So some of you might be saying...
"What the hell is Cardano??"
Why you no $ETH ?!
I get it, Let me explain...
My name is Jimmy, for the last 2 years I've performed as Sick City. It's a solo acoustic folk punk project that I've been working on forever but just recently started doing stuff with. In November of 2021, I made the switch from ETH and BNB over to Cardano.
With native tokens and NFTs being brand new here, I figured it would be a great place to land after looking at what all Cardano had to offer in terms of tech. On top of that, the community here is amazing, it was an easy transition. This was also the time that I learned that NFTs were more than jpegs of monkeys. At the time though, I had no idea how much more... and so I got to work.
I released my first music NFT in early January of 2022. Shortly after I released a few more. It seemed like every week I was getting messages asking how I was doing it and so I started Sick City as a project here on Cardano. My goal was to provide resources to artists for free to teach them how to maximize their IP potential using web3.
My first main project here was called "Epoch Genesis". On Cardano, an Epoch represents a 5 day period in which the reward cycle starts. Epoch Genesis started on March 30, 2022. Every 5 days, we release a new token featuring music from artists all over the world. I build all the metadata, I do a lot of the graphic design, I host all the files, I pay for all minting costs, and we distribute this token to the community for free using our partners at DripDropz and TosiDrop.
As of writing this today, we have done 108 consecutive drops, every 5 days, free to the community. After things started moving I opened the Sick City Record Shop which was an NFT shop operating out of my discord server.
Because Cardano allows for tons of dynamic content within 1 asset, we were able to have multiple songs, music videos, embedded html content, books, comics, games, pdf lyrics sheets, etc. all in one NFT. As things kept going the music community got together and we developed CIP-60 (Cardano's music metadata standards). This allowed music players to be able to easily read and query data in the NFT to make for a more familiar music listening experience.
Fast forward to today and Sick City has partnered with NMKR (Cardano's largest NFT minting platform) and NEWM (an insanely cool DSP solution for artists going live soon) to create The Record Store, Cardano's first music only NFT Marketplace. Using NMKR's pay tech, buyers are able to purchase NFTs from their favorite artist with ADA, ETH, SOL, and all major Credit Cards.
The greatest part about all of this is that we're just getting started.
There are so many innovative things that are being developed with musicians and listeners in mind for Cardano right now that I truly believe if you haven't checked any of this stuff out... it's certainly worth a few minutes of your time to do so.
The ability to pay in a variety of ways, one on one support from people who've been developing in this space for almost 2 years, and the ability to create diverse and dynamic collectibles make Cardano a great place to check out if you're a musician looking to expand your horizons into web3. We understand that Cardano isn't for everyone, but we think it should at least be worth a visit. Stop by sometime and say hi!