We Are Not Bandcamp for Bitcoin

One of the biggest challenges in the first year of Wavlake has been describing to people what the heck Wavlake is.

It's a music streaming site.

It's a way for artists to distribute digital music.

It's a way for artists to earn bitcoin for their music.

All these statements are true. But they don't fully capture what makes us different from everything that has come before.

Take a common refrain we have heard (and said ourselves in the early days): "It's like Bandcamp for Bitcoin." Which, to be fair, is also kind of true. And I think this analogy has been a good starting point to help people understand the general idea of our platform.

But this comparison misses a critical component: the fully open nature of Wavlake's music library. This is a key differentiator between our platform and other music platforms that have come before.

A Bandcamp song can't appear anywhere except on Bandcamp. If you want that same song to appear on say, Soundcloud (or any other site/app for that matter), you have to upload it there separately. Bandcamp won't let you share your music with another app. In fact, no music streaming site will let you do that. This is why companies like Distrokid and Tunecore exist: to manage the distribution of one song to dozens of different places, all of which are pretty much exactly the same.

We believe this is unnecessary and a waste of resources.

Wavlake is different. Our songs are not only available on our own site and app, but also on any client that understands our metadata. And because we're using an open standard, that's easy to do. What all this means is that a song on Wavlake can appear on any app – Fountain, Podverse, ZBD... the list goes on and is growing.

And not only can that song appear anywhere. A listener can also send a payment for that song from anywhere, too. All the apps listed above are capable of this.

That is why artists have so much more potential to earn on Wavlake. Instead of diluting their work across a hundred apps and having to scrape together whatever earnings there might be, all those payments can now be received in a single place.

It's like an email address for song royalties.

And wherever a listener might be listening from, you can rest assured their money will be able to find its way to an artist's wallet.

So to be clear, we are kind of like Bandcamp for Bitcoin.

But we are also so much more.