Curious about the world of web3 projects you can earn with, but short on time? Look no further than our Meet a Builder series.

In these short format interviews, we speak with the teams behind your favourite projects for their insights on what they’re building behind the scenes and what’s next. Join us for an inside look at the projects shaping the future of the web3 earning ecosystem.

In today’s episode, we delve into Sonorus, the web3 protocol reshaping the music industry. Sonorus empowers musicians and listeners to share, distribute, and monetize their content. We explore how users earn by uploading, listening, and promoting music while retaining ownership and gaining rewards as popularity grows. Our guest for today is Michael Chang, CEO of Sonorus, discussing the platform’s role in the future of web3 music sharing.

Transcript

SARAH, web3earner: Today, we are taking a look at Sonorus, the web3 protocol that is revolutionising music industry. 

Sonorus is empowering musicians and listeners to publish, distribute, and monetize their content. We take a look at how users are earning through uploading, listening to, and promoting music, while owning their content and being rewarded as it gains popularity. 

It’s a pleasure to have Michael, CEO of Sonorus, with us today, to discuss Sonorus and the future of music sharing within web3.  

How’s are you today, Michael?

MICHAEL, Sonorus: Doing well, thank you, Sarah.

SARAH: Lovely to have you here.

SARAH: Can you start us off by explaining, what is Sonorus?

MICHAEL: Certainly, thanks for having me. Sonorous is a Web3 music discovery and ranking protocol. Think of it as a global music billboard on Web3, where our music library community decides what’s popular collectively. Users stake their music and tokens on Sonorous to support tracks. More support means stronger consensus, more token rewards daily. That’s Sonorous.

SARAH: Can you tell us a little bit about how people can earn with Sonorus?

MICHAEL: Certainly, it’s very easy. Basically, what you need to do is just pick a song you like and then acquire a number of this record’s NFTs. And then you put your music on Sonorus music record players to show your support to the song. That’s all you have to do to start your earning process. Starting from the next day, you will start automatically receiving our $RUS token in the daily reward form, every day, based on the overall popularity ranking of the song you pick on Sonorus.

There are usually two common strategies our users developed in our community to earn more on Sonorus. The first is just to pick a song that’s already pretty popular as the daily yield is already pretty high but relatively the cost to acquire their NFTs are going to be a little higher. Another strategy is to pick a song with great potential but hasn’t been so popular yet and now you can get your hands on them at lower costs. And once they get very popular your rewards will be super high. So that’s two common strategies that our users are using on a platform.

SARAH: Amazing, I’m a massive Spotify fan. I love music. I’m very passionate about finding finding music. So this sounds like the perfect opportunity for me.

MICHAEL: Yeah absolutely, and you know one of the key differences I would like to point out between us and and Spotify is that Spotify, a lot of times, they send you or you are forced to listen to a lot of music by the recommendations and they are a big record labels behind them so they are pushing that content to you. You don’t really you have a choice in deciding what’s popular.  A lot of people have their favorite artists but they aren’t necessarily super famous. Their support and contribution does not necessarily help their favorite artist get more popular. So that’s what we want to change, we want to let the voice of the community be heard and let the people collectively decide what’s popular and you can support your favorite artists to make them even more popular on the platform.

SARAH: Beautiful, a noble mission and the users and artists get rewarded.

SARAH: And finally, what is Sonorus working on that will bring more value or create new opportunities for people earning in web3?

MICHAEL: Yeah, I think we are two things that are very important to the community. First is that we want to build something that’s not only fun but easy to understand and get your hands on. That’s why we have a mobile app, that’s why we’re building a lot of features to onboard not only existing web3 users but users from the traditional world to upgrade. Unlike a lot of games out there that are very important to get started, and you don’t know what you’re doing in the beginning, and you don’t really understand what’s the point of it. Music is something that everyone can appreciate and have your own opinion, so Sonorus is trying to create the opportunity where you need the taste to earn for you, and you just pick the music you like and you start earning.

And another thing that we care a lot about is sustainable earning. I’m sure you have seen many projects out there that probably offer very high earnings in the beginning, but when you enter the system collapsed and you don’t earn anything. To me, it’s very easy to tell them apart because they’re usually projects that create a lot of hype before they actually release the product. And once the product is launched, some of them never do, their tokenomics just doesn’t last for long. So, the difference with us with Sonorus is that we have been sustainably running for more than a year. We launched our application last year and we have been continuously optimizing our tokenomics and design to enable more diverse strategies, so that whether you are a die-hard fan of an artist or just follow the trends, you always have opportunities to earn on Sonorus.

I also want to announce that in the upcoming update of the application, we will enable our users to nominate their favorite artists and music to our music catalog to include more diverse musical tastes. This will create more opportunities for people to learn with music NFTs.

SARAH: So, how do artists actually get onboarded onto Sonorus?

MICHAEL: There will be a nomination process. Basically, someone would need to nominate the music – this can be done by either the artists themselves or their supporters. Then, there will be a community voting process in which the community uses their tokens to decide which piece of music gets included in the Sonorus catalog. Once the music achieves a fairness threshold, it’s officially included. This process allows the community to issue their user NFTs and collect them, and receive corresponding rewards from them.

SARAH: I love it; it’s a really exciting update that you guys have coming. Were there any other developments that you wanted to share?

MICHAEL: Yeah, so we just launched our latest version last week and in which we optimized a lot of the user experience, streamlining the earning process. So now it’s easier to start collecting your music and NFTs and then start to earn from them.

We also added a mechanism to get more eyes to the to the new and upcoming music. If there’s a new piece of music getting published on Sonorus, it will have a a stronger advantage in the beginning to get more attention from the communities and achieve higher rankings on the communities overall music board. People will then notice them and they then have a better opportunity to grow faster.

SARAH: Just roughly, I’m quite curious, what is your user base like? How many users do you have actually using Sonorus at the moment? And how many artists are uploading their art and music onto the platform?

MICHAEL: We have over 200,000 users already, and now we are in the top 10 on the DAPP Radar’s social applications list. So, we already have a solid user base. In terms of the music catalog, I can’t give you the exact number, but we have tens of thousands of songs already included. What’s popular at the end of the day is up to the community, and they have the ownership.

SARAH: I love it. You guys have truly epitomized web3 with what you’re doing. Honestly, web3 music is going to be huge. We all know it, it’s coming like a steam train. What you guys are working on is extremely exciting and very inspiring, I think you guys have a beautiful mission.

Thank you so much for for joining me today Michael, it was an absolute privilege to have you on and and to learn more about what you guys are building behind the scenes at Sonorus and thank you to all those that have joined in and we will see you all next time.

Discover Sonorus and begin your journey to explore new music, enjoy your favorite artists, and kickstart your web3 music earnings today!