. If someone buys a song through your referral link, we reduce Sound’s platform fee to give to the curator. The result is almost a 10x increase in rewards for sharing music on most mints. Here’s the breakdown:

Free Mints (Forever Editions & Free Limited Editions)

• Curator fee: 0.000222 ETH

Paid Mints (Paid Limited Editions)

• Curator fee: 0.000555 ETH

It’s important to note that all curator fees are taken out of Sound’s platform fee. Artists are not losing anything when a curator shares their music.

What’s next?

We have a chance to change the way that music platforms operate.

Although we are always experimenting and this format could change, we're committed to bringing our most loyal creators, curators and community members with us.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Join the discussion on Twitter.

From today, artists can choose to mint on BASE when they upload their music to Sound. BASE is an Ethereum layer 2 built and scaled by Coinbase with the goal of bringing the next billion users onchain.

Like Optimism and other layer 2s, BASE enables a smooth user experience with 10x cheaper gas fees and lightning-fast transactions. It also allows us to offer free uploads and withdrawals so artists can interact with Sound without purchasing crypto or bridging funds.

The biggest benefit of integrating BASE, however, is tapping into a mass audience over the coming years. With more than 100 million users and $130 billion of capital on Coinbase, BASE will be the easiest entry point for a whole new generation of users to get onchain.

We think many of them will gravitate towards music and discover the community of rising artists on Sound.

How to drop your music on BASE

As always, artists are fully in control of where to deploy their contracts on Sound with the option of BASE, Optimism and mainnet Ethereum.

At the end of the upload flow, simply pick BASE from the dropdown menu. We’ll cover all gas fees for uploads and deploying the splits contract if you’re sharing revenue with collaborators. Sound also covers the gas fee for withdrawals after you’ve made any sales.

How to bridge?

Collectors will need to bridge ETH to BASE to purchase songs. To fund your wallet, visit the official BASE bridge here.

You can also pay with a credit card or use mainnet ETH and have the songs delivered on the BASE chain.

Collect the Soundtrack: Based

To commemorate our launch, Base is dropping their first ever song, produced by Reo Cragun and Heno. It’s free to collect on a special Base profile on Sound, available as an open edition.

We can’t wait to share more about the exciting features we’re building – subscribe on Mirror and follow @soundxyz_ on Twitter to stay updated!

At Sound, we’re committed to building a better future for the music industry. Our next chapter will be focused on creating deeper connections between artists, curators, and listeners, paired with a mobile experience that facilitates these relationships and introduces novel social features.

That’s why we’re incredibly excited to welcome Soho to the Sound community. Omid and his team have deep experience with building and scaling mobile-first consumer social products – at Facebook, Instagram, and most recently, Soho.

We’re confident that this acquisition will accelerate our vision towards creating a world where artists can both reach more people and make a living from their music.

We can’t wait to share more about the exciting features we’re building – subscribe on Mirror and follow @soundxyz_ on Twitter to stay updated!

If you’ve been with us since the early days of Sound, you’ll remember our listening parties. Every song got its moment. The whole community came together to wait for the countdown, listen to the song, and collect.

These listening parties were a core part of the Sound culture, but as we grew we changed the way releases worked and made songs listenable as soon as they were uploaded.

Since then, lots of you have asked us to bring back listening parties so that artists and fans can celebrate every song release. We don’t always get things right the first time around, so we listened to the community and they’re back! After all, we are building Sound for you — the artists and fans who want a better model and new experiences in music.

Releasing music should be a MOMENT

The music industry no longer gives each song its chance to shine. Artists are incentivized to upload endless streams of music to feed the streaming platforms, which only survive on volume. The result is tens of thousands of songs uploaded every day with little more than a ‘presave’ campaign to celebrate.

We believe Web3 gives us the opportunity to change the way we release music. We want to bring back that moment of excitement and anticipation when your favorite artist drops a new song.

Fans and communities should come together, wait for the track to drop and hear it for the first time… together.

Celebrate with a listening party

From today, songs uploaded to Sound will not be playable until the public sale starts. Only collectors who have presale access can hear the song — making it exclusive for your closest fans.

