Africas NFT Music Marketplace/ Bringing Africa to Web3

Funding Proposals
1

Name of Project / DAO / Company

NOIZD NFT Music Marketplace

APPLICATION TYPE

Investment

PROPOSAL OVERVIEW

Untitled-1
Untitled-11411×690 63.1 KB

NOIZD is the only NFT Music Marketplace dedicated to bringing African music creator economies to the Web3 space as an initial door to wider African economies.

Historically, Africa has lacked a presence in the Web3 space due to multiple barriers including a lack of Web3 education, platforms that champion them and projects providing hand-held immersion. We feel that because music transcends cultures, borders and economy - focusing on African music creators is the perfect entry point for bringing Africa into Web3, bolstering interest, development and usage in both NFT and DeFi.

With Afropop and Afrobeats being in the top 4 fastest growing genres in Web2, yet African music creators contributing less than 0.8% of all Web3 music, we feel the need for African immersion is greater than ever.

WHAT MAKES US SPECIAL

Aside from our exciting feature list (both current and upcoming) - like fractionalised NFTs, credit card payments, custom profiles, NFT swapping and playlist creation etc. - as well as our agile and dedicated developer and marketing teams we also pride ourselves on being totally hands-on with our community being available 24/7 and providing manual onboarding both onto NOIZD as well as the Web3 space for any and every user that needs it.

Community is also at the core of our belief system meaning when the community asks for something we provide it to the best of our abilities in everything from developing new features to helping with the promotion of drops to funding song recordings.

4
41500×500 83.7 KB

WHERE ARE WE WITH NOIZD

Launched 11/2021, built on Ethereum but multichain, 2000+ users, 400+ verified musicians, 85% of all musicians coming from the Africa, 29 African countries represented, 500+ listings, 38% sales rate

Currently charging 0 fees/ 0 commissions, meaning the $100,000 in sales to date has gone 100% directly to artists, helping both change lives as well as the attraction to the Web3 landscape in multiple African countries.

One of our biggest challenges currently is further community building in the Ethereum based collector space as well as general marketing.

Screenshot 2022-05-23 at 09.39.48
Screenshot 2022-05-23 at 09.39.481574×1324 58.2 KB

TEAM

The NOIZD team is a mixed group of developers, community and marketing managers, artist relations specialists and visual designers who are all dedicated to bringing Africa to Web3 via music. The co-founders: (Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-rieff-8a28918b/), (Aidan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmusnitzky/), (Micah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/micah-friedland/).

Screenshot 2022-05-23 at 09.56.51
Screenshot 2022-05-23 at 09.56.511920×1132 152 KB

PROPOSAL ASK

We have bootstrapped ourselves but are now at a point where funding to further the dream is highly necessary.

We’re looking for contributions of $500k – $1m at a $13m valuation.
We intend to use the funds to help us with both marketing and further development.

Aside from funding we are also looking for partnerships that can help us grow and achieve our vision of onboarding Africa into Web3.

TRACTION AND MILESTONES SO FAR

Marketplace Traction:

  • 2500+ users

  • 400+ verified musicians

  • 500+ listings

  • 38% sales rate

  • 85% of Artists from Africa

  • $100,000+ invested into artists

    2
    21411×690 157 KB

Dev milestones so far:

  • Multichain

  • Customized marketplaces

  • Ability to sell music videos

  • Multi print

  • Ability to sell with rights

  • Streaming funciton

  • Pack multiple components into an NFT (Vocals, backings, multiple cover arts, Music videos, Remixes)

    3
    31411×690 65.5 KB

METRICS FOR SUCCESS BY EOY 2022

Marketplace Traction:

  • 12,000+ users

  • 1900+ verified musicians

  • 4500+ listings

  • 66% sales rate

  • 93% of Artists from Africa

  • $650,000 + invested into artists

Dev milestones:

  • Fractionalisation of NFTs and NFT Royalties

  • Increase L2 support partners

  • Token creation and retroactive airdrop

  • Syndication functionality (Enabling collectors to upload their NFTs to streaming platforms)

  • Artist tipping

  • Playlist creation

  • Charge for entry playlists (Allowing collectors to lease NFTs as playlists)

CHECK OUT NOIZD HERE:

2

There’s single from Tshaka, according to your website listed as from the artist, “mainnet”.

