April 11 (Cointime) - Sound.xyz recently announced its plans to open the platform to all artists, fulfilling its promise of creating an accessible and open environment. 

Sound. xyz is a company that provides the songs of musical artists in the form of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Sound's platform is built on Web3 technology. The company was founded in 2021 by Vignesh Hirudayakanth, David Greenstein, and Matt Masurka.

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From day one we promised that Sound would eventually open to everyone.

All artists should have access to the best Web3 tools.

We’ll have more details soon, but today we wanted to give you some transparency on the thought process behind opening up…

Before Sound opens, we need to make sure everything is ready:

1. Smooth onboarding process

2. Building features for a mass audience.

3. Battle testing the platform.

4. Do things that don’t scale.

5. Verifying audio ownership

6. Thank you for being patient

1. Smooth onboarding

So far we have personally onboarded all 420 artists one-by-one on video calls.

By doing this we learned all the pain points and deeply understood who we are building for.

Now we can turn that process into seamless onboarding for all artists.

2. Building features for mass audience

We are thinking big.

Sound needs to be ready for millions of music fans and tens of thousands of artists.

That means building features that work at scale, such as:

Simplifying the user experience

Email sign-ups

Credit card payments

Mobile app

Building a discovery layer

Better ways to discover music on Sound beyond the first 24-hours of a drop.

And the ability to browse through thousands of artists.

Sustainable drop methods Offer an alternative to the ‘sellout’ mentality. We wanted to give artists a sustainable, long-term way to sell their music, which is why we built Sound Swap. These features are rolling out to all artists over the coming weeks.

3. Battle testing the platform

To get to the point where we’re ready for millions of music fans, we needed to stress test every part of the platform and iterate fast.

Working closely with a curated group of artists allowed us to do that and get feedback in real time.

Together we’ve experimented with hundreds of features and honed the product until it's ready.

We figured out what works.

What didn’t work.

We refined it.

Now we can roll it out to everyone.

4. Doing things that don’t scale

A core principle of building a startup is doing things that don’t scale.

We onboarded each artist with a white-glove service.

We hosted daily Twitter Spaces to showcase artists.

We tweeted about each drop.

We spoke to collectors every day.

All of these things were essential for kickstarting the flywheel.

Now there’s enough momentum that Sound can accelerate on its own.

5. Verifying audio ownership

Opening up Sound will bring new challenges for our team…

For example, what happens if someone uploads music that doesn’t belong to them?

We’ve been building tools to counter this problem (such as audio footprint technology).

We also wanted to focus all our resources on the core product rather than fighting legal issues at such an early stage.

6. Thank you for being patient

We know that hundreds of artists have applied to Sound and waited patiently.

We hear your feedback about decentralization.

Trust that we’ve been working towards this from day one and we’re nearly there.

Within three months every artist will have access to Sound and all our artist tools.

The next era of music NFTs is coming. Thanks for coming on this journey with us.