In 2015 the pianist Nils Frahm conceived Piano Day, because in his words, “it doesn’t hurt to celebrate the piano and everything around it: performers, composers, piano builders, tuners, movers and most important, the listener.”

Every year since, the holiday has been held on that year’s 88th day – one for each key on the piano. I’m a pianist and, admittedly, a Frahm stan, so I honored this year’s Piano Day by releasing my own piano track, “Transom” on the music non-fungible token (NFT) platform, Catalog.

The release fulfilled a goal I set in Pariah Carey, a music series that reckons with the woes of self-promotion in a TikTok-colored world. The intention behind Pariah Carey is to provide a transparent framework – full of my own anecdotes, blunders and (hopefully) some wisdom – for others looking to ‘go from pariah to Mariah,’ so to speak.

I chose Catalog because it challenges the extractive logic of the streaming paradigm. In 2021, it emerged as a champion of context – “music is valuable, and how you discover it matters” – permanence – “these records live beyond the reaches of our platform, enabling artists to capture the value of their music for eternity (even if Catalog disappears)” – and a commitment to giving artists 100 percent of revenue from initial sales (artists have earned over $3 million to date). 

On paper, these are massive improvements to a streaming ecosystem that regularly abstracts context, silos experience, obfuscates data and pays people through a tortuous rightsholder system. But music NFTs – and crypto at large – continue to be fraught with stigma and friction. Is the juice really worth the squeeze? This is a guide to those wondering.

Catalog

Throughout its history, Catalog has readily addressed typical crypto stigmas like climate harm and jargon. Up until The Merge – Ethereum’s 2022 upgrade that allowed transactions to be secured using much less energy – Catalog was purchasing verified carbon offsets for all records pressed on their platform. The team also elides typical web3 parlance, advising artists to “use words like collect, cosign, 1-of-1, digital record, or piece instead of buy, purchase, NFT, crypto, or web3.”

“The look and feel of the site immediately resonated – it’s absent of gimmicky vibes and buzzwords,” Athena Yasaman, Catalog’s head of community and curation strategy, told me last year, explaining what first drew her to the project. “The focus is truly on the music.”

Athena Yasaman

Yasaman, who helped develop the popular Fresh Finds playlist when working at Spotify, joined Catalog in 2022. Central to her mandate was decentralizing the curation process, which until her arrival was controlled by the core team. 

In response, Yasaman launched curation cycles, tapping a bevy of music folk to expand the team’s purview, both decentralizing curation and expanding the diversity of Catalog’s, well, catalog. (I had the honor of being named as a curator to the third curation cycle – and wrote about the process here.)

More recently, the platform launched Catalog Radio, “a live, 24/7 broadcast and shared listening space, dedicated to curated programming, special shows, untold surprises and experiments.”

Catalog has long championed 1-of-1 records – i.e. they don’t offer editions, as most other music NFT platforms do. But in doing so, they’ve been plagued by exorbitant gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet. (It’s been akin to shopping for a CD and then learning at checkout that it cost twice as much as the sticker price.)

Catalog Radio is an inventive solution to that issue. The interface is simple, centering the music and album art while featuring a real-time chat, visualizer and “cosign” button.

Releases are still pressed as 1-of-1’s, but cosigns are simple and cheap endorsements (they cost .001 ETH – a little more than three dollars currently) on Base, Coinbase’s L2 (an L2 is a separate blockchain that extends Ethereum while inheriting the security guarantees of Ethereum, and its gas fees are nominal).

Importantly, co-signs aren’t transferable, which means they can’t be the products of speculation. (Catalog takes a 15 percent cut of cosign fees while artists retain 100 percent of the proceeds from the 1-of-1 sale.)

When paired with the radio feature, cosigns are especially powerful. They’re elevated in – and by – the other listeners celebrating the music in the chat, and they can quickly yield a payout that’s equivalent to several thousand streams. Importantly, the artist also has an unobstructed view of their cosigners, and can continue to build around their fandom.

“By cosigning, fans receive a high quality download, their name on the record page, and any other rewards that an artist may choose to provide to their on-chain list of cosigners,” says Catalog. “We’re actively exploring other benefits and rewards for cosigning.”

The Process

When not referred by a designated curator, releasing music on Catalog remains application-based. Gratefully, having thousands of Instagram followers is not one of their criteria for entry. 

