Founder Interview Series #1
Catalog Radio: A New Place for Music
Over the last few years we have started to see musicians break the mold and fund their career themselves through the sale of NFTs. Haleek Maul funded a music video for his song Verified that has over 5M views on YouTube. Other artists like LATASHÁ, Xcelencia and many, many more have funded their own projects and businesses through sales of their onchain music.
Launched in 2021, Catalog is a marketplace for collecting 1-of-1 music NFTs. By minting NFTs, artists can earn and own their value, no longer having to surrender to the traditional industry controlled models. Music streaming platforms offer small royalties to emerging musicians. Labels offer an upfront advance but have misaligned incentives for both emerging and mainstream musicians.
Earlier this week, Catalog launched a new product to complement their 1/1 marketplace, Catalog Radio, a 24/7 stream with one-off featured shows regularly. You can find the full schedule here and click the link below to listen. The Catalog marketplace allows 1 true fan to support a musician in a monetarily meaningful way. Catalog Radio will give 100+ true fans the ability to support a musician in a culturally meaningful way.
We asked founders of Catalog Mike Mckain and Jeremy Stern some questions about themselves, their new product and the future of music onchain.
Before getting into Catalog Radio, general questions...
How did you guys first get into music?
J — We’ve always been music heads. Both of us grew up playing instruments, burning CDs, digging through SoundCloud, and in later years learning to produce and DJ. I wrote for music blogs to get free concert tickets and meet artists. It’s a part of our DNA. Everyone on the Catalog team makes music.
M — I grew up playing piano and starting playing around on GarageBand on our family computer. Like Jeremy said, we both produce music and have been for the better part of 10 years. Music has always been a big part of our lives.
Where did the initial idea of Catalog come from? Why was it important to start with 1/1's?
M — We were both avid SoundCloud users in the 2010’s and have always drawn inspiration from SoundCloud, in terms of how a platform can seed and provide a home for online music communities to thrive. Over the years as SoundCloud evolved and the community dissipated, we started ideating and designing alternatives, thinking about new ways to drive support to artists. Prior to Catalog, we created a 24/7 radio website called Loft Radio, and that served as a sort of stepping stone to Catalog for us. As NFTs emerged as a promising medium to enable new economic models for artists, and numerous marketplaces had sprouted up around visual art, it became obvious that there needed to be a place for music in this space, and that’s when we set out to create Catalog.
J — Music has historically been devalued over the years. 1-of-1 NFTs provide a vessel that enables songs to be worth something more comparable to other forms of art. The medium empowers artists to capture the underlying value of their work without treating their music as a commodity.
How do you view 1/1 music NFTs in the short term? Long term? How has this evolved over the last couple of years?
M — 1-of-1s are, and will continue to be, a uniquely valuable medium for artists to canonize and archive their work, while allowing artists and collectors to form a deeper, more exclusive level of connection than they could with other mediums. It’s important for artists to have optionality, and we continue to view 1-of-1s as an important offering in a world of abundant and (virtually) free music. That said, it’s still an early niche, and like all markets, how that value is realized will fluctuate over time.
Moving to Catalog Radio...
What is Catalog Radio? Why is this the right time to launch it?
J — Catalog Radio is a live, 24/7 broadcast of music featuring an eclectic mix of shows curated by our team, special guests, and our global community. You can listen, chat, and support artists in real-time by cosigning music you love for around the cost of a download.
M — We’ve long believed the internet needs more places to experience music together, and now, three years since music NFTs started to pick up more traction, we have a growing library of music where every song has a wallet address attached to it. This enables fundamentally new music products, and Catalog Radio leans into that by experimenting with what an internet radio can look like where every song and artist can be supported in real time.
What is Loft Radio? What did you learn from Loft Radio that has helped you create Catalog Radio?
J — Loft Radio is a live, 24/7 beats radio where listeners can tip artists in ETH as their music plays. Artists receive 100% of each tip directly to their wallet. It was our first experiment with building onchain music experiences, which you can learn more about in our recap blog post.
We discovered that people are willing to altruistically support artists in a space where they’re recognized for it in real time. Loft was inspired by the magic of the early internet, and it revealed how thoughtfully tuned digital environments can provide a warm channel to support each other.
M — I think Loft also let us experience the energy you can create around shared listening experiences online, and that if you incentivize direct support for the music in those spaces, you can convert that energy into real value for artists, and new kinds of product experiences. We also learned a lot just talking with artists in those early days about issues with the current landscape.
What are cosigns? How do they work? What is the fee structure? What chain do they live on?
Cosigns enable listeners to affordably support their favorite records without going all out to purchase the 1-of-1. By cosigning, you receive a high quality download, your name on the record page, and an onchain memento (a non-transferable NFT) etching your support into the internet forever.
We don’t view cosigns as “collecting” music NFTs in the traditional sense. Instead, cosigns are a new, more accessible unit of support. Because they’re ERC-1155 tokens, multiple cosigns don’t clutter wallets, and because they’re non-transferrable, they aren’t a medium for financial speculation. All cosigns are created under a shared Catalog collection.
A cosign costs .001 ETH on Base, and you can cosign a record as many times as you want. Artists receive 85% of cosign earnings, split instantly among collaborators. By introducing this model, Catalog records continue to serve as a high-value medium for music ownership (and for some, speculation) on L1, and simultaneously enable price accessibility and distribution through a support tier via cosigns on L2.
How is the music curated / who determines what gets played on the radio?
To start, Catalog Radio is a single station, curated by our core team and guest curators from across our community who host featured shows. We believe leaning further into curation is important — despite the perception, there is incredible music being released in this space, and we’re using Catalog Radio in part to highlight that. We’ve always valued a diverse set of curatorial perspectives on Catalog, and that will continue to be embedded into our approach.
What are you hoping to accomplish with Catalog Radio, what new inspiration do you hope to instill in artists, creators and collectors?
We hope to prove alternative paths for enjoying and supporting music online. So much of our music listening flows through a few services with the same economic models, the same incentive structures, the same experience. When all of the music is onchain, internet radio and music platforms exist in a fundamentally different design space, and we’re excited to illustrate one example of what that can look like. Catalog Radio is designed to bring us back to the reason we’re all here in the first place — the music — and drive more support to artists in doing so.