FML : P2P sync licensing protocol

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Build a peer-to-peer music licensing protocol and marketplace called Free Music Land to issue synchronization licenses via NFTs on the Cardano blockchain.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Our team has 15+ of experience in software development and 10+ years in the and music business.

Our MVP has already onboarded 12 musicians, 33 albums, and 222 songs. We have issued ~20 licenses for usage in sync, including a sync in a YouTube channel with 1.5M subscribers.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

What is 'Sync'?

Synchronization Rights (Sync) are the rights granted by the owner of the Master Rights (the owner of the recording i.e. record label and/or artist) and Songwriting / Publishing Rights (i.e. composer, author and/or publisher) to authorize the duplication, distribution, and performance of a musical work embodied within a sound recording to be ‘synchronized’ with various audio/visual media outputs. These outputs may include film, television shows, advertisements, video games, movie trailers, etc.

What is the problem?

Sync is a feasible revenue stream for musicians. It does not require clout, comprehensive sync portfolios, or high social media metrics. The main criterion to sync music is the quality of the music itself. Yet, despite this, synchronization and music licensing is still out of reach for so many due to the over-centralization of authority and value in the music industry.

Who are our stakeholders?

There are three main stakeholders of this protocol:

1. Licensor - Musician / label / publisher / etc
2. Licensee - Music supervisor / content creator / streamer / etc
3. Community Member - fan / tastemaker / promoter / netlabel

What is our proposed solution?

What we are proposing is to use the underlying infrastructure of Cardano to build a peer-to-peer protocol to decentralize the listing, discovery, negotiation, and issuance of music licensing for Sync.

What the dApp and protocol will do:

1. Listing / Discovery - a marketplace where artists are able to list their assets and be discovered
2. Transact the issuance of the (2) sync licenses
3. Synchronization license from a publisher/songwriter, allowing to exploit the original composition and lyrics 
4. Master use license from a record label/recording artists, allowing to synchronize the sound recording 
5. Parameterize sync licence scope
6. Each relevant area of scope in a sync license will be parameterized by the rights-holder. This incudes:
7. Term
8. Territory
9. Nature of Use
10. Cost
11. Marketplace tools
12. Give licensees and licensors negotiation tools. Such as:
13. Offers
14. Bidding
15. PWYW (pay-what-you-want) or other variable rate models

What will be the result?

The decentralization of sync licensing on Cardano. The protocol will enable the artists, builders, and licensors (filmmakers, indie game developers, etc) to issue and approve sync licenses. This will allow fees to stay low and middlemen to remain at a minimum.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Music synchronization touches many large industries including: film, video games, and metaverse.

A p2p music synchronization licensing protocol and marketplace would give tools to professionals and creatives to do business/collaborate in a decentralized manner.

Bringing all of these transactions onto Cardano can help drive mass adoption. This is especially true for music sync licensing for video games and metaverse solutions.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Legal Risk -

There are many legal risks in copyright law and automating legal documents. The primary legal risks will be mitigated by being non-custodial of music rights. FML is not a marketplace for music rights, but rather a marketplace for licenses of use for those rights.

We will also mitigate the risk by iterating the scale of complexity of license scope. For example, we have started simply by issuing Creative Commons licenses. Then we will move to build a standard "non-exclusive" license. Then, we will move to build out negotiations and complex parameterization of license scope.

Budgetary Risk

Gold plating & scope creep - One risk in all projects is when the project team adds functions into the project scope without the customers asking for it (gold plating). Or, the project managers are approving too many scope requirement changes (scope creep). To mitigate this, we will be only adding functionality to the roadmap if there is a quantifiable need for it from the current users and/or from prospective users. It is important to keep our roadmap very lean and simple as our team grows and our budget is limited.

A key way to reduce gold plating and scope creep is to have founders with first hand experience of the customers. Ian McCullough has been a musician and creator working in sync and understands the musician's experience.

Currency fluctuation - We are an international team working from at least 3 different countries with different currencies. On top of that, we will be working with ADA for the Cardano transactions. With all these different currencies, and the current state of the markets, there is a risk that our funding may not fluctuate. To mitigate this, we have added a 10% risk contingency cost to our budget.

Technical Risk

Potential risks in terms of delivery include bugs, inefficiencies or vulnerabilities discovered as part of the development and auditing process. This could cause delays in rolling out the required feature set in the expected time frame. One strategy we will employ to help mitigate against this is to provide frequent updates to all stakeholders and be transparent about the process and any issues that may arise. The project roadmap will be kept up to date to reflect this and all milestone targets will be overestimated to create a buffer for any possible delays.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Milestone:

Q1 2023

M1: Complete MVP

We currently are building a web2 MVP at https://freemusic.land. There you will see the first version of the marketplace built on a very simple closed protocol. We are currently working on a v2 redesign with major upgrades vital to establish our KPI and continue to onboard musicians.

