Founded by Richard Harless (pictured right), the former Managing Director of Shazam Germany, Digitalstage.io was developed as a direct-to-fan artist platform with the mission to bring artists closer to their fans with unique and engaging digital experiences, as well as provide artists with better monetization opportunities than are currently available.
Through our digital work with global stars like Kings of Leon, Martin Garrix and James Arthur in 2021, we began to see the market possibilities for Music NFTs. This led us to launch an Ethereum based NFT music collectibles solution. We saw what NFTs could do for artists, but we often received two points of feedback from our artist partners: Ethereum is not as “environmentally friendly as we would like it to be,” and “the gas fees for ETH based NFTs rip off my fans.” This led us on a search for a blockchain solution that could help us address the ethical environmental concerns of our artist partners and eventually to Celo. We decided to work with Celo because of what we see as mission compatibility and also the tremendous support Celo provides for its developer community which then led us to Celo Camp.
What We Built
When we first joined Celo Camp, we only had an idea and a vision of how Web3 could reshape the music industry beyond just digital collectibles and also in connecting to fans and artists in a way previously not imaginable. With the support and guidance of the camp, in just eight weeks, we were able to fully define our MVP product and go-to-market strategy based on market research and our user facing UX. In addition, we even built the backend minting tools that will mint the Celo NFTs for our artists physical and digital products, online and offline experiences, and even support live events and concerts using Web3.
User Impact
Our dApp follows on our original mission and is designed to connect artists and fans using Web3 as the new music medium. This is not a product, but a platform that will use a vertically integrated Web3 approach to bring fans and artists more closely together than ever before and build truly one-to-one artist-fan relationships.
Today’s music artists have no direct-to-fan relationship but using our “NFT everything” approach artists and fans alike will know “who is the biggest fan.” By making all music commerce transparent, we will create a direct link between artists and their fans so that all fan activities, both online and offline, can create participation. The gamification possibilities this provides can create new engagement scenarios that can also allow fans to compete for exclusive prizes, pre-access to new material, and exclusive access to artists by simply holding the most tokens based on a fan’s engagement with the artist.
Memorable Moments
Our journey through Celo Camp has been one of the most rewarding and fun experiences of my almost 20 year career. It really allowed us to push an idea forward and bring it to life and that was truly an amazing experience. The highlight was obviously the Demo Day. The stress and fun of presenting to such a large group and the support of the Upright team is something that I will personally never forget.
We know this is just the beginning of our journey, but the past eight weeks have put us on a new trajectory for success that was previously not imaginable.
For more information, please visit our website: https://www.digitalstage.io/ or follow us on twitter @digitalstageio.
Author: Richard Harless, Founder at Digitalstage