Sonorus' Mission

Sonorus is a Web3 protocol to revolutionize how music, and eventually all sorts of content forms, are published, distributed, and monetized. Sonorus has a simple but big mission— to make good music recognized and to make music streaming revenue distribution fairer — let people listen, let people earn.

Why Sonorus was born?

Sonorus was born because we believe the current music industry sucks. Many music players claim their mission is to spread high-quality music and give creative artists the opportunity to live off their art. However, they are not treating those who create music fairly. Despite online music players being the main channel for people to listen to music, musicians are not earning what they deserve. As the overall trend in copyright industries, the percentage of copyright royalties has declined among the total income for individual artists, not only because users are used to the increasingly free content available online, but also since those services with copyright are not paying artists fairly, either.

Under the current recommendation system implemented by music players, most traffics are going to the top 1% of artists and big labels are deciding who to be heard. Thus, young artists usually choose to sign a contract with complete control given to the labels. It sounds similar to startups looking for funding support from VCs. Yes, you will receive corresponding support on your music release, social media management, or even wardrobe, but simultaneously, you are also losing your freedom to decide who you are, as a music creator. As many listeners complain day after day, perfect assembly-line products occupy the platform instead of talented creators coming up.

What makes things even more complicated is artists can neither upload their music directly nor receive royalties from streaming services. Artists have to sign up for a music distribution with an email address, and then choose where to upload their efforts. When royalties are generated, the return channel is also from services to distributors and finally artists.

Oh, help. The process is so complicated. Yes, it is. Too many sides are involved in the music release process and all of them are also grabbing streaming revenue share from musicians’ hands. The complicated process results in an irregular payment system in an opaque manner. By schedule, artists should receive their royalties on a quarterly basis, whereas delay is more frequent than punctuality, and based on the research from Berklee College of Music, 20–50% of royalty revenues just mysteriously vanish and never arrive in the right pockets.

Ok, I know I have complained too much. So, what is the exact amount an artist can receive per stream? Forbes reports, that streaming services like Amazon Music, Apple Music, Google Play, and Pandora pay artists approximately $5,000 to $15,000 for every 1 million plays of a song. Thus, given the minimum wage rate in California is $14 per hour, an artist would need roughly 400,000 streams to earn an amount comparable to the state monthly minimum wage. Also, the money per stream received by artists from streaming services is decreasing. In 2014, they paid $.00521 on average, but two years later, the average rate dropped to $.00437. By 2017, the average pay rate had been reduced again to around $.00397, according to artist-rights site The Trichordist. According to Business Insider, Spotify has paid artists as little as $.0033 per stream, with other sites reporting upwards of $.0054 on average in 2021. In May 2020, classical violinist Tasmin Little revealed she was paid approximately $15.67 for six months of plays — “around 5–6 million streams” — on Spotify.

Sonorus' Solution

From the previous introduction, you can see there are three main issues:

• The royalty revenue distribution system is never transparent
• Musicians earn too little from music streaming services
• Spotlights seldom go to unpopular musicians

The first issue is easily to be solved with blockchain. Sonorus removes all middlepeople between the platform and musicians and confirms the royalty distribution for musicians through trustless and permissionless blockchain smart contracts. Thus, musicians can easily find out how much they will receive from Sonorus clearly and get their revenue almost immediately.

What about the second and the third issues? Sonorus notices a group of people who are ignored in the current system — listeners. You might feel confused— What? Are music players ignoring listeners? You must be kidding. Listeners are paying for the services available by those players and all music players are trying their best to optimize the recommendation system. However, let's consider from another perspective— people are now finding new music from other people's playlists, from short videos online, and from home parties. It is normal listeners who spread the music out. However, big labels still take away all marketing fees, and normal listeners' contributions are never fully recognized and financially rewarded in the current system.

Accordingly, Sonorus proposes two incentive mechanisms to encourage normal users to scout and promote music. Both two mechanisms are built on the à-la-carte model, which means selling music for a per-unit price. For the anti-cheating purpose, only those who have paid the streaming fee for a song can share the streaming fee generated from the piece.

The first mechanism is called listen-to-earn, which aims to incentive users to be early listeners of a song and thereby shift traffic from the hottest pieces to a broader pool. Consider this, if you can share the streaming fee of those listeners who've paid for the song later than you, you will have extra motivation to listen to those with fewer clicks because you can get rewards earlier and faster.

In detail, each piece of music has an individual token pool with 30% of total streaming payments for it. Tokens in the pool will be used to reward listeners in the order of the user’s payment date. So that by listening to a great song early, listeners can earn unlimited rewards as the song takes off.

The second mechanism is called promote-to-earn, which is designed to encourage users to share their favorite music with the network and let more people find it.

Sonorus believes everyone should have the decision power on which piece to go trending. At least for myself, I found a lot of new songs from my friends’ playlists. Every time I “steal” the music name from them, I think “oh, they should get paid for their promotion” but unfortunately it never happens. The streaming payment from each additional user is shared among all previous promoters, while the most direct promoter gets the biggest revenue share besides the artists.

Sounds complicated? The graph below is a good example: user1 found music on Sonorus directly and shared the music with user2, user2 then shared music with user3. The payment of user1 will only be shared with music NFT holder, that of user2 goes to NFT holder and user1, and that of user3 goes to holder, user1 and user2, etc.

Want to know more details about the mechanism? Read our whitepaper

Sonorus is a Web3 protocol that revolutionized the way how music is discovered, distributed and streamed.Through our promoter-to-earn and listen-to-earn smart contracts, Sonorus incentivizes everyone to discover great artists and music early and promote them to others. The protocol also enables developers to embed music in their own products, such as using Sonorus music as game BGM and adding music to your social profiles, so that music can be used, distributed and heard in various user scenarios

Offical website: sonorus.network/#/index

Mirror: mirror.xyz/0x4Bb6dd3514eC48885DaD6784170581..

Medium: medium.com/@SonorusOfficial

Discord: discord.gg/rQf4Vz2Brp

Zalo: zalo.me/g/xichaj240

Facebook: facebook.com/SonorusProtocol

Twitter: twitter.com/SonorusOfficial