Today we are proud to announce one of the projects that can revolutionise the indie music scene completely. A new platform for publishing music, and sounds in general, where everyone will be able to monetise their works based on the amount of likes their content generates. Yes guys, this is true, innovations of blockchain and distributed storage came to music industry as well!

This platform is:

https://dsound.audio

What is DSound?

DSound is a web application developed in Javascript, that allows to upload, listen and discover music and other sounds stored on top of the IPFS Network. It uses STEEM blockchain as a decentralised database, which allows authors to earn rewards in STEEM Dollars cryptocurrency, which can be exchanged directly to US Dollars or any other currency, when other users like or repost our content, in the same way as Steemit.com for blog posts. If you don’t know Steemit yet, please check it out at http://steemit.com

It is still in it’s early stages, but already gives a taste of what can become the platform of reference for musicians to publish their songs, promos and recordings and be rewarded for their work immediately, without any publishing and/or distribution involved.

As we are in the industry for quite some time, we deeply understand that the industry needs a platform where musicians and producers can publish their own works to receive the feedback from the community and earn few bucks with that! And if you also are in the industry, you know how difficult it is to make any money with our creations in the music business these days!

There are some platforms that allow it, if you are signed with a major label, like SoundCloud, YouTube, Apple Music or Spotify, but if you are an indie you get lucky if you can publish any of your own creations on these channels without being taken down! Who didn’t have their own creations (even without any sampled materials) being taken down for copyright infringement, just because they can?

It gets even worse for other kinds of creations, which constitute fair use of the copyrighted materials, like remixes, mashups or DJ sets. If you want to share any of these with your fans, nowadays you can’t! If you upload these works to YouTube or SoundCloud in a matter of seconds they are taken down for copyright infringement. These derivative works of the original ones serve to promote the authors or give them a different use, like a remix makes people dance to an undanceable song, or a DJ set which mixes and blends together several tracks to produce a completely different sound vibe. These creations deserve to be published and their authors deserve to earn their bucks if people like them!

The industry is using the laws that had in their root the will to protect artists and creators agains the same small artists and creators with their super-powers, making it impossible for them to survive without working other jobs to put food to their tables, instead of focusing on creating and spreading love! But this is about to change with DSound!!! :)

How to use DSound

1. Logging in
   Create a STEEM account on Steemit.com, if you don’t have one already, then enter your STEEM username:
   

2. Enter your Private Posting Key, you can find it here:
   

Multi-user login

If you are an artist as well, it is common to have your artistic names, which leads to having multiple accounts on the social networks and usually makes it a real pain to always being logging-out and logging-in to use your different pseudonyms. Youtube and Facebook have this feature allowing you to switch between them easily. So DSound as well lets users log in with as many accounts as they want, and switch between them.

Uploading

First, you need to be logged-in to be able to access the upload page.
Then just simply upload the audio file, the cover art (not required but much appreciated by your listeners, like a part of your sound that fills the eyes), and finally fill the texts for the blockchain and publish!

If all goes well, you should be taken to the new sounds feed where your sound should be sitting, waiting to be played by your fans. The process can take between 0 and 3 minutes, depending on the IPFS network status and your connection speed.

Browsing and Discovering Sounds

Here Sound replicate sthe way Steemit.com works, with the exception of the home page where you view the feed of sounds that had any recent interactions, like comments or likes. Then you have the regular Trending, Hot and New main sections. They work the same as in Steemit.

If you click on a sound (title or cover) you will get to the sound page:

If you click on a ‘#tag’ on any page, you can discover sounds only on that category, even if you select the new, hot or trending sections you will be seeing that category on the chosen section. By clicking on the logo to go to your feed or exiting the browsing to any other page you will exit the category mode. When browsing in category mode you’ll see the category ‘#tag’ at the top:

Anywhere on the application you can click on an ‘@user’ to view that user’s publications alone at the user page:

The profile picture and the new profile cover picture come from Steemit profile settings to show on DSound user profile page.

And anywhere you see a track player with the play button and a waveform of the sound, you can play that sound and navigate in it by clicking on the waveform as you do on SoundCloud.

Throughout the app you see the player at the lower part of your screen and that player plays music even when you navigate through the application, knowing your last feed selection of songs and playing them in sequence or shuffle them for you!

How DSound works

Sound all based on STEEM blockchain, so naturally you can like sounds by clicking on the ‘heart’ icon, republish them on the ‘repost’ icon, download the sounds on the Download button (if enabled by the author) or otherwise the author may activate a Buy button with a link directly to that sound on any music store of his choice or even his website.

By disabling the download link, the author is only not giving his permission for you to download the sound directly on DSound, but through IPFS network, everything in it is naturally available to download, so don’t think your content will not be downloadable if you disable the download button when uploading! As with SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify or any other content sharing, if one can stream it one can download it, one way or the other.

What makes DSound so special is its decentralised nature. By using a blockchain like STEEM it has many advantages over other blockchains. It is fast (3 sec blocks). It is free, anyone can use it without having to deposit some form of currency, and transactions have no fees.

Other projects are already there that implement some kind of Music Currency, that you can use to buy access to music content, like Musicoin or Resonate. DSound works the other way around by enabling to reward music creation by the community, in the same way that STEEM blockchain already implements its reward-earning mechanism for blog posts.

Any sound uploaded on DSound becomes a STEEM content, that can earn rewards payable after 7 days.

The storage is handled by IPFS network, which is a protocol that enables decentralised file storage. The principle behind it is called Distributed Hash Tables (DHT). The same principle also powers the BitTorrent network. Just like how cryptocurrency uses asymmetric cryptography, DHT networks will hash contents in order to be able to identify a file. The hash becomes the identifier of a file, and it's as easy as re-hashing a file and making sure the hashes match to ensure the file that was sent to us is the original.

IPFS is young, open-source, and actively being developed, with many bright minds working on the project. We believe it has a great future ahead.

Design and User Experience

DSound has a simpler but equally intuitive approach inspired by the leading sound sharing platform SoundCloud, as the potential users are already used to it.

The design is clean and without distractions, but still showing what users care about and facilitate the usages that they require, like waveform navigation, commenting, republish and liking content. It also makes it easy to discover new music, as that is really important for DJs, thus the browsing by tags and merging with top sections.

Conclusions

We are true believers that decentralisation is the future, so we believe that DSound has the potencial to change the music industry world.

But competing with SoundCloud will not be an easy task! Although DSound is decentralised so not easy to take down, and IPFS even harder because nobody exclusively hosts the files stored on the network. Let’s see what this will bring. In the meantime, let’s make some bucks by sharing what we all love: music!

As DSound author says:

”DSound is NOT about facilitating the sharing of copyrighted material, but it is all about freeing the authors from the pressures of the major labels, by giving them a tool that enables them to make decent living out of their creations without having to be signed to major labels…”

And we love the tagline of DSound: “Music is what feelings sound like”

Go check it out by yourself here: https://dsound.audio

And keep the groove on!

YUGE // Media Press