See our roadmap.

Q2 2023

M2: Protocol Migration / Specification

We will formally specify the protocol built out on Cardano. Since the MVP is built on web2 stack, a lot of the protocol specifications are too. We will map and migrate the content and information onto the Cardano blockchain.

Q3 2023

M3: Deployment

Once we have the content and protocols migrated, we will deploy a new version of the protocol that runs our marketplace.

Q1 2024

M4: Interoperability and Integrations

Once the protocol is specified and implemented, the next milestone will be to work towards widespread adoption. This milestone will be finding strategic partnerships in the music industry, film, and video games. Alongside that, we will facilitate an open and collaborative community building tools ontop of our protocol.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

The following is an estimate based on 5 team members working part-time for 12 months.

USD 25 hourly rate

18hs avg per week per person

$25 x 18 hrs/week x 5 people x 52 weeks.

= $117,000

+ 10% risk contingency

= $128,700

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Current Team

Ian McCullough (Cullah)

Milwaukee, USA

Musician composed and licensed 10,000+ syncs of 16 years of open-source music in video games, films, tv shows, and advertisements. MPhil in Music & Media Technology from Trinity College, Dublin. BS in Computer Engineering from Marquette University. 10+ years experience in music business and licensing. Grandson of Richard Wolff, the patriarch of the largest American family band in history: The Wolff Family Band.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-mccullough-252a92170/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CullahMusic

Music: https://cullah.com/epk

Email: mc@cullah.com

Blackbird

Cape Town, South Africa.

Experience building highly optimized web services for serving chucked transfers and websockets. Experience with protobuf, websockets and general audio streaming technologies for use within a react frontend. Experience managing big data and highly available backend services. Experience building Cardano smart contracts, off-chain backends, wallet integration and working with the various serialization libraries. Experience with Cardano token minting transactions, metadata standards and the NFT ecosystem. Experience running, syncing and querying data from Cardano nodes.

Github: https://github.com/bbdropshop

Twitter: https://twitter.com/24blackbird314

Steven Cooper

Neumünster, Germany.

Experience in the design of corporate identities, websites, print products and the development of strategic brand concepts. Expert in: web design, web administration, eCommerce

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-william-cooper/

To Hire

General Council

Marketing / Community Manager

If you are someone who may fit these positions to hire, please reach Ian McCullough

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

This round's funding will allow for a (1) year of protocol and product development. If we are funded and the year is successful, we will consider returning to Catalyst in a later round.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Auditability is a cornerstone to web3, but it is especially for Cardano blockchain. This is why we, as stewards and members of these ideals, take auditability very seriously.

For our protocol, we will measure the github commits, contributions, and other key activity. We will measure it by using the tools and analytics provided by github. This will help us determine the strength of our developer ecosystem as it evolves.

We will measure the number of songs licensed and the total value transferred in the transactions. We will measure this by querying the blockchain and performing analytics on all of the transactions and tokens minted via our protocol. These basic measurements will allow us to determine the quality and quantity of our goals.

Quantity Indicators

Scale - total value of goods or services transacted on the platform

Margin - the cost of the products sold or services rendered from net revenues

Momentum - growth (users, songs, licenses), marketshare

Quality Indicators

Activity - % of items or services that get sold/booked, and within a given period of time

Engagement - the frequency of certain activity of a set of customers.

Retention - the continued activity of a set of customers acquired in a specific period of time. Such as cohort's revenues, gross/contribution margin, or number of orders

We will measure the response and reactions to our protocol/marketplace by measuring

Number of Customer Complaints - Number of received customer complaints (justified/not justified)

Number of Customer Satisfaction Surveys - Number of formal Customer Satisfaction Surveys carried out during the reporting period

Percentage of returned Questionnaires - Percentage of questionnaires returned, in relation to all questionnaires being sent out

Customer Satisfaction - Average measured customer satisfaction

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Success for the protocol will be when new business models and businesses will form on top of our protocol. It will be when our github will be used by other projects to solve problems we never thought of.

Success for the marketplace will be to prove the concept of the protocol. It will be a flagship product that will showcase the magnitude of the challenge to the legacy industry. The marketplace success will be measured differently than most. Of course our KPIs will focus on margins, costs, etc, but the primary focus will be measuring the quality of relationships being built rather than the amount of money transacted.

Success ultimately is when sync licensing is a viable revenue stream for the average musician. When there are frictionless and instant transaction between musicians and visual artists (in Cardano metaverses, video games, and visual media).

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is a brand new proposal.