App Spotlight: Jamify.xyz

Onchain albums, NFTs, streaming music

I’m going to try to do quick little rundowns of some active micro/nanopayment apps and products from time to time using this format. If you have ideas of products I should explore, leave a comment or send an email.

I recently played around on jamify.xyz.

What is it?

Jamify is a way to listen to music that has been uploaded to the BSV blockchain. It’s a Spotify-like interface to interact with onchain music - play, browse, sort, like, and if you are an artist, group your songs into albums to share. You can also purchase NFTs of the songs on the site.

Jamify does not allow you to directly upload songs onchain or mint NFTs, instead it relies on musical NFTs minted via RelayX.com.

How does it use tiny payments?

Songs can be streamed for free, but if you want to own one and add to your collection you can buy the NFT on Jamify for whatever price they are selling on the RelayX exchange. This means songs can sell for pennies or even fractions of pennies. Payment is instantly split between the seller, royalties to the artist, and a fee to Relay. (I’m assuming Jamify also takes a small fee.) *I found out Relay takes 0 fees because the transaction is directly on chain, not on Relay. Jamify takes a small fee.

What I like about it

First and foremost, it’s clean and super easy to navigate. RelayX opened the ability for anyone to mint any kind of token, including tokenized songs, but there is a lot of noise on Relay, because it is not dedicated solely to music.

Jamify is fun to use and wastes no engineering power by re-inventing the wheel. They let others handle the minting and exchange, and simply provide the best UI.

This is a model blockchains do really well IMO - base layers that serve broad utility, while multiple competing UIs can serve niche markets.

Challenges

The functionality is somewhat limited.

Songs can be listened to for free, so why buy them? As with all NFTs, the non-scarcity poses some potential problems with business models reliant on purchases.

Possibilities

Even if songs remain free, I could see some special content, rights to revenues, new features, other exclusives packaged with song NFTs to make them more than simply a donation to the artist.

I also think curation could become the main revenue model. Sure, songs could be free to listen to individually, but who has time to search for them one at a time? Why not pay a few bucks or even just a few cents to listen to a playlist someone created?

In a world where listening is free, curation could become the new way to win in the streaming music biz. The best playlist makers - like radio DJs of old - could be sought-after for charging us a little bit for their search and sort efforts.