When you think of creator platforms for musicians, there are very few choices on how they can monetize their content. For example, they can stream and monetize on platforms like Spotify or Apple music.
Let us take Spotify, for example, and see what it takes to earn minimum wages as an artist on Spotify. Spotify pays 0.0033 cents per stream. Assuming a minimum wage of $15 per hour the annual income expected is about $31,200. When we back-calculate how many streams it would take to earn the minimum wage from the streaming revenues, at 0.0033 per stream, it takes 865,000 streams per month or about a 10.5million streams per year! That's a lot of streaming.
As of 2022, Spotify has about 11 million artists on its platform. 90% of Spotify's $7 billion payout goes to only 0.7% or 77,000 of the top artists. Even in that 0.7%, only 800 artists earned above $ 1 million annually, and the remaining artists make barely $100,000 or less.
What about the remaining 10.9 million artists, you ask? Well, roughly about 200K users make $1000 per year. That is less than 2% of artists barely earning $1000 per year.
Streaming platforms alone definitely cannot be a source of income to sustain. What should the artists do?
Some artists perform locally, and some resort to teaching music to kids and adults. Of the 11 million artists, only a few are well-versed in pedagogy, and only some can teach.
This is where Kena comes in handy. Kena has built an artificial intelligence music neural engine that can take the content from the artists, simplify the content and teach people on behalf of the artists adding passive income to them.
The best part is that artists can upload their courses and content and name their prices, and Kena pays 100% of the revenue to the artists on sale. Separately, Kena charges a 10% platform commission (or a markup) on the consumer side of the sale.
Through the recent foray into crypto tokens on Avalanche blockchain, Kena has encoded a unique tokenomics in the smart contract where nearly 10% of the total network earnings it charges as commission gets redistributed as a community crypto incentive. The redistribution to all artists is based on their weighted share of the sale.
Kena applies the levers of community protocol for redistribution.
Kena redistributes wealth based on a game theoretical approach. It applies the following levers:
For every $100 sale, an artist makes, they earn a 7% crypto incentive.
Based on the accumulated crypto in the artist's wallet, Kena redistributes 10% of its topline earnings as an additional crypto incentive to the artists based on their current crypto balance.
The redistribution, which is based on the current crypto balance as a weighted average, incentivizes artists to retain the crypto in their wallets to attract more community redistributions.
A spot market will be established for artists to liquidate their crypto if they choose to convert it into cash.
Let's take a scenario where the current crypto balance in the artist's wallet is 1% of the total crypto held by all artists. Let's say Kena activates $10 million in topline gross merchandise value sold in the current year (as in, consumers purchased $10 million worth of goods on Kena).
Then 10% of $10 million or about $1 million worth of crypto gets redistributed to the community based on their crypto balance. So an artist who holds 1% of the crypto balance receives $1000 additional crypto to have participated and created the network effects on Kena.
"Kena's core proposition to create such a decentralized economy based on crypto incentives is founded on the belief that 'the network is the product.' Since the community generates content and engagements on Kena, the community should also benefit from its generated utility. With 300K users, Kena is a true community protocol where we are redistributing wealth based on utility. We are also offering crypto grants of up to $50K for influencers and micro-influencer to create content and move their community onto Kena." Says Freedom Preetham, founder of Kena.