Rewarding Builders
If we're going to change the way music is streamed, discovered, and paid for, we're going to need a lot more ideas being tested out in the wild. To encourage this, we want to evenly share rewards with the builders of these ideas
In the last year, we've seen some awesome, new music experiences grow out of Wavlake. Experiences like podcasts where the artists featured can get paid. Or where listeners can send a micropayment in bitcoin to an artist for a song that's shared on social media. And while all of this has been so great, we still think it's just scratching the surface.
Which is why we're launching a preview of developer splits today (along with a developer API), which pays a share of earnings to anyone who builds new products using the Wavlake library.
Here's the deal: this ecosystem of open music integrated with Lightning payments is still very niche compared to the way most of the world finds and consumes its music. And while we've seen some really promising ideas and growth over the last year, we need more experimentation in order to see what else is possible. Because we ultimately want this concept to become as normal as streaming is today.
Our goal with these developer splits is to encourage builders to start coming up with some new ideas for exploring this new frontier. It could be something as simple as a site that showcases electronic music and highlights trending artists. It could be an app that lets users mix songs into videos and share any earnings with the artists. Or it could be a better version of our own Party Mode.*
Really, it could be anything.
In short, we want to see what you come up with. And we want to better understand how we can support the future development of music services that improve the listening experience for music lovers while supporting artists' livelihoods at the same time.
For this initial launch, we'll be splitting our fees with developers 50/50. That means developers will receive 5% of all payments to artists that originate from their app. Wavlake will receive the other 5%. Artists still keep 90% of their earnings – that remains unchanged.
In order to help any builders out there, we're also publishing an API which should make it easy to search and access our catalog using some basic REST calls. We're publishing this API with what we think are the bare essentials to get started, and plan to develop this further as we see more usage and feedback. Please let us know if you'd like to see any data we're not providing.
To participate in the developer splits preview, you will have to contact us for the time being. We plan to open up the registration process down the road when we've had some time to work out any issues.
We're really excited to see what you come up with. Let's get building.
*Hats off to NotBiebs for helping us test out these new splits. His Wavlake Playlist Party app is earning for him right now, so go try it out! Check out the code example here.