Logs and Data Backpacks: How RAC and Jack Spallone's Oscillator Is Trying to Fill the Social-Music Void
The Factory.fm app is hoping a focus on open source code and avoiding the music licensing quagmire will lead to elusive success in the music social graph-o-sphere
Back in the spring of 2020, I was building a social music app. It was a community layer on top of existing streaming services, rooted in human-based discovery. We were trying to create a digital experience that better connected people through music.
Part of that process was collecting user sentiment – tapping into existing communities to better understand pain points and existential ills. One such strain was the plight of the streaming era artist, who’s forced to endure extractive digital platforms while earning a measly $0.004 per play.
“How do we create a healthier music ecosystem that empowers independent musicians financially?” we asked, posting the query to various subreddits.
Hundreds responded, and while a few angry Redditors chastised us for breaking with Reddit’s anti-spam decorum, most were thoughtful commiserators already considering this question. “Streaming has really commoditized music into a background feature,” wrote ‘ToHallowMySleep’ in the ambient music subreddit, “so much so that people don't curate collections, often don't even actively choose what to put on.”
“I run two record labels and in my opinion,” added the user ‘SketchesOfSilence,’ “something has to give.”
‘SketchesOfSilence’ and I got to chatting. In obscuring behavior, we observed, streaming platforms remove opportunities for shared meaning. They force us to gather on exploitative social platforms detached from the music itself, hindering the Internet’s vast potential to cultivate serendipitous web encounters – like the one that brought us together. Two years later, ‘SketchesOfSilence’ – now called Mark – became my co-founder.
The Factory app
Similar circumstances brought together Jack Spallone and André Anjos (better known as the Grammy-winning artist, RAC). Both longtime trailblazers in the on-chain music world, the duo is now building Oscillator, an open protocol that champions interoperability and data.
At the project’s center sits the artist-fan relationship, and a new social music app that promises to “deepen your connection to music,” and return context, depth and social features to the fore. Amidst a graveyard strewn with projects attempting to cross this music-social divide, will Oscillator be the one to finally bridge the gap? I sat down with Spallone and Anjos to find out.
This tale, too, begins on Reddit.
In 2017, Anjos won the “Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical” Grammy for his remix of Bob Moses' "Tearing Me Up. That same year he started paying attention to Ethereum. “I believe it’s going to revolutionize multiple industries, including my own,” he wrote in a post to the ‘ethtrader’ subreddit. “I'm reaching out to this community because I would like to release my work on the Ethereum network.”
“I reached out to UJO music and have not received a reply,” Anjos added, “so I figured I'd try here.”
The now defunct Ujo Music project was part of the Ethereum-based software company, ConsenSys. It was bleeding edge. Dubbed the “crypto Bandcamp,” Ujo’s team worked with the artist Imogen Heap to sell a song with splits way back in 2015 – before the Ethereum Mainnet even went live. Spallone worked for the company as a product manager.
"What was funny is that [Ujo Music] didn't see my email because it came in as ‘RAC,’ which was the internal ConsenSys [term for] ‘resource allocation committee,’” Anjos told me, laughing. “It was something they were actively ignoring."
But the Reddit post “cascaded into working and meeting Jack,” Anjos said. And together, RAC and Ujo put out EGO, the first album ever released on Ethereum. “It was just: contract, deposit ETH, get Zip file,” Amjos said. “It was very simple."
"We split payments between Andre and his label Ninja Tune,” Spallone added. “We got Ninja Tune onboarded to crypto in 2017."
It was the beginning of RAC’s ride at the vanguard of on-chain music. In 2020, in conjunction with the creator-friendly non-fungible token (NFT) protocol, Zora, he released $TAPE, which became the most expensive cassette of all-time. Later that year (also with Zora), he launched the $RAC token – one of the first instances of a social token.
Meanwhile, Spallone left ConsenSys and became the head of product at HIFI Labs, a creative incubator and artist mentorship collective. Anjos worked with HIFI in 2022 to launch racOS, a web-based home that linked all $RAC holders.
Later that year RAC and HIFI released musicOS, “an information, analysis, and social layer on top of the Web3 Music ecosystem,” reads the project’s manifesto. “We are developing pieces of a grand ever-changing tapestry that hints towards a future where there will not be one platform to rule them all.”
In 2023, RAC and HIFI Labs teamed up again to release Cult Pass, a dynamic membership that visually changes and morphs based on what is in your wallet. The pass offers access to exclusive content, experiences and other benefits.
