Beat Foundry is a platform for releasing entirely on-chain, generative Music NFTs in a format that transcends the artist’s creative vision into the hands of the collectors. Each generative output is unique and made up of musical components such as melodies, drum parts, and interludes, that are composed by an artist and put together on mint to produce an output that sounds curated.
Our music is established on-chain in the MIDI format, a universal, browser native format for digital music. This format does not define the sounds or instruments for the music; just the compositional content. This allows anyone to add their own creative vision to the music through remixing, instrumenting, and producing. Each NFT also will come with the artist’s fully produced interpretation of the piece so that anyone can listen to the NFT despite their ability to produce a song.
When you collect one of our NFTs, you own a full-length song that is made up of random stems composed by the artist. Each output is guaranteed to be one of a kind and sound cohesive.
By purchasing an NFT from an artist, you have a one to one connection with that artist, having a unique composition of theirs that no one else has, as well as a one to many connection with the other collectors and superfans of the artist.
Our artists release their music in our format for a variety of reasons. Many are independent artists that don’t have the means of doing live shows, creating merchandise, or selling physical records. These artists have thriving communities but often do not have enough mass appeal to make enough income off streams to support their art. Creating a collection of unique pieces of music that allows them to connect with the fans that love their music the most and support themselves financially to continue making music.
Beat Foundry currently has spoken with over 25 artists about releasing collections. We plan on releasing collections at a pace of around 1 collection every month and a half.
MIDI is a format for digitally communicating musical content. MIDI describes the content of music (notes, rhythms, tempo, lyrics, etc.) but not the instrumentation or production of the music. It is also currently the music industry’s standard for digital music, is browser native, and supported by major music production interfaces like Logic and Ableton. MIDI is even accessible through Garage Band.
Before each mint, we will be “uploading” MIDI files to the Ethereum Blockchain. Given that MIDI is a compact format, it will not be too costly to store on-chain. Each MIDI file we upload represents one possible stem to be put together on mint to make a song. When a wallet mints an NFT, the smart contract assigns their newly minted token ID a seed that represents one unique combination of musical components. The token URI for that token ID will then produce a JSON metadata containing some information on the NFT like the composer, an off-chain interpretation of the piece for the purpose of listening to the music on sites like Gallery, Opensea, or Zora (the off-chain interpretation of each piece is an iframe player of the hosted audio files and images for the collection, currently hosted on GCP), and the on-chain MIDI output.
Our goal at Beat Foundry is to work with musical boundary-pushers in various genres, allowing them to connect with their communities of super fans and the Beat Foundry community by releasing their music in a unique format.
We will continue partnering with artists and putting out new music on a regular basis.
Yes, each NFT is an entire song from beginning to end.