Craig DeWitt, director of product at Ripple, has been working on a personal project for a couple of months now. His mission is to connect digital content creators, such as musicians, directly with consumers to help cut costs.
“When you cut out the middlemen you get lower prices, more revenue to the artists, and more art,” DeWitt told The Block. To that end, he has built a blockchain-based platform called xSongs, where artists can upload and sell their music directly to users for XRP. When an artist uploads music to the platform, xSongs runs a series of checks, including copyrights.
The platform has gone live today in beta form, which means users can buy songs in XRP. They can pay either via the Payburner wallet or any other wallet. Payburner is a noncustodial crypto wallet, also developed by DeWitt, on top of the 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,” DeWitt told The Block.
DeWitt further said that he got inspiration from Bandcamp for
developing the xSongs platform. Bandcamp is an online music company that
allows artists to share and earn money from their music. “They’ve done
an amazing thing and they clearly care about their indie artists who
would probably never be able to monetize without their platform,” he
said, adding:
“While Bandcamp charges 15% plus a 6% processing fee for a total of
+21%, xSongs is a direct to artist model which means that platform fees
and processing fees will always be 0%.”
Despite those fees, fans have paid artists $445 million using Bandcamp, and $8.9 million in the past 30 days, according to its website.