We encourage all artists to make an event of their drop! Host a livestream, TikTok live event or X Spaces with your fans when it drops. Get together in a Telegram or Discord chat and celebrate the new release.

This is our chance to create new experiences in music. Let's make releasing music an event again.

Today we’re proud to launch Magic Uploads, allowing you to upload music to Sound with zero gas fees and no ETH required. All you need is an email address, putting Sound on par with any other traditional music service.

Here’s how it works:

1. Create an account with your email (you’ll get a wallet provisioned to you by Magic).

2. Upload your music.

3. Deploy for free with no gas fees.

Get started: upload a song for free now.* *

Making Sound … as easy as Soundcloud

We built Sound to create a better model for musicians — giving them control and ownership of their art, the ability to monetize it in new ways, connect with their audience and get paid directly without middlemen.

Web3 makes this possible, but we need to meet artists where they are in their journey and make it as easy as uploading to traditional music platforms.

Since we started Sound, we’ve helped more than 1,000 artists bring their music onchain, most of them through one-to-one calls, and we’ve learnt the biggest friction points in the upload process.

Funding wallets, bridging to new networks, and paying gas fees are all steep learning curves for artists. So today we’re eliminating them.

Magic Uploads

Magic uploads strip out all the complicated crypto interactions for artists during the upload process.

• Upload with just an email.

• No need to create a wallet or buy crypto.

• Deploying a song is completely free from start to finish.

Bonus: deploying a splits contract is also free, so you can share revenue directly with your collaborators without any additional cost. Sound is the only platform that currently enables this.

You focus on the music, we’ll build the tech

We want artists to focus on making and promoting their music, not figuring out complex crypto transactions and smart contracts.

Magic uploads takes away all the complexity and makes Sound the easiest place to get your music onchain.

Uploading is only one step in the artist's journey on sound. The other two pieces of editing your release and withdrawing your earnings will still require the user to pay gas for now, but we’re working towards a completely gasless end-to-end artist experience and will be shipping gasless editing + withdrawing next.

We see a future where every artist can enjoy the benefits of going direct-to-fan on Sound, and this feature is a big step towards that future.

Try it out! Magic uploads are available on all Optimism releases starting today.

Bonus: for seven days we are doubling curator rewards for the top 50 referrers on Sound.

Music discovery works best when it’s powered by real human connections and passionate music fans, so we’ve supercharged the social feed. You can now write posts about your favorite songs and interact with other music collectors directly on Sound.

Start posting now!

Share music, earn rewards

Best of all, you can earn curator rewards every time someone collects a song from your post.

We launched curator rewards earlier this year, allowing fans to earn a 5% cut of primary sales if someone collects a song through their link. Since launching, there have been more than 14,000 referrals, leading to almost 50,000 sales on Sound. Now we’re building those rewards directly into the social feed on Sound

Here’s how to make your first post and get started:

1. Go to a song you love.

2. Tap the new “post” button.

3. Write a short post about the song and share it.

You can also see what your friends are listening to, reply to their comments and upvote their posts.

Get 2x rewards for one week

To celebrate the launch, we’re doubling curator rewards for the top 50 referrers on Sound, over the next seven days. At the end of the seven-day period, we’ll calculate the top 50 curators (by number of referrals) and distribute the additional rewards to their wallet.

Music multiplayer mode

Listening to music today is a single player experience.  Despite the hundreds of millions of music streamers, very few have any idea what their friends are listening to.

We believe music is more fun to discover when it’s social, multiplayer, and context is shared amongst friends.

Think about who you trust most when it comes to music discovery. It’s probably your friends. Or trusted curators, blogs and artists themselves. Nothing beats a personal recommendation, a mixtape or passionate music writing.

Try out the new feed and let’s make Sound the home of social music discovery.

Now you can see all these updates in one place on our dedicated page that's easily accessible from wherever you are on Sound.

To get started, click the bell icon on the top right corner of the page.

You’ll get a notification anytime something important happens on Sound:

• An artist you subscribe to drops a new song

• You win the Golden Egg on a drop

• You earn Curator Rewards

• You get a new collector on your drop as an artist

• You gained a new follower; and more.

