Ever faced copyright strikes for including just a few seconds of Taylor Swift's music in your totally viral school video project? Did you find the perfect Joji song for your transition, but can't possibly buy the rights to use the song without millions of dollars and a legal team? Cadence transcends these boundaries to our content creativity. We want to incentivize both musicians and content creators to work together, in order to bring purchasable high-quality music to the ears of millions.

Welcome to Cadence, the decentralized music buying and selling platform.

What it does

Cadence provides a platform where music creators can upload their compositions and set a price and/or rate in NEAR tokens. Once uploaded, the one-time right to use their music is converted into a non-fungible token (NFT). This NFT allows buyers to use the music only once at a cheap price as it is a single unit price by providing them with an encrypted authentication token. Once the music is used in a video or project, the buyer needs to repurchase the NFT to use it again. Multiple users can purchase multiple NFTs of the same piece of music, leveraging our blockchain technology.

The advantage of utilizing blockchain technology is that music artists receive the profits directly, bypassing intermediaries. At the same time, the blockchain ensures the transaction is decentralized and transparent, and NFT regulations and technology allow for extremely straightforward methods of ownership identification.

How we built it

For our backend, we used Near as we were attracted to its beginner-friendliness and organized documentation. It played a really big part in helping us come to understand blockchain, NFTs, and smart contracts. Jackal was employed to ensure secure peer-to-peer transactions and store the music data. These frameworks were actualized using TypeScript and JavaScript. To generate NFTs, we leveraged Pinata, Alchemy, MetaMask with a Goerli address, and HardHat. Finally, our frontend was created using ReactJS.

There is a frontend-only demo available (since the backend requires actual payment) in the link above!