Hi Nicky my old friend! Hope you are safe and well.
As you know I love to code and I love music so after I had being playing dCity, Holy Bread, Drug Wars and a few other games for a while the idea bubbled up in my head. I had no idea how to develop on blockchain so dove in and looked for help. It was actually really hard to find people to help and that surprised me but eventually someone responded and I paid for the basic code to be created and then I modified it from there. @gerber (the dCity creator) was a massive help too and I wouldn't have been able to move forward without his constant support.
Atom Collector Records was starting to experience that drop off you get after the initial launch period and one of the members introduced me to crypto. I then discovered Musicoin and dsound. As well as trying to get more fans musicians need money just like everyone and I was curious to see if we could do a bit of both.
Due to the "crypto winter" things have progressed at a snails pace in terms of music & crypto but we have now had the Bitcoin halving and all things being equal we are about to go into the next bull cycle. Trying to predict one year ahead in crypto is impossible let alone five but I think we will see a lot of crypto music services appear in the next year or two. However they will all have the same problem that even new non-crypto music platforms have - how do you attract listeners who are not just other musicians with an ulterior motive to listen? That is the holy grail and no one has cracked it yet!
Hey mate! Yeah it's been a while but all safe and well here, hope you are too over there!
1 - I'm surprised it was hard to find people to help but guess it is quite a niche subject to develop something on HIVE - great to hear that @gerber was there for you to support - he's a good egg (does he still have Boss Baby as his profile picture in Discord? GREAT programme!)
2 & 3 - I honestly think that HIVE is best set up at the moment to be a direct replacement for a musician's Facebook page in its current form. It has pretty much replaced my one and if you have a WordPress site, there's a HIVE payment plugin you can get from @roomservice that works a treat - a few folks on HIVE have downloaded my music using HIVE that I've actually given them over time through upvotes courtesy of them commenting on my posts - it's a powerful thing for musicians and music fans.
If there was a HIVE equivalent of streaming music app with active development (not really sure dsound is still active with only a couple of updates in 14 months), then it could be incredible.
Quite! There will always be bad eggs but I think with HIVE, it's possible with the Hivewatchers team who are vastly experienced to squash them out and nullify post rewards at least. But really, from my recent poll results (admittedly from around 180 people so not the whole world!), Spotify is by far the popular choice so to me, it makes sense that if music discovery on Spotify can be matched with listener experience whilst having rewards for artist and listener with some social interaction then it's a winner.
It's a real shame that Inmusik and Choon also fell apart because they were "looking into" this model, or at least, their whitepaper was (I wrote 3 blogs on it) but it's back to the drawing board!
Can Emanate fill the gap? Not sure... still in alpha build but things are developing at least but has to be built with the listener in mind as well. Keeping my eyes on it but I'm sticking with HIVE as have had the most success with it on a personal level and I really don't see the developers closing up shop unless there's something I don't know (which is still a LOT)!
Thanks for replying anyway, great to hear from you and may get around to playing Rising Star at some point soon (July maybe when things have quietened down)!
Yeah @gerber still has the same pic :P
Now I know how to interact with the Hive chain there is no limit other than time to what can be achieved. Rising Star is already a fully fledged streaming platform albeit a centralised one.
So my focus is to keeping developing the game and growing the user base and then we can see if a Hive music streaming service can be born out of that.
I am still using Steempress for publishing as they have switched to Hive too. Is the @roomservice one better?
Cheers!
Haha, great to hear!
Interesting to hear of the developments regarding the Rising Star and Hive streaming combination. How does the in-game streaming side of things work? Do musicians send their tracks over to you or is it done through the ACR site?
The plug-in from @roomservice integrates with WooCommerce, which is another plugin that you use if you have a store on your site where people can buy your merch. What this plugin does is also give an option to buy things with HIVE or HBD or any Hive engine token now. Have a look at his post about it here
To be added to the streaming radio you just need to sign up to the game and play a little so your account is set up to receive tips when we add the feature. Then you submit mp3s via our Discord.
Thanks for the info on Roomservice!