FFM Publishing

Inspiration

Any good app is designed to solve a problem. In that light, web3 promises a great deal when it comes to media industries––especially in countries where those same industries are centralized by the state and used to damage freedoms of speech. In other words, this technology has a dual benefit:

1. it amends financial, legal, and ethical problems in the entertainment industry today. That's a domestic issue, primarily.
2. it amends political problems wherever––in the world at large––music is also a form of free speech or protest. That's an international issue.

Our app addresses both of these matters, using the example of today’s Russia, where unforgiving government control over the press and music-making leads in 2023 to frequent, unjustified prison terms for writers and artists. If those same people are able to use decentralized tools, however, then they can clearly operate with greater liberty, thanks to greater anonymity, self-regulation and even the opportunity to make a living free from censorious legislature.

The Russian government has essentially closed down all independent media since Spring 2022 and––in the middle of an unjustified war––has used bogus claims of “fake” reporting or “treacherous” lyrics to hound hundreds of thousands of people from the country over the last twelve months. Prison sentences of ten years are now common, designed to scare those who still oppose the war into silence. Songs in this setting becomes forms of news. Songs are newspapers and music becomes a form of journalism.

Web3 tools can do a great deal to nurture both decentralized, independent business (irrespective of one's location) and, therefore, individual liberty also. Both journalism and music are powerful forms of protest––but they need the the technology to make that protest both safe and, ideally, a way of still surviving financially.

What it does

The app, in essence, turns music files into NFTs by deploying a new contract for the user and then minting songs as non-fungible assets to be traded on a marketplace. Our contract currently only supports one-time transfers, which means users can sell their music as a one-time transaction. However, we have plans to offer an additional ERC1155 contract in the future, which would allow users to sell copies of their albums.

It hopefully goes without saying that although the app is designed to respond to a specific time and place (Eastern Europe today), the same functionality can––indeed, will––be just as useful in helping to democratize America's music industry with fairer, artist-defined streaming payments, superior copyright protection, and so forth. We just happen to be testing the tool in a very demanding context where freedom of business has morphed into the dangerous freedom to even think.

How we built it

The app is constructed with smart contracts written in Solidity, while the front-end has been built using JavaScript and a Moralis SDK. The workflow gradually migrated from a reliance on API calls to the consistent use of a relational database. This allowed for improved load times and for users to both view and listen to albums on multiple chains without burdensome authentication.

Challenges we ran into

One of the most puzzling issues was a result of using the keyword indexed for a string emitted from an event within the smart contract. This produced the unexpected behavior of emitting the result of the Keccak256 hash applied to the UTF-8 encoded string, instead of the expected value, causing some minor delays in the process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The app was designed to be both simple in design and, just as importantly, to have a clear application in the outside world. As suggested, that application is twofold.

1: It, within the context of the United States, helps to solve a pressing financial issue caused by the gross centralization of music streaming, leading to miniscule payouts. If NFTs are used not (only) as collectibles, but also with a fuller realization the underlying technology, they grant independence from those centralized and avaricious corporations. NFTs give artists a chance to produce, tokenize, distribute, and sell the results of their creative labor. And, aggregated as DOAs, isolated NFT minters can become healthy regional or genre-specific scenes to oppose the unfairness of the status quo. They become free communities.

1. Decentralization need not be financial, of course. It can also be legislative. Hence the parallel with a different country and a different purpose during wartime, in order to oppose authoritarian powers. The tool we have made can be emptied of its content and used to aid musical freedoms of self-expression anywhere around the world.

What we learned

How to successfully build out a prototype platform that allows users––especially newcomers––both to deploy album smart contracts and mint individual songs with zero-coding-knowledge at the click of a button. The biggest, most enduring barrier to anything on-chain or decentralized is complexity. We have endeavored to remove that bewildering level of complication, since the democratic potential of NFTs, blockchain etc. is significantly reduced if the general population cannot understand how to use it! Simplicity, therefore, is key.

What's next for FFM Publishing

1. To text the tool into the hands of students. This month we are hosting a bootcamp at UCLA for close to 300 journalists and musicians around Russia, where this same app will be introduced and soon put to good use where it is needed most: https://www.pacificsv.org/web3

2. Over and above that two-week event, an undergraduate class has been formed and approved at UCLA to teach precisely these principles –– and introduce this technology to students who would otherwise be daunted.

3. The fundamental technologies applied here to sound are equally applicable to the delivery and publication of text files. So a decentered newspaper is the next goal, something that will aid regional journalism all around the country.

Built With

• javascript
• moralis
• react
• solidity