#3 - Factory - Jack

Not right now, apart from wallet as an authentication option. For now, we want to be the best music review app available, and being onchain isn't an obvious requisite for that. Long term we have plans to bring in data portability and issue a wallet for all users, but for now, Factory is a regular consumer app. We think that's the most efficient way to grow at this time. We are currently out on the web and will soon have the app in iOS and Android app stores.

Factory lets you share the music you're listening to with your social circle and keep a record of your entire music journey. It is Letterboxd or Goodreads, but for music. The music review app.

(laughs) That's for sure. Blockchain, crypto, web3 for music… it's been a wild ride.

My journey in music started organically. While in college, I managed artists and booked local shows. As blockchain technology emerged, I noticed few people understood both the music industry and this new tech. This realization led me to the music co-op Resonate and then ultimately to join ConsenSys in early 2017. There, I had the incredible opportunity to work with RAC, who, after winning a Grammy, approached us with the idea of releasing his album onchain. This collaboration kicked off an amazing journey where we explored onchain primitives with price discovery, DAOs and social tokens, NFTs, and a lot of things that became 'firsts' for music and Ethereum.

Absolutely. Bonding curves, for instance, were actually conceived at Ujo by Simon de la Rouviere. The initial goal behind them was to help figure out how to price media (like, how do we price things that are infinitely reproducible at no cost). Simon wrote about them after the 2017 RAC release. RAC had an album coming out in May 2020 and we wanted to release a limited supply on Cassette, using a bonding curve with tokens to redeem the physical good, for price discovery. That led us to Jacob Horne, who worked on Saint Fame, which used bonding curves (similar to $SOCKS). Zora, which we now know as a digital creator platform, started as a physical redeemable goods store. The first drop they ever did was actually that RAC cassette tape, or $TAPE. There's honestly just so much lore when you run it back. The first AMM contracts for Uniswap were written by someone who worked at Ujo, and who also co-founded Optimism. Some of the early code that went into MetaMask was built for an early Ujo prototype - the space at the time was so small. Today, most people think music and crypto didn't converge until music NFTs.

Yeah. NFTs were such a weird phase for music and crypto. There was so much hype around them, but I often joke that they made me dumber. Artists made money and that was cool, but NFTs didn't solve any problems on the licensing or rights side, which historically was more of my focus with music and crypto. Combine that with the reality that a lot of the volume that was happening there was more related to speculation vs actual fandom. If connecting artists and fans, and deepening those connections was a metric we strive for, then we can safely say now that we under-delivered in the first iteration of Music NFTs from 2020-2023ish. The hygiene of the metadata around them was very irresponsible, too. There were large inconsistencies between platforms and token contracts. As for composable, cross-platform benefits, everyone stored data differently, too. Was it on IPFS, or was it actually just on a platform's database? Perhaps the major question that didn't have a concrete answer: what exactly were you buying when you bought a music NFT? The lack of unanimity of this prevented wider music adoption, ultimately.

Oh, absolutely, and that was the opportunity that was left. NFTs captured a market of people wanting to spend money on things they weren't exactly clear what to do with. We used that to think about what could be done differently to make the process better.

We think that what was missing with [music] NFTs is that they weren't designed to be permanent, platform-less artifacts. Thus, they didn't connect artists and fans in meaningful ways that you couldn't achieve without crypto. Users and artists would benefit from having data that connects them together and is not owned or held by a platform, but NFTs didn't do any of that. In hindsight, music NFTs were all about making artists more money. I think that is very important and worthwhile, but the implementations were short-sighted in that the byproducts of composability were largely missed or ignored.

Well, the underlying protocol behind Factory, Oscillator, is our approach to solving data portability with user-level social data. For Oscillator and music our position is that your listens, likes, playlists, and artist follows on platforms is all your data—you should be able to bring that around with you, artists should be able to access it without a platform's permission, and developers should be able to build on it with a user's permission. The data itself does not need to be onchain in every instance, but by using smart wallets for identity and onchain incentives for platforms we can enforce portability. We will be announcing more about Oscillator and our plans in early 2025.

First of all—my entire career was born out of the idea of blockchain automating royalty payments and programmatic music licensing. If I've learnt anything, it's that anyone who touches music copyright walks into a contentious room where they rarely have any leverage. Every successful online music provider today has had to settle at some point over infringement in their past. Even if you get access to music files from rights holders, with their permission, and you offer that to other people you're required to pay royalty collecting organizations (even if you can or would rather pay the rights holders directly), and if not, are susceptible to copyright damages. Short of changing actual statute about how music royalties can be paid out, onchain royalty automation cannot exist without, at best, being redundant. Long term, I still believe this will happen, but I am not waiting for it. I've been turned on by what else we can do with crypto, and am pursuing that in a way with Factory and Oscillator that yes, do not touch music playback or the copyright itself, as a means of not 'needing permission' or costly licenses (lest we infringe) to operate. Factory is enabling us to build meaningful experiences for users to create data (music reviews) that are high signal for artists and the industry as a whole, and also something that the user cares about and would find value in not having tied to just one platform (Factory). Because we are working to make this portable data via Oscillator, we are building an open, referenceable, knowledge base of all music related artists and release data, too. On a long enough time horizon, and if successful, this could be well suited to act as a foundational element to the original payment and licensing dream after all.

We're shipping incredibly fast with Factory. If you love music, just go check it out at factory.fm. We have a very simple goal: be the best music review app. With the iOS and Android releases coming early in 2025, we are going to be putting a big emphasis on user growth. With Oscillator, we will be releasing our litepaper any day now and will have some APIs for anyone to play around with the public music data.

Well, right now the main problem is just that the app isn't in the App Store. As soon as it will be, it'll be pedal to the metal. We're using a lot of organic growth and paid growth playbooks right now.

Yeah. And what I've noticed is that a lot of people say they want to build for creators, and sure, that sounds nice and altruistic, but what often ends up happening is that creator platforms build for creators and either don't solve for fan/demand side experience or they do and then turn around and start charging those same creators to access features on the platform—when the platform couldn't have been built without them in the first place. There's a lot of feel good altruism thrown around in the space. The biggest thing we can solve for is distribution for creators. I realized this after having been in the space for so long and not being focused on that. Frankly think a lot of us in web3 have to take accountability for over-indexing on the tech and just assuming people would come - that did a lot of damage. This tech, decentralization, is egalitarian in nature and changes the internet's owner vs creator class dynamic, so it made sense to market our goals to the artists, creators, and educate them first. However, we need to match the demand they have elsewhere, and while we have finally overcome the burden of UX and costs with better wallets and scalability, we still haven't brought that demand, that distribution. All that to say, For Factory, we're focused first and primarily on mass scale distribution now through growing our user base. If we can onboard 1 million users to a music review app, we will then have their trust to give them wallets, educate them on a future where user data belongs to users, is portable, and the infinite amount of experiences that can be created from that which would not have been possible otherwise.

Thank you, Abi. Factory.fm — THE music review app.!

I'm pretty active on Twitter, always happy to connect there!

Appreciate it!