Symphonic distributes music using the SHARE Protocol

Overview

Earlier this year, FORMLESS announced a partnership with Symphonic, enabling artists and labels to expand the way they distribute music through the Share protocol. This technology allows for setting content prices, immediate payment to contributors, and the ability to share revenue directly with fans via the latest feature, ‘Liquid Splits.’

Brandon Tory, a long-time Symphonic artist, is the first artist to release a song using the Share distribution technology for his latest song, Money Can’t Buy Love.

"With SHARE, Symphonic artists can work directly with Formless and their product to gain even more control over their success path by easily creating smart contracts, determining audience access, setting a price they choose, enabling permissionless curation, revenue sharing, and receiving instant payments. — SHARE is the new way to distribute your media, where you can succeed on your own terms."

– Everything You Need To Know About Formless’ Share Protocol by Randi Zimmerman

What We Did

Strategy

• Use revenue sharing as a method to help drive purchases (transactions) for access to the song.
• Use Formless’s smart contracts for direct-to-consumer distribution, to simplify and streamline allocating revenue-share ownership rights, and to distribute reward payouts across a large group of participants. 

Technology

The song used SHARE protocol smart contracts to establish terms of access to the song, such as price and duration of availability, manage the ownership rights of the revenue stream generated by the song, and instantly route payments to co-owners. As transactions on the song generated revenues, co-owners viewed their payout balance on the Formless dashboard application interface.

Splits Allocation

In addition to Brandon, song producers, and Symphonic, revenue-sharing rights equal to 60% of the total revenues generated by the song were offered to the public during a live digital event. Participants were encouraged to claim a revenue-share split on the Formless application interface. Each participant automatically received their portion of the total revenue generated by transactions on the song. 

Building Community

Each split included a token for co-owners to unlock future experiences.

Results

• All community splits were claimed within the first 30 minutes.
• 100 streams within the first 24 hours.
• $160 in revenues within the first 24 hours.
• The collective instantly received 60% of the revenues.

Outcomes

• Revenue share ownership rights were claimed quickly and automatically established for participants.
• The SHARE protocol efficiently distributed payments to all co-owners in real time.
• Revenue per stream was 500x more than traditional streaming.
• Time to revenue was 200X faster than traditional streaming
• Brandon received 35 email addresses of new community participants with whom he can build direct connections. 
• The results show promise for using direct distribution and community revenue sharing for future music projects.

Contact us at creators@formless.xyz to discuss how to create similar results as part of your upcoming release strategy.