Over the past few months, we have been working away on musicOS, our home for artists and fans in Web3. Today, we are pleased to open its doors to friends and family, as part of our very first musicOS alpha release.
HIFI Labs is on a mission to build technology that is a force for good for artists. We want creators to be able to be their own platform, to scalably build connections with their communities, and for everyone to truly own their relationships.
We admire the emerging ecosystem for music in Web3, and we want to build things that help it reach its full potential.
Taking Web3 Music to the next level
The philosophy of Web3 Music is promising; Music NFTs are a shining example of artist and fan connections not owned by any one platform and offer the opportunity for more financial freedom for creators.
However, being honest with ourselves, there are clear obstacles and shortcomings with the current state. It is financially prohibitive, confusing, and has high barriers to entry.
We believe that the key to unlocking the next paradigm in Web3 Music will be through more social experiences, more experimentation, and more composability, and we are building musicOS to this end.
The vision of artists and fans as their own platforms is something that we are truly invested in. Building direct connections between your peers, collaborators, and friends. Relationships that are not locked behind the walls of a platform. We are on a collective journey to discover what this looks like, and how it should work, and this first release of musicOS is hopefully a step forward in that direction.
We are excited by a world where artists have full control of their story, art, and persona online. A world where great fans and curators are celebrated, and music discovery is fun and collaborative again. We’ll be launching new tools and resources consistently to implement these dreams, but more importantly, look forward to refining this vision and building with you, the artists, fans and supporters.
musicOS Friends and Family Alpha release
With this release of musicOS, artists and fans can find and like their favorite music NFTs, follow their friends, and share their profiles. You can claim a musicOS subdomain. You can write messages to each other’s “guestbook”.
We want to showcase the types of interactions that can be generated in a manner more familiar to the “social web” that we are all accustomed to. But built on technology that respects the user.
musicOS is a platform where you can find and form a direct-to-fan connection. As stated, the mission of HIFI Labs is to make these interactions personal and ownable. Future developments of musicOS will explore the solution space to this challenge, while being sensitive to the needs and wants of the community, be that through on-chain data or otherwise.
We are building out in the open, which is a somewhat vulnerable position to take, but we want this to be something that reflects the wants and wishes of the ecosystem, and the benefits will surely outweigh the additional difficulties. To this end, your feedback and guidance as we develop musicOS will fundamentally drive its roadmap.
For this “friends and family alpha” release we are paying homage to the communities that inspire us by truly leading the way, and are using their tokens to enable the allowlist.
If you are a holder of Water & Music ($Stream), Songcamp ($BPM, $CHAOS, $ELEKTRA, $PRESENT), FWB ($FWB), Seed Club ($CLUB), or Colors DAO tokens then you will have access. If you are interested in trying out our alpha but don’t hold any of these tokens then please join the waitlist and we will add you as soon as possible.
neume
The data underpinning musicOS is being loaded directly from Ethereum through neume, the open source protocol for indexing Web3 Music data; another project that HIFI Labs is supporting the development of. We believe in the core value proposition of decentralisation, that future applications should be built on open and available infrastructure, and neume is being built as a truly open project to deliver on this goal.
neume itself is in early stage development and may break from time to time. This also means that the data ingested into musicOS at first is likely to be less comprehensive than if we had spun up a centralised database. However, we believe that this is a more robust, future-proofed, and scalable approach going forwards, as detailed in the neume blog when we launched the project.
We hope that musicOS serves as a showcase for the kind of things that can be built on this new paradigm of open source and accessible infrastructure and inspires any developers thinking about building Web3 Music experiences.
Looking forwards
This is the very first alpha release of musicOS, however we are already thinking about and building future updates.
For example, Artist specific profiles and options for musicOS to write user actions related to artist-fan relationships (i.e. a follow, or a like) to a decentralised social graph.
The OS element of musicOS hints toward our mentality with regard to composability in the Web3 ecosystem. We are building an operating system that empowers artists and fans to be their own platforms, interoperable with other projects and tools. Future planned updates to the application will work towards this goal by enabling the integration of other popular platforms in the ecosystem into a user’s OS.
Closing this out, we want to build musicOS with you, the Web3 Music ecosystem, and want you to feel comfortable providing any and all feedback along our journey together. Please let us know what you think, ideally using the in-app feedback functionality, and if you have any ideas then we are all ears!
musicOS is the operating system for artists and fans to be their own platform.