Song A Day

A new song, every day, forever.

Research + Design + Polish

TLDR

Jonathan Mann has been writing one song, every day, for the last 13 years. He wanted to find a way to monetize his music so that he could focus on writing these songs for the rest of his life. I worked with a team of web3 experts to refine the product strategy for his project, Song A Day, and then design the website needed to launch it. The first phase of the project sold over 4,000 NFTs with a combined revenue topping $2.5 million.

Tools

Figma/Figjam
Discord
HackMD

Methods

Comparative Research
Scoping Sprint
High-Fidelity Mockups
Copywriting

01. Research

Jonathan brought us a concept, The Song That Owns Itself. Our implementation: the Song A Day library becomes its own company, SongADAO. All revenue from the songs goes back to the company. Anyone who owns a song is eligible to become a co-owner. So the more the songs get sold and played, the more each co-owner's stake is worth.

The songs will reward their owners.

02. Design

NFTs are great for proving membership.

NFTs are being used right now to create digitally scarce art. Which is fine. But what they're actually great at is facilitating membership. NFTs are easy to trace, and easy to check. Selling Song A Day songs as NFTs makes it easy to see if someone was eligible to become a co-owner of SongADAO.

You can see the wireframes here.
The site is live here.

Deliverables

Song A Day sold out in an hour and a half. 4,000 songs for 0.2E each—over $2.5 million. Daily auctions are now running, and SongADAO is a formal legal entity! This is just the beginning, but it’s off to a pretty great start.

The result

03. Polish

Song A Day makes money through plays.

There are no CD sales, and Jonathan doesn't tour. Which leaves streaming and licensing as revenue streams.

Normally, a record company manages and promotes music. But signing with a label often means losing a lot of rights, and revenue, to a company that might not care much about you. What if fans could do that work, and be rewarded for it?

Keeping revenue in the DAO is key.

We could have carved out a salary for Jonathan, or given him a large share in the company. But the more money he takes out, the less the system can reward promoters, which decreases incentives to grow Song A Day.

So we opted for something like an initial public offering. Song A Day had over 4,000 unsold songs when we started the project. Sales from this backlog would go to Jonathan, and once they sold out, all future sales would go to the company.

So we built the site for an NFT drop.

Referencing comparator websites and Jonathan’s existing brand, I designed a set of pages for each phase of the project.

I organized the site’s information architecture as it evolved on the path to launch, from clearing out the last NFT backlog, to marketing the drop, to launching a daily auction for all future songs.