spinamp: A maturing music NFT aggregator

Currently, the quality of music distributed in NFT is far inferior to traditional music, and there is a strong disconnect between the three important acts of casting, publishing, trading, and listening: users must search many different platforms to find what they want, and it is even harder to keep track of market dynamics in real time.

The experience of playing and listening to music NFT is even more painful. Even when the copyright war between domestic music platforms is at its most intense, users only need to register NetEase Cloud Music, QQ Music and Xiami Music at the same time to listen to most music, but how many applications are there in Web3 music circuit now?

While fragmentation is an important feature of Web3, too much fragmentation is not good for listening to music.

To be heard is the most important thing in music. Sound.xyz, by far the biggest NFT platform, is more of a marketplace than a place to listen to music, and they don't even have a mobile App, making the volume so vast that the new-age vinyl record players and walkmen -- phones and Airpods -- are useless.

None of this would be a problem if the music NFT market were booming. Just as no one gave up on OpenSea's poor experience when BAYC exploded and Image NFT hit the masses in 2021, the wealth creation effect will drive users to get everything done. But in the absence of network effects across the entire NFT landscape, all problems are magnified.

Music NFT needs to get back to the music itself, and spinamp, a music NFT aggregator platform, was born for that.

Simple and smooth design

Spinamp is a music NFT aggregation platform, currently mainly support Ethereum network, products have been covered Web, iOS, Android. spinamp's name is clearly influenced by the older Winamp music player.

Spinamp has a retro visual style and a three-column Web app with a left navigation to view the current playlist (Queue), search bar, and explore page. When you enter the Web page, the Explore page, Latest tracks, Trending this week, and Trending playlists are displayed in the middle bar by default.

Unlike track tap Sound.xyz, spinamp shrinks the cover in the music browsing interface so that the music is displayed in the shape of a long bar in traditional music apps such as Spotify and NetEase Cloud Music playlists. The benefits of this go beyond increased information density.

Platforms such as Sound.xyz and Catalog use Opensea-like display logic to highlight the visual attributes of the work, with music single/album covers taking up a large portion of the display space. This is fine for pictures, but it can be counterproductive for music, because most covers have nothing to do with the music itself, and may even put some people off because of visual aesthetic differences.

Spotify's front page also shows square cards, but they have added extra packaging to the cover to improve integrity and are more restrained in size.

Of course, covers are also an important part of a piece of music, and there are many very famous covers in the history of modern music, such as the Beatles' Abbey Road. But be clear, it's the Beatles' music that gives this image its value, not the cover that makes this album great.

In the Playbar on the far right of the spinamp page, various buttons appear in the form of a tape-like player, all at once. Users can click Love to Collect the track, click Collect permanently, or add it to a variety of playlists.

The contrast between Spinamp and Sound.xyz design logic is the same as Blur and OpenSea, except that the first two are not in competition. Retro beauty, intuition, and simplicity are spinamp's design philosophies, and they've done just that.

Excellent aggregation experience

It covers almost the entire track

spinamp currently covers 6 major music NFT publishing platforms Sound.xyz, Catalog, NOIZD, NINA, Relics, Lens, and allows you to search and listen to any audio content on those 6 platforms.

The Spinamp experience is like that of streaming music apps like Spotify and NetEase Cloud Music. In contrast, isolated platforms like Sound.xyz are more like record labels, and spinamp is where users actually listen to their music. In the traditional music market, even Warner, SONY, and Universal are dependent on Spotify, so spinamp's aggregator nature is very needed and has potential development.

One-click purchase experience

In addition to playing and listening music NFT, users can also purchase music NFT directly by clicking Collect in spinamp player.

With the recently launched Spinamp Collect feature, spinamp will automatically find the best price for a piece of music for users, without any jumps and additional charges. When users want to permanently Collect a desired work, Spinamp Collect's first choice is to cast a new NFT in the primary market, followed by buying the existing NFT of this work from the secondary market.

spinamp allows users to purchase almost all music NFT on the Ethereum mainnet with one click. Currently supported tier 1 NFT markets include Sound.xyz and Catalog, As well as almost every secondary Market including OpenSea, LooksRare, X2Y2, Zora Asks, Rarible, Sudoswap and Sound Market, Blur support is also on the agenda.

Aggregating various reward mechanisms

In February 2023, Sound.xyz launched its Curator Rewards feature, which enables users to recommend links and share playlists as a reward of 5% of the foundry fee generated by links they share.

Spinamp also aggregates these active reward systems from the Music NFT platform. If someone casts a new NFT via a spinamp link shared by a user, spinamp forwards the curator reward directly to that user.

Currently, spinamp fully supports the curator rewards service of Sound.xyz, and the aggregation of Lens, ZORA and Catalog active rewards services is about to be completed.

Embed spinamp on any website

Current major Music platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify support the sharing of songs in the form of an embedded player. Embed lets anyone add podcasts, albums or other audio content from these platforms to their website for users to listen to. It's a great way to promote music, share a new podcast with your fans, or get your favorite album heard by more people.

For music NFT, embedded sharing is a new and promising traffic entry point. If it can be embedded in Mirror, Substack and even larger platforms, more new users will be driven to the world of music NFT.

spinamp saw this opportunity and launched the Spinamp-Embed page. In this page, whether you want to share any Spinamp music, be it a single, an album, or a playlist, simply enter the link to automatically generate the embed code for the web page, as well as choose the primary color for any part of the embed player.

Spinamp's embedding process is similar to the Spotify or Apple Music experience, as users don't need to know any code, just copy and paste, and there's a lot more freedom.

Already, many users are using spinamp's embedding feature to add music NFT to Mirror articles.

Of the major music NFT products, only Sound.xyz offers one-click embedding, but with spinamp, thanks to its aggregated nature, you can embed almost any music NFT on your own website.

summarize

Spinamp set out to create a place where music could be easily listened to and stored, and as far as it goes, they've accomplished that vision, even pretty well.

+ Excellent visual design

+ simple and intuitive operation logic

+ Comprehensive and convenient aggregation experience

However, there are some problems with spinamp:

- The Web application does not have the volume adjustment function

Spinamp web player can not adjust the volume, only allow users to adjust the overall volume of the device or browser volume, relatively inconvenient. Loudness varies from music to music, and even Spotify, which has a standard volume feature that automatically adjusts the volume, often has to adjust the volume.

- No distinction between music and podcast content

The podcast content is displayed alongside the music, with no separate browsing page for those looking for podcasts, wasting display space for those who don't want to listen to podcasts.

- Business model in doubt

Streaming platforms such as Spotify make most of their money from subscription services and advertising, with the majority of their revenues paid to music rights, or record labels. On the Web3 music circuit, the revenue model of traditional music streaming platforms is clearly no longer applicable, and spinamp currently does not collect any fees from the casting and sale of its aggregated music NFT. Issuing tokens and enabling them is even less likely in the barren land of Web3 music.

Spinamp is indeed a very good product, it can be said that the product power is far above the track average. With spinamp, the much-criticized Web3 music circuit finally has a full-fledged portal comparable to Web2 music apps, removing the "hard to use" label. But as an aggregate product, spinamp still needs the evolution of the Web3 music and creator economy, and can't get out of the new future on its own.

The Web3 music circuit is still down, but the groundwork has been laid for the rise, leaving room for more people to explore monetization and economic models, or to bring more quality music to Web3. spinamp has us looking forward to the defining moment of the Web3 music and creator economy.

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