Artíste - Crowdfunding Musical Talent

Inspiration

When artists are first starting out in their careers, it's hard to gain recognition and convince people to invest in your talent and future. For small-time artists who can't get the support of a large record label to support them, it's often a struggle to make ends meet and continue to engage with their fan base.

What it does

Artíste allows artists to raise money by issuing their personal brand of ERC-721 tokens which fans purchase and can later redeem for special access/ surprises from the artist. With these tokens, a fan can gain things like autographs, personalized shoutouts, concert tickets, and whatever else the artist wants to provide in exchange for the tokens. The artist makes money by selling the tokens to the fans and the fans in turn get exclusive access to the artist that they couldn't have gotten anywhere else. Because there is a finite supply of tokens for each artist and since fans can sell their artist tokens to each other, as the artist grows popular the tokens appreciate in value. This way, early loyal fans get rewarded for holding their artist tokens as more and more people want to get access to the artist.

How we built it

We built the backend with Solidity and the front end with HTML/CSS/Javascript. We used Web3 libraries and Metamask for transaction handling.

Challenges we ran into

We found that allowing a user to issue their own tokens through fungible ERC-721 tokens (yes, a bit of an oxymoron) cost a lot of gas since we had to maintain several supporting datastructures.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to build something that's a win-win for both artists and fans to use. We hope that we can really help small-time artists better connect with their fans and decentralize the music industry by making it easier for artists to survive and succeed whether or not a record label decides to back them. We're proud to have laid the groundwork for this platform that we hope can support creative talent from artists all around the world.

What's next for Artíste - ICOs for Musicians

We plan to build many cool features to allow artists to give exclusive access to their fans through Artíste, such as photo/video uploading, live chat, and many more community centered tools. We also plan to build a native full-fledged marketplace for the artist tokens, as currently a fan would have to rely upon a third-party ERC-721 marketplace (e.g. Opensea) to sell/exchange his tokens with other fans.