Sold for .28 ETH? Checking the wallet, I do not see the transaction of that amount.

According to Apple Music, the copyright is owned by @2021 Define Entertainment & Phanda TV. I see no evidence that this company has transferred their copyright to your website and your NFT project.

Please explain. I also found other songs with clear copyright from established companies that have never announced selling/offering their music as NFTs on your website.

3 Likes
3

Hey thanks for flagging that!
Answers below in order of questions:

We will look into the Tshaka song regarding pricing, this could be a bug from when we launched Polygon. We will do an audit of all songs today. Thanks for pointing this out.

Regarding Define/ PhandaTV - These are both owned by people associated and part of NOIZD (Tshaka was also at a stage a member of the AR team for Zimbabwe before starting his studies again).

Regarding other music that may be copyrighted, we do KYC on each and every artist as well as song checks etc. on each and every artist. We cannot prevent infringements, however when they do occur we look into them and if it truly is an infringement we removing them right away from NOIZD. Please if you do not mind, either list the songs here which you have seen or DM me and the team will look into it right away.

Regarding companies announcing selling music, we cannot enforce them to do that. However all sales are congratulated to companies and artists that have sold both via their socials and their emails which they have signed up with and we announce them in our newsletters. Feel free to check these announcements for peace of mind.

We try be as transparent as possible and are always free with any information that is requested. Having said that, naturally things slip under our radar and when they do we try correct them as we notice them/ are informed on them.

Hope that clears things up and please let me know what other songs you have noticed that may infringe. In the interim we are reviewing all pricing etc.

4

Alright. Fair enough.

Your youtube channel has 4 videos and 30k views with with 275 subscribers.

So… I would be in favour of this grant.

However, you would need to massively improve your marketing strategy. Again, your Discord has very, very little activity.

I am not exactly sure how you can scale this, but if there’s another bull run then I guess the older music NFT marketplaces with some original IP will likely do well.

Your chief issue is the cost of content. You need to produce content. Producing content is very expensive. Youtube content is even more expensive. However, your content is mostly house music/trap/lofi etc. on your NFT marketplace.

My recommendation to increase exposure would be to get some more pop Shona songs and market this to Western people as helping Africa scale by providing income/jobs to Africa through NFT ownership. Take: #รถไฟไทยสมัยร5ใช้มาแล้ว120ปี #น้องนวย #milli #ข้าวเหนียวมะม่วง Full show live #coachella 2022 - YouTube

Thai girl talks about mango sticky rice in Thai… with an American audience. American audience eats it up. She becomes famous back home. The music you gave is… not great for that kind of market I would say. Although trap/rap/lofi music can be popular, from the people who I know in the music industry, they have always told me that the highest grossing songs are songs with the largest audience. The largest audience will be hit songs that focus 15-23 year old demographic that talks about love/romance/with various K-pop/J-pop moves and dance stuff. Basically, hit that female market who like to become cult followers of musicians.

Therefore, I would recommend the milestones be based on how many songs actually become popular on your YouTube channel rather than “sold” on your marketplace. Because anyone can wash trade on a NFT marketplace. User activity is a metric, but let’s focus on metrics that Google/YouTube can at least provide evidence for.

1 Like
5

Thanks for this info and feedback, super appreciated!

Yeah unfortunately marketing is a quite tough. A lot of are artists face certain economic difficulties which prove really hard for them to market themselves (Cost of data, lack of twitter usage, lack of stable internet and so forth). So this means it is super hard for them to market their releases and it is solely on us - which we are super happy to do and pay for ads etc from our budgets, but this is still tough in the space because collectors often want a ‘connection’ with the artist and feel part of the artists community, which is hard to do if the artist has no way of creating the community nor really being there as Western artists are.

