CoCreate

Many people can write songs but don’t have the resources or skills required to produce them. Others can write lyrics but can’t put them to music. There are many bedroom producers who are talented when it comes to using the tech, but cannot write great songs. And there are bedroom musicians who would love to be involved in the creative process of others. Our goal is to bring these people together.

We want to create a solution where everyone gets the credit for their contribution to the process of creating a new song. We need to move on from the old rules where the default was 50% to the lyric writer with 50% to the composer. Many great recordings feature inputs from musicians who didn’t earn a cent in royalties. Producers need to have built up a reputation before they can get cut in on royalties. We give everyone a chance to negotiate a fair share of royalties.

In CoCreate, the initial contributor uploads an idea. Maybe a verse and chorus. Maybe a whole song. Maybe a melody with no lyrics. Any user can take the original idea and work with it. Maybe add a middle eight. Maybe start production by putting down a guide track and starting to add more tracks. At the start, the initial contributor has full control. They decide what contributions they like and then they can approve them.

Once a part is approved, a negotiation takes place. The new contributor will request a share of the royalties for their contribution. If both parties agree on a fair split, then the combined song is now shared between them. When the next contributors come along, then the first two contributors have to jointly agree on where to take the song next. And it grows from there, each contributor gets a share and uses that voting share to make decisions on how to evolve the song.

The project is built as an iOS app. It is built using Swift using the SwiftUI framework. It uses Fleek's Space Daemon to access Textile Buckets to upload and download files from IPFS. It uses Ethereum to record the ownership rights of every song. Each song is made up of song contributions, which are recorded as NFTs on Ethereum. When two musicians work together they can "join" their work into a new NFT. In the future we want to expand this to work as a DAO, where all the musicians who contributed would get to vote on collaborations as the song evolves.

We used TrustWallet's Wallet Core to build a mobile wallet. We used a Web3 Swift library to interface to the Ethereum network. We also integrated a gRPC library to integrate to Fleek's Space Daemon.