Raquel Gonzalez is an activist and artist from Puerto Rico. She’s not a musician by Western standards, her daughter Laura Jaramillo told me, but rather a galvanizer of crowds, regularly performing at protests alongside her collective.

“If the opposite of commercial is art, she’s a step beyond that as well,” Jaramillo said. Inspired by her mother, and by the dearth of financial and connective opportunities for musicians like her, Jaramillo is building Sona, a new web3-powered streaming service with a model more equitable than incumbents like Spotify and Apple Music.

Jaramillio envisages a world where “the artists who give our hearts a voice can make a living doing what they love, and capture more of the value they create.” First and foremost, her work is motivated to help her mother make a living off of her music – so she can feel dignified and see herself “for the powerful, beautiful woman she is.”

Earlier this month, Jaramillo and co-founder Jennifer Lee – better known as the Grammy-nominated artist, TOKiMONSTA – emerged from stealth mode, announcing a $6.9 million seed round and the open beta launch of their streaming platform, Sona Stream. I sat down with both, eager to understand how they plan to compete in a saturated streaming market, and hopeful that a project planted in motherly love might take root.

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In 2021, Jaramillo and Lee met while flying from LA to Miami for Art Basel, an international arts fair that occurs annually in Basel, Hong Kong, Miami Beach and Paris. On the plane, Jaramillo overheard a chatty couple in their 70s making festival party plans. At the time she was supporting product initiatives for the social decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), Friends with Benefits (FWB), and finalizing the guest list for FWB’s Art Basel party.

“I mentioned that our event was happening because I felt bad not answering this couple,” Jaramillo said. “And Jen basically chimes in and says, ‘Oh, you should put them on the guest list.’ And so I'm awkwardly fumbling and trying to figure out if they have wallets, if they have FWB tokens – trying to play by the rules.”

Lee tweeted about the interaction. From the ground, FWB founder Trevor McFedries figured out she and Jaramillo were on the same flight and encouraged them to hang, thinking they’d get along well. He was right, and they met several times at Art Basel. Soon after, Twitter – again – brought them closer.

Jaramillo tweeted an idea she’d been toying with to help her mother engage with – and benefit from – the blockchain: “I tweeted basically ‘oh imagine music NFTs (non-fungible tokens), but without selling your rights and royalties or constantly coming up with some benefits for collectors,” she said.

It caught Lee’s attention. “That is essentially the biggest issue in music right now – a lot of musicians don't have ownership of their music,” Lee said. “Or if they do have ownership, they don't have enough funds to put their music out or proliferate their sound. Seeing Laura’s [tweet] implied that she had a solution. She proceeded to tell me the base idea of Sona and it really hasn't changed at all.”

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Over the past couple years, Lee and Jaramillo fleshed out that base. The protocol was designed around two major goals: give artists access to a bigger influx of capital than they can get without a label deal or undertaking massive crowdfunding campaigns, and provide consistent revenue for every artist that participates.

The Sona app interface

The process begins when an artist auctions a SONA, an on-chain collectible that functions as a song’s “digital twin.” The first such auction is today at 8pm ET and runs for 24 hours, coinciding with this year’s Art Basel Miami. The auction features TOKiMONSTA’s “Rouge,” one of the title tracks to her Grammy-nominated, 2017 album Lune Rouge. Lee made the record while recuperating from a rare brain condition called moyamoya. Recovery included two brain surgeries and temporary loss of language and comprehension skills, and she was still finding her way back to music while making the project she’s called her most personal work.

The SONA confers no of ownership of “Rouge” (importantly, the artist retains all the rights to the music itself), but the purchaser will get their name on TOKiMONSTA’s profile and, as long as they own the SONA (there’s only one per song), they share in the song’s ‘protocol generated rewards.’

While the SONA sale provides the influx of capital, the ‘protocol generated rewards’ imparts the consistency. When SONAs are sold, Sona takes a seven percent cut – two is for the company and the other five comprise those rewards. Think of them as streaming royalties. The protocol pools and distributes them across all artists proportional to their listening share, splitting the proceeds 30/70 between the artist and SONA holder, respectively. The novel mechanism here is that whenever someone purchases a SONA, they’re also supporting every artist in the ecosystem.

“The way [the system] is designed is that even as larger artists join, or some other bigger influx of capital joins, it distributes it a lot more fairly,” Jaramillo said, “so that everyone in the ecosystem feels it positively when that happens.”  

It’s a similar pro rata model used across major streaming platforms, but notably, these rewards are doled out every two weeks – a far cry from the often months-long payout cadences elsewhere in the streaming world. “The core of why I'm involved in Sona is because of this payment lag that exists in the music industry,” Lee said. “Even if you have a viral moment, you don't even have the funds to then capitalize off that viral moment.”

Jaramillo added, “[Payments] should be coming in every two weeks, right? Give musicians a normal paycheck that they can live off of.”

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Indeed, musicians are people too. We eat and pay rent. But as simple and straightforward as Sona’s system sounds, when existing music rights enter the fray, simplicity goes out the window. 

