Craig DeWitt, director of product at Ripple has built a dedicated platform for musicians and artists. The platform dubbed “xSongs enables artists and musicians to sell their music in XRP”.
xSongs Connecting Musicians Directly to Consumers
DeWitt considers xSongs as his personal project and has been working on it for a couple of months. However, he said that xSongs will cut out the middlemen between digital content creators and end consumers. More so, he is enabling musicians and artists to keep “100% of revenue”. With xSongs, artists can upload and sell their music directly to users against XRP. It was also stated that as soon as artists upload music on xSongs, the platform will then run a series of checks that also include “copyrights”.
Ripple has been working to bolster the XRP ecosystem either by funding for blockchain projects or by integrating XRP as a payment form. The nib of the matter is that the XRP cryptocurrency is profoundly known for its speedy settlement of transactions, presumably within 4 seconds. Nonetheless, consumers can buy songs by paying XRP which can be payable using Payburner noncustodial crypto wallet or any other wallet. Notably, Payburner is built by DeWitt on top of XRP ledger.
“We’ve built a wallet experience designed to allow artists to accept payments from anywhere in the world and for buyers to have that ‘one click’ experience anywhere on the web,” said DeWitt.
While he has said that he is personally funding the project, he also mentioned that he is currently looking to “monetize” the platform. He has personally funded about 10,000 XRPs which currently worth around $1970. He elaborated that;
“I’m personally covering the costs…I think when you build something that people love, then monetization stuff will take care of itself in time.”
xSongs is currently available in the beta version. However, the beta version already covers around 100 artists and about 500 songs on xSongs and moving forward DeWitt intends to bring at least 1000 artists and 10,000 music sales by the second half of 2020.
“Once we have a following and are seeing some real scale, we’ll start adding the same kind of artist-centric marketing and content that Bandcamp offers today,” DeWitt told The Block.