You can also visit the notifications page directly by visiting https://www.sound.xyz/notifications after logging in.

Let us know your thoughts on Twitter or Discord.

Limited editions (scarcity) optimize for exclusivity but limit a song’s ability to grow after selling out. Open editions and free mints (reach) can expand your audience and make collecting music more accessible, but make it difficult to capture value.

Both models are useful to the artist strategy, but what if there was a way to combine them and get artists paid for both?

Introducing Tiers

We’re proud to launch Tiers, allowing artists to incorporate different rarity levels and give fans a way to support you forever.

Inspired by Matthew Chaim’s “Canon, Collectibles, and Copies,” Tiers is a new drop format with:

• A Limited Edition at the core, ensuring there’s an exclusive, valuable heart to your song.

• A Forever Edition built on top to maximize reach (a free mint + artist mint fee).

The best part is, artists get paid for both.

Here’s how it works.

Forever Editions (with no audio)

The Forever Edition is always available so your fans can collect and support you whenever they discover your music, long after the initial drop.

Forever Editions are the most accessible way for fans to support their favorite artists, signal their taste, get access to the artist communities and be part of your journey. This tier is like a POAP — proof that someone discovered you early and a digital memory of finding a new song they love.

It’s also a new way to support artists financially. The Forever Edition is free with a small mint fee that applies to every edition (0.000777 ETH) — a slight change to our previous ‘per transaction’ mint fee. A majority of that fee goes directly to the artist (0.000555 ETH). It creates a pay-what-you-want model, allowing fans to show patronage, as much as they want, forever, and move up the audience section as they buy more.

But there’s a twist.

There’s no audio in the Forever Editions.

Wait, no audio?

We started Sound with a belief that music has value and that artists deserve to set the price for their art. Therefore, music will be reserved for the exclusive Limited Edition where artists choose the price and supply and collectors get priority status in the audience seating chart.

NFTs don't always have to be used for music - it can also be a way for fans to continue supporting their favorite artists every time they mint.

Limited Editions

Limited Editions are the only way for collectors to own the music. It’s exclusive and scarce, and the artist has full control of the price and supply.

Limited edition collectors get priority seating in the audience, exclusive artwork and the chance to win the coveted golden egg: a unique 1:1 edition of the song that’s randomly rewarded once the Limited Edition sale ends. This tier is for the super-collectors within the Sound community that value the rarity of scarce editions.

Artists can also get creative and add their own perks for limited edition collectors, such as access to exclusive fan chats, discounted merch, tickets and many other fan benefits. The perfect balance?

With Tiers, music can be both scarce and widespread. It can be both expensive and accessible (so we can value it like art). Most importantly, artists still have control over the price of their music.

1. Less pressure to choose the ‘right’ drop strategy - Tiers allows you to achieve reach and exclusivity in one drop, so there’s less worry about getting the perfect approach.

2. Drops can live longer - This model allows fans to collect and support artists forever, so the drop can grow organically as your song grows. There’s also less pressure to sell out or get a certain number of mints within a short time period. Music takes time to find the right set of ears, and Forever Editions allows for that.

3. Three levels of rarity in one drop - Sound is now the only place you can drop music with different rarity structures built in: Golden Egg, Limited Editions, and Forever Editions.

4. Get paid, no matter what - Whether fans collect a Forever Edition or a Limited Edition, artists get paid instantly, either via mint fees or from the limited sale itself.

Available to all artists from Oct 2nd

We’re rolling this feature out over the course of this week, starting Tuesday, September 26, with a select few artists in order to pilot the feature. It will be available to all artists on Monday, October 2.

Once it’s live, you can enable a Forever Edition tier during the standard upload flow, as part of the “Drop Configuration” step.

Set your calendar alerts for the week ahead!

• Tuesday: Violetta Zironi

• Wednesday: LNRZ, Lyrah

• Thursday: NOISE (ft. Daniel Allan)

• Friday: Bloody, Mija.