Global music rights are a labyrinthine system upheld by the supremely resistant major label paradigm. They are immensely complicated – to the extent that blowing the whole thing up is rather appealing. But the majors have proven time and time again that they can capably quash would-be revolutionaries. Gradual progress seems to be the only viable path forward. Wisely, unlike many of the startups in the on-chain music space, the Sona team is exploring a solution that works with the legacy industry.

“We want to respect the rules and the rights that currently exist,” Jaramillo said, “and therefore coded our revenues in a way so that for signed artists, it’s just net new revenue that they can control. If you're fully independent, it can go fully to you or your label.”

From a rights perspective, the variations in circumstance across signed and independent artists come down to who owns the music. Every song has two distinct pieces of copyright – one for the composition and one for the recording. Both pieces have two primary stakeholders. For the composition, it’s the composer and the publisher, and for the recording, it’s the artist/performer and the record label. Each of those can be subdivided if there are multiple songwriters, publishers, artists, etc. Now account for variance in listening format and geography. Quickly, trying to figure out who – and how – to pay becomes an excruciating task.

Like other streaming platforms, Sona has partnered with distributors so that proceeds can flow to existing rights holders. When a SONA sells, revenue is split 50/50 between the rights holders of the composition and the recording. The protocol generated rewards, or streaming royalties, go directly to holders of the master recording rights.

These distributor partnerships are crucial in accommodating existing music rights, and they’re built on trust. Lee’s presence as an artist helps curtail some of the skepticism that accompanies other music tech projects, and her clout – as well as the support of Lewis Kunstler, her manager and business partner at her label, Young Art Records – have helped the fledgling project form many of its key alliances. “All the distributors come from personal relationships,” Lee said, “and a lot of musicians that were onboarded come from personal relationships.” 

“It’s a big group effort,” she continued. “It's not easy trying to get these music execs to understand what we're doing, but once we explain it to them, they're all really excited to see where we're going to go and excited to join our journey.”

Jaramillo added: “Ultimately, making [Sona] plug into the music industry has been such a saving grace because it means there's so little friction for onboarding folks. We’re doing something completely different, but in a way that codes very well with what currently exists. And I think that sets us apart from other web3 crypto startups that just have a lack of understanding of how the music industry actually works.” 

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Still, even with less friction, Sona’s success will hinge on reaching some critical mass. People need to show up to buy SONAs, and the protocol generated rewards need to be large enough for people to care. For the listener, the calculus may come down to convenience: why should I use a platform that has less music and isn’t as robust as Spotify?

Perhaps the answer for many folks is that they shouldn’t, and for Jaramillo, that’s ok. “That's the reason we're building it as a protocol,” she said. “It would be beautiful if Spotify could take advantage of the infrastructure that we're building here. I don't think Sona [Stream] should ever be the end all be all streaming platform. The point is to create this base that things can be built on top of. Underlying that is a beating heart that’s so much more equitable and rewarding for the creatives.”

But Sona Stream does have one especially enticing proposition for the listener: it has no advertising and it’s free to use. That may generate pause for some artists, but artists are accustomed to earning a measly $.004 per stream, so for the vast majority, the difference between free and not free is nominal. And the hope is that net new revenue streams and a more human-oriented platform round out an attractive alternative.

“We have a super opinionated stance that curation and discovery in the platform should be through people,” Jaramillo said. “There is no algorithm feeding you what we believe you should be listening to. There's no strong-stance Sona editorial on what's hot and what's new. Instead, we put a lot of effort into building out curation tools and playlisting tools and encouraging discovery.”

Sona Stream already hosts five million songs and they expect that catalog to triple by next year. They’re also thinking about curator rewards and other features like tipping, stem downloads, merchandise and ticket purchases. These kinds of tools help fill the chasm between massive streaming platforms – which prioritize individual consumption over interaction – and mainstream social apps, where success demands lots of non-musical engagement.

“What's unfortunate about something like TikTok is you have to be in front of a camera and not every artist, myself included, wants to be in front of the camera,” said Lee, who had her camera turned off during our call. “I love watching little parakeets skateboard on [TikTok], but being an artist… that's not what we want to be on.”

On Sona Stream, there’s visibility between artist and curator, which gives artists “an actual face to a name on the curators they can reach out to be playlisted,” Jaramillo said, “taking away this centralized, payola type editorial system that we have in Spotify right now.”

Lee added, “We're bringing back the social context of being a musician without having to put yourself out there in that way. The way that I see kids talk about music nowadays is really sad. They talk about trying to beat the TikTok algorithm. I'm like, ‘what about just making music because you want to make it?” 

It’s a beautiful, long-sought vision. Time will tell if the model works, but it’s the time to try, because it’s not working elsewhere. Earlier this week, Spotify announced it’s letting go of 17 percent of its staff (about 1500 people), its third round of layoffs this year.

Spotify’s struggles are indicative – in part – of a broken music industry, but the company has always been a tech company first, music second. Economic incentives of external shareholders can derail a mission, and in Sona’s next phase, with VC money in tow, they’ll need to tread carefully, and hold close the stories of Raquel Gonzalez and other struggling musicians. While she builds, Jaramillo is also gathering cash to help her mother record her first studio album, at long last. If Sona can champion that kind of artist-fan relationship, they’ll be just fine.

lead image: Sona co-founders Laura Jaramillo and Jennifer Lee