“It’s a way to take ownership of our community. It’s a layer above social networks,” Anjos said of Cult Pass in an interview with Decrypt. “It’s not always about the ‘thing.’ It's about belonging to something.”
Across these projects, there’s a common language of belonging, and an enduring pursuit to identify that ‘thing’ that can connect the pieces – without being “one platform to rule them all.” “Throughout all these experiments that [Jack and I] had been working on,” Anjos told me, “we were always working on, ‘how do we connect artists and fans?’”
"Jack and I had always wanted to start something,” he continued. “And then on a personal level, Jack had a baby. Not far behind I also had a baby” – a child whose grandparents are Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger – “and we were just like, ‘what should we do now?’
“We should start a company,” he concluded, wryly, “cause that makes sense."
Last year, Spallone and Anjos incorporated Oscillator. It arrived quietly at first, via a simple manifesto on a simple landing page.
“We, the undersigned, see a world of fragmented artist and listener relationships,” the manifesto begins. “Community is strewn across the web. Comments. Threads. ‘Is attending.’ 25,786 saved this playlist.”
“Oscillator will offer something others can’t,” it continues, “a place that values music over metrics, community over competition.”
Anjos (L) and Oscillator technical co-founder Carl Fairclough
The duo harnessed that vision to raise pre-seed funding from partners like Robot Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, ConsenSys Mesh, Seed Club and NOISE DAO. Soon after, they brought on technical co-founder Carl Fairclough, who had worked with Spallone at ConsenSys.
In March, Oscillator’s first app arrived. Fan Score riffs on Cult Pass, parsing a wallet’s on-chain interactions with a given artist to generate a score. Said score is then subtly gamified by presenting it alongside other wallets’ scores.
Next came Poke, a simple app where you select your eight favorite artists. If you have matching favorites with someone else, you can “poke” them. It’s a nod to the social mechanics of yesteryear – namely Myspace’s “Top 8 Friends” widget and Facebook’s “poke” feature.
The big idea, though, was the Oscillator Protocol, a decentralized music social graph built with open data. “Spotify, Instagram and other web2 companies already capture a lot of this information, but they keep it to themselves, use it for advertising incentives, or release limited versions on APIs that could get rugged at any time,” Oscillator wrote in a May blog post. “We're doing it differently. All the information lives on Oscillator – a hyper-optimized, open data protocol for music data.”
The vision was sound. Imagine your data – in aggregate, the pieces of your music identity – seamlessly following you around the Internet. You could ‘like’ an artist on one app, listen to their music on another, buy their merch on a third and have all that value accrual represented in a single profile. Despite the conceptual grandeur, though, they found it wasn’t quite tangible enough.
“After six months of exploration,” Spallone wrote in a subsequent blog post, “we've realized the market isn't quite ready for a full protocol implementation. So, we're adapting our approach.”
They needed an app, they decided. So they built Factory.fm.
Currently in private alpha, Factory is a social music app for logging your favorite music. Notably, the emphasis is on the social component – not the music playback. “The simplest way that we explain it is if you've ever used Letterboxd or Goodreads, it's basically that but for music,” Anjos said.
The logic is, you don’t go to Letterboxd to watch a film. You don’t go to Goodreads to read a book. In Anjos’s words, it’s a “review social network.”
And there are practical considerations for prioritizing the social graph. “If you touch music catalog, you're at the mercy of the incumbent industry – you know, copyright,” Spallone said. “There’s government-mandated control over that asset class and they guard it pretty closely. It's notoriously a very litigious industry.”
Working with digital music rights is a convoluted slog. Last year I wrote 9,000 words on that copyright-rooted litigiousness, which has long precluded innovation across the music industry. The tl;dr is: if you don’t own the rights and your ‘thing’ disrupts the prevailing hegemony – which does own the rights – to their detriment, you’re toast.
It took Twitch – an Amazon-owned creator platform with a quarter billion users – four years to secure all the music licensing they needed to support their recently released DJ program. Accomplishing that as a resource-strapped startup is impossible.
Via Spotify integration, Factory does offer playback on the app’s web version (and there are plans to diversify streaming sources), but the project’s core domain is something not controlled by the incumbent industry: open data.
“Building with open data is an untouchable layer above the music,” Anjos wrote. “We’re working with something they don’t own, so there’s an open runway where we won’t run into existing rules and regulations.
“Historically, platforms own the relationship between artists and fans — they own every like, every follower, every pre-save,” Anjos continued. “We want to show what’s possible when that data is user-owned and open across different platforms.”
Last week, Spallone led me through a walkthrough of the app. Our session was streamed live to Twitter – part of Oscillator’s effort to “build in public.” Over the course of an hour, Spallone prompted me to explore the feed, post music and perform various other actions.
