TOKiMONSTA’s new music streaming platform, Sona.stream, has no ads and no subscription
Fans can show support by purchasing digital assets of songs that artists put up for auction.
Image: Sona
DJ and producer Jennifer Lee – aka TOKiMONSTA – has launched Sona.stream, a Web3-based music platform where listeners can invest in “digital twins” of tracks.
According to Techcrunch, Sona.stream uses the basics of decentralised finance to “put the financial power back into artists’ hands” with its rewards model, auctions and ad-free streaming.
The company, which recently received $6.9 million in seed funding, unveils its first product in the form of Sona.stream Stream, a free music streaming service with zero subscriptions or ads. Instead, artists share music and auction off ‘SONAs’, which are “digital twins” or digital assets of songs that can “only be owned by one person at a time”.
The platform allows artists to auction their SONAs to fans for 24 hours, with a set minimum price and sales to the highest bidder, providing immediate liquidity. Collectors will earn a spot on that artist’s profile – and a 70 percent split of Sona.stream streaming rewards (based on their proportional share of total platform streams) for that song.
Artists, meanwhile, receive 30 percent and the company charges a 7 percent fee. The rewards pool is funded from a percentage of SONA sales, benefiting all artists on Sona.stream Stream with each purchase.
Additional features such as tipping, merchandise sales, ticket purchases, stem downloads, and fixed-price audio downloads for DJs, will also be incorporated in the future.
“It’s pooled every two weeks and then redistributed to every artist and collector, proportional to how much [the specific song] is streamed,” co-founder Laura Jaramillo told Techcrunch. “So, you’re paying artists for their work quickly, incentivising the creation of that work, and then also rewarding the people that are actually supporting those artists.”
At present, Sona.stream is home to five million tracks by artists like Rochelle Jordan, CRi, Adam Oh and Sara Hartman. The startup says that there will be 16 million songs on the platform by next year.
In an Instagram post announcing the project, TOKiMONSTA – who called herself a “not-so-subtle advocate for musician’s rights” – states: “Streaming has been a beautiful tool for music discovery & has truly given anyone a chance to make music their life, but not really a fighting chance. We live in a world where your top streamed artist may not be able to pay rent or buy groceries bc streaming isn’t paying enough and there is a huge payment lag that exists in the music industry.”
“They feel pressured to be multi-hyphenated TikT0k memecore influencers, even if they hate it. Possibly bc they make modular exotica ambient waltz and they can’t really tour the project. They prob don’t have the capital to make merch or the bandwidth to do all the extra things musicians have to make money. These musicians you cherish should be able to make music at a value that’s true to their artistry. We want them to continue being an artist so they can make the music you love.”
Sign up today at Sona.stream.