One of Catalog’s most fascinating discoveries is that they see “no correlation between an artist's monthly listeners or social following and their success on Catalog” – a testament to our overreliance on vanity metrics. This offers hope to artists who have smaller fandoms – and/or find using traditional social media to be akin to torture (I identify with both).

After getting the green light from the curation team, I pored over Catalog’s robust artist guide, which covers the basics of moving on-chain (and why it’s worthwhile), and includes practical manuals to pricing and marketing your releases.

More information is on Catalog’s web site

Pricing is particularly tough. Catalog’s 1-of-1 model ensures rarity, which differentiates it from both edition-based NFT platforms and more traditional digital spaces like Bandcamp, where artists price an infinite supply of digital downloads.

Shoulders shrugged, I leaned heavily on Catalog’s pricing guide and went with .33 ETH. Here’s why: although technically I did mint a Bob Dylan cover with the FOLK collective last year, this is my first individual on-chain release. And despite being fairly embedded in on-chain music communities, my identity is much more writer than musician, so I decided to expand the “beginner” tier just a tad.

Notably, when an artist presses a record, they can add splits (smart contracts that will automatically split revenue – for instance with producers, co-writers or other contributors), which greatly simplifies – and theoretically elevates – the confounding process of traditional music rights payouts.

Catalog’s upload interface

Artists can also set a resale royalty so that every time someone sells the NFT down the road, they get a cut. This is the work of provenance, one of the blockchain’s superpowers. I followed Catalog’s recommendation and chose 10 percent.

The upload experience itself was smooth – just upload a piece of music, a graphic, a title and some notes. It was, however, expensive. There were four transactions, including the actual mint process and various approvals. They totaled $50 in gas fees – the equivalent of about 15,000 streams. 

It’s important to caveat that Catalog is not getting any of that $50. These are those exorbitant gas fees mentioned above. In fact, the platform is covering associated storage costs, paying to pin 1-of-1 records to the open data management platform, IPFS (they also pay to store cosigns on Arweave, a permanent, decentralized data storage system). 

Compare the process to a YouTube upload, which feels free, but remember your server costs are covered so that they can mine your data for ad dollars. Additionally if someone purchases the track (which does not confer any actual rights or ownership in the song itself), that $50 hit doesn’t feel so bad – .33 ETH is almost $1,200 as of this writing (about 350,000 streams). 

Catalog’s minting fee

That said, $50 is still a lot for artists already getting steamrolled by a streaming machine that pays about $0.003 per play. And $1,200 – while a boon for said artist – is a lot to expect a fan to shell out when accustomed to paying $10 a month to that same machine – to access virtually all the music on the planet. (Because releases are priced in Ethereum, it also means that these price points can be volatile – if I had released “Transom” on the same day last year, for instance, .33 ETH would have been worth $567.)

Cosigns certainly help, but most people don’t have the means to purchase a 1-of-1. Moreover, the 1-of-1 rarity involves inherent trust, as there’s nothing technically stopping an artist from minting the same record on other platforms. Upon upload, Catalog asks artists to agree to terms that they won’t, and that they may revoke access to offenders, but relying on trust means risk. A 1-of-1 record loses a lot of value if it becomes 1-of-many.

Catalog does, however, encourage artists to release music on traditional streaming platforms like Spotify. Catalog – indeed, on-chain music platforms in general – offer an interface that can exist alongside the lean-back experience of streaming. They unlock a non-extractive, ex-platform and more direct fan-artist relationship – one that can be further deepened with future media.

tl:dr

Ok so is it worth it? Well, no one’s yet purchased my digital record (on average, Catalog says, releases take about a month to sell). And truth be told, there’s more friction – e.g. moving on-chain, covering upfront financial costs, risking blowback from crypto stigma – than many artists may be willing to weather. 

But if you have the means, it’s worth doing. Catalog’s ethos, business model, contextual tools and thoughtful approach to decentralized curation are all steps in the right direction. It’s a model that celebrates music and can accommodate “everything around it: performers, composers, piano builders, tuners, movers and…the listener.” 

The more we normalize systems of care, the more pressure we apply to systems that don’t. It feels good to know my music’s first home is in the former.

Until next time, here’s to you Mariah.