NEAR x Music - Community, Academy and Toolset - Research and Development
A Guild to build a community around music, learning the pain-points and opportunities, and informing both a project/grant proposal pipeline for music-forward tools, as well as an NFT Music Academy to onboard musicians and other creatives to the NEAR ecosystem.
Long-form
The blockchain and crypto tools and communities represent exciting evolutions to how many traditional ecosystems function. The introduction of the NFT protocol has blown open the doors of possibility for collectible media, social tokens provide tools to mobilize a community and the financial and historical aspects of blockchain promise a new era for the ownership and provenance of artist's creative output, as well as the marketplace value and lifecycle metrics often kept from the creators themselves.
For all of the awesome opportunity and tools emerging in this ecosystem, the speed of evolution and sheer variety of options keeps even the most researched professional on the edge of their seat. To the traditional artist, this may all seem overwhelming and confusing, and for that reason, a trusted community is as important as ever, to educated and empower the artists of web3.
The NFT Music Academy will begin as a Telegram channel, where enthusiasts and artists will be invited to share their thoughts and collaborate towards educational material and proposals of tools that the community believes are most needed, and will best serve the early adopters, both artists and consumers. By developing an education stack, the NFT-MA will gain a better understanding of the pain points and opportunities for music-forward blockchain ecosystems. Once this development stack is drafted, a small cohort will be invited to proceed through the lessons, hold directed group conversations, and work towards releasing music - whether as artists, marketers or facilitators. A proportion of the created artwork will be returned to the NFT-MA Vault as an NFT or % of return. The graduating cohort will then be invited to edit, update and curate the NFT-MA Education Stack and vote on the cohort for the next generation. The NFT Music Academy is started.
In parallel to the educational NFT Music Academy, the NEAR x Music Guild will nurture the side of the community concerned with tech-building: Music players, Playlist oracles, Galleries, Marketplaces, and other as-yet unimagined tools will be proposed and voted on for Grant funding by the NEAR ecosystem and its partners. By growing the NFT Music Academy and NEAR x Music Guild in tandem, there is greater opportunity to best understand the urgency of novel proposals and their fit into the ecosystem, as well as match the technical talent to implement these solutions.
With Ethereum gas fees at a premium, NEAR and its Rainbow Bridge functionality presents a unique solution for web3 creators working in larger mediums such as audio and multimedia, especially with lower price points and high quantities minted. By developing a NFT Music Academy and NEAR x Music Guild, NEAR will best position itself through supporting tooling projects and platforms, to maximize its effectiveness to the music-blockchain ecosystem, and therefore onboard a greater possible number of creators and consumers.
By connecting to the DAORecords community and reaching out across the metaverse, it will be straightforward to curate a group of knowledgeable and forward-thinking pioneers to discuss the pain points and opportunities for music in web3. Once this semi-brain-trust is established, onboarding crypto-music community members will be enticed by recurring Clubhouse, Discord and Metaverse conversations, as well as contests and other community events, for both the artistic and developer-minded. In this way the community will be consistently exposed to the opportunity of grant proposals and the Notion community board, and through these interactions the NFT Music Academy and NEAR x Music Guild will begin to take its roots.