2020 wrap-up and a look ahead
After launching Alpha 1.0 in September 2019, only a few months of normality played out before 2020 brought the weirdest year we have all ever experienced.
Let’s replay Emanate’s 2020 and take a quick peep ahead.
We kicked the year with our pledge for creative freedom. Emanate stands by this pledge, and many musicians from developing countries are already taking advantage of the easiest access in and out of the global digital music industry.
Remix Savaan
Our second remix ever, Saavan’s ‘In My Head’ brought a wealth of new talent, and interest, to Emanate.
Mau5trap Partnership
We formalised our partnership with deadmau5’s infamous mau5trap imprint!
The Big 5
In March 2020, we dropped 5 bombshell news stories which sent $EMT reeling up 250% in just one week!
1: Gavin Parry
2: Emanate Distro
3: StreamCard
4: Seven20 Group
5: Chris Lake
Lockdown
Once lockdown hit, it was time to reflect on what would happen to the music industry, were we right?
Open Uploads
Emanate Alpha opened for self-uploads by midyear
Remix Attlas
The Attlas remix comp was by far our biggest yet, uncovering new talent that went on to be released on the label and one case, signed to a management deal!
Zed.Run
We helped zed.run find 10 unique tracks for their product via a production competition.
Bentley Dean Remix
More mau5trap remix action, this time Bentley Dean got the flip.
RAREZ; deadmau5 NFTs
We closed the year with the launch of our experimental ‘RAREZ’ NFT brand and an insane sale across WAX and SuperRare with the one and only, deadmau5.
2021Looking ahead
We’re in the middle 2x start-up accelerators and investment fund relationships. The first, with traditional start-up coaches, Skalata Ventures, based in Melbourne. The second is with crypto OGs, Outlier Ventures, based out of London.
Governance, NFTs, Liquidity and more
We’re three weeks into our work with Outlier Ventures and things are already getting serious. Weeks 1 & 2 brought more than 30 ‘speed mentoring’ sessions where we met the wealth of talent and experience brought in to help with the Outlier experience.
Week 3 brought a series of workshops including legal, tokenomics, fundraising and community building.
Our vision for 2021 has now been backed up by everyone we met and in the coming weeks, we will reveal our new plans for NFTs, governance and liquidity; all of which will complement platform growth and adoption.
NFTs
The growing interest in NFTs cannot be ignored. Our own experiment with deadmau5 in December was wildly successful and there is already a queue of artists ready to build NFTs into their own mix. Music industry NFT integration is a focus for 2021, on a level much deeper than you might expect.
Ethereum Liquidity
In the last 12 months, we heard too many times that Emanate would be far more investable on Ethereum, instead of EOS. While Emanate needs the feeless transactions of EOSIO there is no reason why we can’t start to look at a cross-chain future. Given the overall lack of development in the EOS end-user, developer and investor communities we have decided to open up to the Ethereum community, via a governance token.
The Governance Token
If you read Emanate’s original whitepaper, you would know that decentralised governance was always part of the plan. But the EMT token economy never grew to a size that could support a DAO and our resource focus has been squarely on product development.
With Emanate now generating revenue, and new investment interest being brought in through our accelerators, the time has come to revisit governance.
It might come as a surprise to some that this will most likely not be done on EOS. Rather, Emanate looks to be launching a new ERC20 token to represent governance for our project(s) and separate out the rewards and governance layer from the utility layer. The new token will be the key digital asset for the running of a new DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organisation).
The best news for Emanate followers and users? EMT holders will be allocated a generous portion of the new token, most likely by locking EMT for a period of time as the DAO launches.
More great news is that emanate.live and the EMT token will continue on and we see these two assets having a symbiotic relationship as new users and new capital flow into the Emanate ecosystem. This will also mean updates to the EMT platform tokenomics in 2021 to support longterm sustainability as a utility token.
Keep following closely as details roll out about the governance token.
A Focus on the Future
Emanate’s past has been focused on solving the major problems that exist in the music industry, and our solution has been focussed on the fixing streaming and distribution. What we have found in that time is that the problem is much bigger, and the solution, therefore, needs to be much broader.
Accelerated further by the COVID19 crisis, it has become clear that the music industry is in another major phase of disruption, one possibly more severe than any before it. The emergence of virtual concerts, the importance of live streams and the excitement of audio-visual NFTs has led us to shift focus looking forwards to opportunities that exist in the future industry, instead of solving the problems that have existed for decades.
The future of Emanate (and the future of music) is more than likely a cross-chain solution and the time has come for Emanate to branch across to new communities. This can only be good for everyone, even those EOS devotees. For the time being, EOSIO makes for as good a scaling solution as anything else in the space and a bridge into new communities will demonstrate that.
Details of the new governance token will be announced in the coming weeks and the token will begin to be rolled in the following months. Stay close as plans develop, as there is something in it for everyone.
THANK YOU!
As we dive into 2021, we thank everyone in the Emanate community, especially those who have been with us since day one. You have our eternal gratitude and we assure you the best is yet to come.
XOXO Sean, Jimi, Trent, Blake and the crew.
