January 16, 2023
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This interview was originally published by Genfinity.
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King Solomon interviews Tune.FM as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
What is up, everybody? Hope you guys are all having a fantastic day. As you guys know, within Genfinity, in collaboration with HashPack, we are doing multiple Hedera ecosystem interviews, and today, super excited to have um Andrew Antar uh from Tune FM joining us. How are you doing this morning, Andrew?
Tune FM – Andrew Antar - Founder
I'm doing well, doing well. How you doing?
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Fantastic. Um, I actually told um Marc from uh HashPack on Thursday or Friday when we nailed this in. This is this is one that I'm definitely excited for. Um, so let's let the audience know um from a background and history standpoint. Can you give us just an overview of like how the Tune FM initiative like started, um when did it start, you know the team members and the onboarding aspects?
Tune FM – Andrew Antar - Founder
Yeah, so um we've been building uh music tech project for a while and the idea is to create an Open Marketplace and um for artists and fans to be able to interact with each other and find each other and um what the missing piece was really the monetization component. Um, and we knew we wanted to do something with tokenization and crypto, we didn't quite know what we wanted to build on. Um, but we were lucky enough to stumble upon Hashgraph before Hedera launched and immediately sort of it clicked that this would be the only technology that could scale micro payments uh for music streaming royalties which is really the underlying business model that we wanted to pursue, and so we partnered very early on with Hashgraph literally within days after it launching um uh or at least being announced and then we've been building on Hedera ever since and um so we were the first to launch on OA like within the first minute that OA happened and then um helps with the creation of the token service in the first to launch a token on HTS and so and then we're the first to get a token listed publicly on an exchange and now we're on 20 exchanges and counting, and um so you know we've been there at the beginning uh sort of pioneering a lot of different Hedera based adoption and services and all the while building up our community and user base and artists and products alongside our use of Hedera.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
That's fantastic and I know even on the site you know kind of the web 3 of Spotify aspect, so from your guys's standpoint based on the market research that you've done, how much of an opportunity exists for disruption in the music industry for both artists and fans?
Tune FM – Andrew Antar - Founder
Yeah, so I mean Spotify is sort of uh poised to be disrupted um and um it's basically um it's really bad for the artists they don't get paid close to anything uh it's like less than 10 percent of less than half a penny per play and um so they can't really live off their streaming Revenue um the rights holders and the Publishers take about 90 of that um and that's about 70 of Spotify's revenue for Spotify is getting squeezed. Funny enough, even though they make plenty of money, the rights holders of publishers and labels make most of the money from streaming, so they're doing fine. But the artists are getting the short end of the stick and have to rely on merchandise sales, touring, and even when they tour, most of the actual money that goes to the artist is for merchandise. So, it's still stuck in the stone age from a monetization perspective. And when you compare that to YouTube, where people can monetize their channels very easily, or Instagram, where they can monetize their influence with just ten thousand or a hundred thousand fans, you don't see that type of monetization on the existing platforms. Part of that is creating a new business model that enables creators, especially music artists, to monetize their streaming, but not only that, to monetize their super fans via the use of music NFTs. There's been a lot of talk about music NFTs, but nobody's really done it right and there's no real true music NFT platform out there. So, we think we've put together the right combination of solutions to actually offer music NFTs that are scalable for the future.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Yeah and I think even watching the video the commercial that you guys had. One stat in there that you had is you know artists can make upwards of 10 times more revenue than they're currently making on Spotify. So when you kind of look for like a feedback loop within the platform that you guys are facilitating I know that uh music NFTs streaming uh royalty micropayments and social audio for both artists and fans, can you talk about kind of how and I know it's there's a lot of products within that but how there is like kind of that feedback loop that drives value from what um Tune FM is building within all the products that you guys have.
Tune FM – Andrew Antar - Founder
Yeah so um essentially our secret sauce is the fact that we're vertically integrating a streaming platform with an NFT marketplace. So, there's a decentralized web 3 streaming platform, AKA Spotify, SoundCloud, where it's permissionless, anyone can upload their masters. But also, you have that sort of premium streaming experience and then also a place where you can buy the NFTs which is really just collectibles and exclusive things from the artists, exclusive experiences, whether in-person experiences or virtual experiences, whether it's backstage pass or face time with the artist or any number of things that artists can offer, as well as limited audio releases, albums, multimedia, multi-tiered music NFTs, and a place where you can actually listen to the music, where you get the music NFTs. And because we're doing the streaming royalty micro payments for the streaming itself, we can attach those to the NFTs so the artists can sell a portion of the streaming world's micro payments in-platform with the NFTs. So the buyer of the NFT can essentially participate in the upside of the streaming with alongside the artists. And so, having a place to stream the music, make playlists, and save it to their library and share songs, all within the place where you actually buy the NFTs is something that hasn't really been done before.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
And I think you touched on it as one way that listeners can also potentially, obviously not financial advice, make revenue. Within some of the other aspects too that TuneFM is building out, I mean, I think that listeners also can, like, find talent or bring talent onto the platform. What does that look like from a listener's standpoint, in a way that they could potentially get rewarded within TuneFM platform?
Tune FM – Andrew Antar – Founder
So, there's also a play to earn aspect, so it's not just all spending. You can actually listen to music and get paid for those listens. That is this sort of feedback loop where the artists can promote their music with JAM and if the music is actually good then the people who are listening to promoted music, getting paid for it. If they listen to the whole song, they'll get that full amount, and then if they go ahead and listen to the artist's other music or the full album, then that would be a return on investment or ROI back to the artist for that investment in their promotion. So you have the win-win on both the artists being able to promote their music to new fans who've never heard their music before, getting an ROI on their investment if their music is good, and we're targeting that to the right music taste, so people are listening to things that they want to hear. Then, the listener is winning because they get to discover a new song and a new artist and actually get paid for that experience. So that's a really exciting thing as far as having the play to earn and win-win on both sides.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
If you remember because I know that you guys are really old school within Hedera as well, like if you remember back when they were doing like testnet, you used to have to like they had like a bunch of articles and if you like clicked on the article and scrolled through it, you would get like micro streamed hbar. So it's probably just like a really easy transition into like, "Okay, you're listening to music, listen to the whole song, listen to the artist's additional catalog." I should say on top of that, you guys are still in I think it's still open beta right, so people can come on and test out the platform and get, I believe right now it's 1,000 jam coins that you guys still have on there as a reward for people that want to participate. Is that still the case?
Tune FM – Andrew Antar – Founder
Yeah, we actually upped it to a thousand. So you know more juice and it's totally open and working. You can go ahead and sign up on Tune.fm, join now and create your account. We have over 10,000 artists on the platform already, over a hundred thousand users, and we're growing. We're still in beta because we're not quite ready to say that we're prime time. There's so many things we're building and so many things are changing, so things can break from time to time as we're moving very fast. But we'll probably come out of that sometime this year. It's really just a label but we're really focused right now on the music NFT Marketplace.
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