Regarding discord, yeah this is also really hard, once again due to lack of discord usage within these African creator economies and high usage on FB/ IG. Which is tough when trying to connect artists with collectors - as most collectors in the space are focused on Discord/ Twitter. So definitely something we are trying to overcome (and have even started giving discord ‘Onboardings’ :sweat_smile:).

Great idea with the Shona tracks (are you from Zim by any chance?) - We are starting to do this with one of our partners in the UK (Mixtape Madness), but it is a slow process.

Never thought of having metrics around Youtube views and vids etc. (Although it would be more around vids than views - too many scummy questions in regards to views/ too many people buy views so it makes things questionable) - But yeah this is def a really good metric to consider, thanks for that!

*Also, love the link to the sticky rice!

6

@frwrdslosh @papi Would it be possible to have YouTube views be the milestone? How does one provide a milestone for NFTs? Especially music NFTs. They’re different from art NFTs because you can’t mint 1000 of them. Also, because there’s so few music NFTs versus art NFTs, the community will likely be smaller. You mint 10000 art NFTs because several thousand people can get them for a relatively low price. And hopefully those people who did will stick around. For music, it’s not possible. Music NFTs are a truly awful business model… but who knows… maybe it’ll take off someday.

7

I would not suggest so , views can be botted sooo easily (I’m talking 100k views for like $20 , the new milestone has to be somewhat bot proof , something that can be easily audited.

8

You’re right. But, what would the milestone be for music nfts? Surely it can’t be the number of music nfts. Quality over quantity is my motto. I’ll repeat that there’s a reason why music publishers are getting rektedddddd by Spotify. Publishing hasn’t really been a good business since the 1990s. Owning the IP can be big if it’s a hit artist. But, how does one create something like that in the music NFT scene?

9

Yeah ofc , completly agree , I guess I would have to brainstorm for a while since I can’t come up with something as of now , but there’s must be something I’m sure of it…

11

Perhaps , number of KYC artist and KYB labels that have “x” amount of traffic per moth across all reproduction channels , obviously would be harder to fake that , and can be more or less audited.

2 Likes
12

That would be easy to create as a metric. You could connect the APIs together via a dashboard. Insta, YouTube, Facebook views.

13

Well , why own the music if you can listen to it for free on yt or spotify , I guess it’s a specialty item or a collectors item to own the NFT of the song , but I guess you could say the same about every NFT (why own it if I can “Save as” …

14

World is weird. The core issue is that NFT music projects will have much smaller communities than regular NFT projects for years to come.

15

Less use cases , regular NFTs can offer so yield here and there or getting some other type of benefits , with this is a little different.

17

Which begs the question, why not combine each music NFT with a .one domain name. At least then there would be some IP.

18

fair , I guess they would make them stand out a little , that’s true.

20

Yeah not a bad idea, Auditing should be pretty easily actually. I think the biggest problem with the space in general is the amount of ‘faking’ which makes it a lot harder for platforms like us to be able to find good ways of showing authenticity without having to tread the muddy waters of ‘fakers’ lol

21

So to touch on your points:
With us it is also very much quality of quantity, it’s a key factor and principle we intend to stick true to.

Regarding IP, so we give all artists the possibility to sell the rights to their music to collectors (we also make the process easy and seamless - whereby it usually is not).

What this has seen rise to is the following:

Record labels have bought tracks we assume to test out artists mainstream receptiveness before asking the artists if they would like a deal.

Youtube and Twitch content creators buying music for their streams without the music being flagged on pulled down.

A small, yet growing group of 1-person labels (people with larger connections in the industry who have bought the music and resold it to labels and other DJs to remix etc.)

Artists buying beats to use on their own tracks.

An indie ad agency/ house buying a track for the advertising in the music.

So as you see, on the one side yes it is being sold and the IP is strong in that way. On the other side, the space in general is not taking off as fast with collectors as the usual visual related things.

22

Yall talking about music and doesn’t count the stream?

23

No idea why. Good point.