Throughout the session, he asked for my feedback, looking at the app through my eyes and expectations. He also revealed a new product feature – user mentions in comments – and when I logged my first album (right now only albums – not tracks – can be shared), Acabou Chorare, by the Brazilian band, Novos Baianos, I watched in real-time as folks engaged with my post.
Right now, 400 people are testing Factory. Spallone told me some users are “spending hours on the app on their own accord.” The team plans to launch a mobile app at the end of the year or in early 2025, and they intend to expand the testing in the coming weeks.
“We’re very much in the mindset that Factory actually is the ‘thing,’” Spallone said. “Forget the architecture that we came up with, where we solved all those requirements that we thought we needed to hit.
“If that architecture is spot on, great – we'll be very excited to revisit it when the time comes,” he continued, referencing the Oscillator Protocol. “But I think what we need to do is celebrate the value propositions of [our] North Star – permanent profiles, [and giving] artists access to their relationships. Create an experience that people actually want to use and fills a void.”
Indeed, that void – i.e. the absence of a digital social space dedicated to music – has existed for too long. And while Oscillator has one of the most capable teams of those who have attempted to fill it, they’re far from the first to try.
Writing this piece has been a trip down memory lane – with eerily familiar stops along the way. Twelve years ago, naive and fresh out of college, I launched an Indiegogo campaign to build “an unpretentious music review website that will allow music lovers to become more intimately engaged with the world of music.”
Many years later, building alongside the co-founder I also met on Reddit, it eventually became a social music app. We even launched on Product Hunt as soon as the ‘user mentions in comments’ feature became available.
We bootstrapped a functional app, with Spotify and Apple Music integrations, hoping also to skirt the stifling guardrails of licensing and copyright. And as we built, we became increasingly aware that we were part of a long lineage of similar attempts. Behind us existed a litany of discarded or underused social music apps that had carried that honorable torch and ventured into the darkness. This Is My Jam. Rate Your Music. Currents.fm. Humit. Deepcut (formerly Turntable.fm), Undrtone.
Back in 2020, I spoke with Charlie Kaplan, the CEO of the defunct, VC-funded social music app, Cymbal – one of the most successful attempts thus far. They built a sleek connective experience with tens of thousands of users. Kaplan told me there was at least one marriage facilitated by the Cymbal app. But at the end of the day, there was one piece of feedback he kept hearing: “I just wish all of my friends were on here.”
Unable to bring them all aboard, Cymbal eventually folded.
It’s a familiar fate. But it’s not for lack of trying, or for lack of want. Fans continue to implore Cymbal’s erstwhile builders to bring the app back. And in June, Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover tweeted, “I'm surprised there's no music-centric social experience online at any meaningful scale.”
But the reason these things don’t stick “is pretty simple,” wrote the web3 thought leader and Factory app co-founder, Ben James, who wrote a blog post around Hoover’s comment. It’s death by endless copyright negotiations or the loss of access to the platforms that have already done it (e.g. Spotify).
“Our approach at Oscillator is to avoid the slow rug (by limiting our exposure to music copyright),” wrote James, “while building the defense against fast rugs (by creating a shared global state for music data).”
It’s that “shared global state” we should put our hopes in. Because perhaps the problem this whole time is that we were all competing for the same friends. Central to the madness of centralized, VC-funded social apps is the growth-at-all-costs scheme. Become another enshittified platform that wedges itself between users and artists and siphons value from both sides.
Factory, though, is seated atop a vision of data portability, and an open protocol on which other developers can build a suite of complementary applications. From app to app, you’ll be able to bring your data with you. It’s a kind of “data backpack,” as James wrote.
Questions remain, of course. Can Factory succeed without resorting to mechanics of scale that so often dilute mission-oriented projects? Can they really gather all of our friends?
Time will tell, but in order to succeed, they don’t have to. Factory just needs to remind us of our pent-up love for music, which – I believe – is lying latent and eager at the bottom of our well-trained “music as background feature” minds. If they can do that, and inspire others to build adjacent spaces on the forthcoming Oscillator Protocol, perhaps there’s hope in this long battle against the empire.
“Our ability to coordinate on shared infrastructure will be our defensibility against incumbents,” the Oscillator team wrote in “Building An Open Music Ecosystem, Together.”
In the essay, that line is repeated – and emboldened – twice. After the second instance, the post concludes: “Collectively, we can’t be disrupted or acquired or turned off.”
lead image: Spallone (L) and Anjos on stage in Brooklyn, 2018