First of all, a little intro for those of you who are new to Dequency: we’re building a decentralized sync licensing marketplace. We’re rooted in the belief that if you give more control + increased % of licensing revenue to creators, then more amazing music will want to participate; by removing third parties from licensing transactions, Dequency can offer music rightsowners a higher level of control — and potentially a better value proposition overall — than found in existing online licensing systems. You can read more about our general position on this in this thread by CEO Keatly.
Dequency has become, to our knowledge, the first of its kind web3 solution to connect songwriters with creators of all stripes utilizing emerging tools and technologies that provide material value, optionality, control, and transparency for all parties.
Additionally, we’re passionate about synchronization licensing “sync” as a channel because we believe that visuals are enhanced by music — and in a web3 world where visual art is proliferating at an astonishing rate (be it NFT projects or metaverse productions), we’re bullish on the future of audiovisual in this frontier.
This vision of a peer-to-peer sync licensing marketplace is powered by web3 tools; specifically, their ability to automatically, inexpensively, and transparently facilitate transactions between rights seekers and rights holders. This allows us to “cut out the middlemen” (so to speak) and allow for peer-to-peer transactions (if you really want to dig into the meat here, feel free to check out our litepaper).
Our beta — launched in Feb around the same time that we raised our seed round— entailed a centralized marketplace where rights seekers could license music from a small catalog of great tracks, pay in crypto, & receive an NFT representing their sync license. Great first step, though never the goal to just be a normal online licensing outfit. The name of the game? Progressive decentralization.
That’s why this v1 release is so special: it heralds in the next era of online sync licensing in which artists & rightsholders are empowered to list their catalog on the Dequency marketplace, set their own prices, & achieve sync placements amongst metaverse + NFT projects.
So, who gets to participate in the marketplace? You! We’ve removed gatekeepers who might reject music based on personal opinion, internal bottlenecks or competing interests. Artists shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to use this tool.
Wanted to take a brief moment to shout out the artists who believed in this vision and contributed their music to the Dequency sync marketplace: you all are making history and we’re proud that the catalog is shaping up the way it has.
Additionally, we’ve built out features such as artist profiles (add a bio + pics!), social integration, as well as sorting/curation metadata like moods, subgeneres, and tagging. The goal is to allow for curation and discoverability without gatekeeping.
Yesterday’s release is a step forward for music artists & rightsholders; never before has the “music side” had so much control over online sync licensing. But we’re not stopping there — our roadmap includes approval rights, bulk upload, and custom licenses.
This is also a big win for visual content producers who need amazing music. By giving music artists and rightsholders more control, you’ll be able to license music you actually want to use.
We were absolutely blown away by the support of our launch (check out some of the coverage in Cointelegraph, Music Week, Music Business Worldwide, and MusicAlly, to name a few) and we’re committed to continuing to build a platform that’s worthy of your optimism.
Alright, enough blogging, more building.
-Team Dequency
PS: not in our discord yet? why not? we’ll let you DJ