There’s more than one way to bring music onchain

It’s always been our vision to give you as many tools as possible and let you choose the strategy. Every artist is different and we firmly believe in building tools that let you escape the one-size-fits all model of Web2 platforms.

We’re excited to see how artists use Tiers to create different levels of experience for their fans, and enabling different ways for fans to support their favorite artists.

We’re just getting started.

Starting today, you can collect a sold out song directly from the secondary market. Join the audience of any song, whether you discovered it when it first dropped or a year after it was released.

Previously, once a drop was sold out, you had to go to Sound Market, connect your wallet, purchase an edition, and then come back to Sound to leave a comment.

Now that entire experience lives natively on Sound through an integration with our friends at Reservoir. Of course, we always honor the 10% artist royalty on all secondary purchases.

To get started, click “Collect Now” on any sold out drop to collect the song at the lowest available price.

If a song is sold out and has editions listed on the secondary market, you can collect directly on the song page on Sound.

If the song has no editions listed, you can still go to Sound Market to place an offer on any edition. You can also purchase the Golden Egg if you’re looking for something more rare.

For now, this feature is only enabled on song edition contracts (uploaded after September 21, 2022). We’re working on further improvements and support for all other songs (until then, you can still use Sound Market to offer and collect).

Let us know your thoughts on Twitter or Discord.

Now you can bridge your ETH to OP Mainnet natively on Sound.

Our goal is to make it incredibly easy to collect your favorite songs, even if you don't have ETH on Optimism:

✅ Pay with Credit Card
✅ Pay with ETH on Mainnet
✅ Bridge your ETH to Optimism natively on Sound

Give our native bridge a spin on sound.xyz by signing in and tapping on your avatar in the top-right corner.

Let us know your thoughts on Twitter or Discord.

Today, we’re making it even easier to collect songs directly from playlists or from the audio bar.

Simply click or play a song on any playlist, and you’ll see a panel with the drop details. Click “Collect Now” to add the song to your collection.

The playlist creator will earn up to 5% in Curator Rewards for any mints driven through their playlist. Music curation is critical for discovery on Sound and this rewards curators for contributing to the ecosystem and introducing new artists and songs to other collectors.

You can also collect any song you’re currently playing from the audio player from anywhere on Sound. Enjoying the Sound? Tap Collect to join the audience.

Create your first playlist here.

Let us know your thoughts on Twitter or Discord.

Music discovery is one of the areas we are always looking to improve on, so we shipped the Explore page to make it easier to find the music you love.

On the Explore page, click on popular genres to quickly browse through songs on Sound.

You can also explore all Sounds, Playlists, Artists, and Collectors and freely apply your own filters like genre, availability, location, and more. You can access it on the left navigation bar wherever you are on Sound.

We also enhanced search so that your results are displayed on a full page, where you can further refine your search by filtering for artists, drops, playlists, or collectors.

Pro tip: add your location to be included in the new location-based filtered search.

Coming up next, we’re adding more sorting and filtering options across the site to help you find exactly what you are looking for.

We’ll also be putting an emphasis on personalization, taking into account search history, who you’re following, and who you’ve collected from to create an even better search experience.

Stay tuned for more updates to the Explore page and search features on Sound.

Let us know your thoughts on Twitter or Discord.

In 2022, we launched Sound with a simple hypothesis: if music fans had access to a deeper connection with their favorite artists and were able to directly support them, we could unlock the true value of music. Its value is now trapped by the fixed pricing model of streaming, where only 0.1% of musicians are able to make a living wage from their art.

Sound flips the model on its head. We encourage artists, not platforms or labels, to set the price of their music and sell directly to their fans. They get paid instantly and are able to see their biggest supporters on every track. This is the biggest advancement in music since streaming.

By making music collectible, Sound artists have earned revenue equivalent to 1.6 billion streams — a figure that less than 100 songs have ever reached on Spotify, and has never been achieved on Apple Music. It’s an early validation that artists can make a living from 1,000 true fans, without chasing viral hits and millions of streams.

