Sonata

Select the amount you would like to contribute to the artist to stream music.
Intro/login screen.

Updates for Web3 Infinity Hackathon

This project originally stored files on Crust, but now uses IPFS to store song files!

Inspiration

Spotify currently dominates the music streaming industry, but has notable flaws that are becoming increasingly obvious as technology evolves. Artists are demanding to be paid fairly. Hosting costs are up. Sonata seeks to be the next evolution of music streaming that will treat artists and listeners fairly by leveraging key pillars of blockchain technology.

What it does

1) The demo is a proof of concept intended to show how artists can be paid in NEAR tokens in exchange for allowing listeners to stream their music. Spotify currently pays on average less than half a cent per stream. The default amount in Sonata is roughly 5 cents per stream, but can be adjusted. It's an exploration of ways how an artist can be paid a more substantial amount, with the option of contributing more.

2) Play counts are logged on the blockchain. It's a common problem in the industry for artists to pay for bots to artificially increase their plays and metrics on platforms like Spotify - but Sonata aims to hault this practice by keeping play counts honest.

3) The demo illustrates how songs can be stored on decentralized networks such as IPFS.

How we built it

This demo shows how to login and play a song - which will require a small transaction. Sonata allows you to pay artists directly, and you get to stream music!

This demo evolved out of the examples presented on www.near.dev. The underlying program uses smart contracts to keep track of play counts. Tokens are sent on behalf of the listener to the artist, thereby removing the middleman.

The demo song you will hear in the video is a song that my band Black Heart Saints wrote about the future of the web and how blockchain technology is revolutionizing every corner of every industry.

Challenges we ran into

Understanding keys and their role in executing change methods took a bit of work, but I am pleased to have completed my project with the support of NEAR's discord channel. Special thanks to Benjamin Kurrek for pointing me in the right direction.

What's next for Sonata

The next feature I'd like to add is the option of selling tickets as NFTs. Listeners can purchase these and redeem them for access to an artist's live shows.

IPFS: This project uses a song file hosted on IPFS. See it in action by cloning the repo and running the program.