Our goal is to make Sound the home of music discovery on the internet, and we’re now opening these tools to all artists. To turn this vision into reality, we’ve raised $20 million in a Series A round led by a16z crypto, with participation from Palm Tree Crew, Scalar Capital, A Capital, Collab + Currency,  Sound Ventures, Coop Records, Archetype, Crush Ventures, Coinbase, Snoop Dogg, Ryan Tedder, Tay Keith, Paul Rosenberg amongst others.

Mint a free commemorative NFT to celebrate Sound opening to all artists and the next era of onchain music.

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We’re so excited to start the next stage of this journey with musicians from all around the world. To get you started, here’s a bit more about the problems we’re solving and how you can get involved as an artist or a music fan.

Make a living from your music

The streaming economy is broken for most artists. Recorded music revenues are at record highs, yet payouts are stuck at $0.003 per stream — a figure negotiated behind closed doors, with no input from the artists, and zero options for fans to contribute beyond the fixed price. Compare this to the gaming industry, which historically shared a fixed pricing model, but has since realized that offering the game for free optimizes for viral reach and charging for in-game purchases maximizes revenue per user. Today, virtual in-game purchases account for 75% of the revenue in the $180 billion gaming industry, a four-fold increase in market share in the last 10 years.

We need to monetize music in the way video games have monetized over the last ten years. Through Sound, artists can run experiments to discover the optimal balance between maximizing reach and charging for collecting the music to unlock proof of fandom, direct access to the artist, and exclusive offers to increase the average revenue per fan.

In our first year, independent musicians on Sound are now living full-time from their music and on the cusp of breaking out, like independent rapper Reo Cragun, who generated more than $120,000 from his music and built a community of 500 loyal collectors in just one year.

Release your first track with Sound today:

Starting today, Sound is open to all artists. You can release music at a price you choose, sell directly to your community, and receive instant payments.

Release your first track. We’ve made it easy to upload your music onchain. After onboarding 500 artists one-by-one, we’ve refined the process and created a simple and intuitive way to release your first music NFT with no coding required.

See your biggest and earliest collectors. Streaming platforms provide no insight into your biggest fans. On Sound, you can see exactly who supported you. Your artist profile celebrates your biggest collectors and your earliest fans.

Instant payments and splits, straight to your wallet. Unlike the traditional music industry, where royalties can take months or even years to hit your account, you get paid on Sound immediately, with no middleman. Add splits to your songs to share revenue with collaborators in real time.

Every part of the platform is designed with artists at the heart. Artists own their own contracts and always will. Artists have creative control over pricing and supply, and can opt out of features they don’t align with.

Through Sound, artists can:

• Upload songs onchain and maintain complete creative control over how to release their music. Artists decide how to value their catalog.

• Fully own the relationship with their audience, without the middlemen. Be your own Nipsey Hussle.

• Instant, accurate, and transparent payments every time a fan collects their song.

• Artists receive 100% of earnings and retain 100% of master and publishing rights.

Every music listener is a curator on Sound, whether through collecting music or making playlists. Fans get rewarded for actively participating in the ecosystem and creating signal for other listeners. On Sound, music lovers get credit for discovering new music.

As a music fans on Sound's web and mobile app, you can:

• Discover the hottest new music releases by rising independent artists.

• Collect music to prove you were the first to discover the next Billie Eilish.

• Leave permanent comments on songs you collect, allowing other listeners to see your support.

• Gain access to group chats with artists and other collectors, amongst other rewards and experiences.

• Earn money by making playlists and sharing links to your favorite songs. Curation has value on Sound.

We’re just getting started…

Our mission is to create a world where artists can make a living off their music alone, regardless of who they know in the music industry. We embarked on this journey 18 months ago to liberate music from the one-size-fits-all business model and make Sound the ultimate hub for music discovery on the internet. So far, we have seen tremendous success.

Our next vision is even more ambitious: we want to scale this model to every artist out there, big or small, and become the number one destination for music discovery on the internet.

We know that disrupting the entrenched models of the music industry is a daunting challenge. The first era of Sound has proven that artists and fans are excited for something new that celebrates the power of music.

We are thrilled to start the next stage of this journey with musicians from around the world.

If our mission to build the new music economy resonates with you, we would love for you to join us in making this a reality. You can find our open roles here.