Welcome!

A legally binding, 5-year exclusivity agreement has officially been signed between Feedbands and Dash Core.

Someone from Core will be confirming here shortly.

Confirming Dash Core is in receipt of a signed 5 year exclusivity agreement

FYI I have confirmed my identity as Bradley Zastrow, Director of global business development for Dash Core on the Dash forums

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/confirming-my-identity-on-dashcentral-org.23457/

"Bradley joins Dash from American Express where he has spent the last 17+ years in a variety of partnership and finance roles across the globe."

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/welcome-bradley-zastrow-director-of-global-business-development.20569/

sounds great !!

Feedbands, highly inappropriate behavior for you to make comments, to try and influence the voting on other proposals. You should stick to your own proposal.

You have my support. Thank you for you proposal.

I will vote yes, good luck.

Thanks qwizzie. We won't let you down.

A Easy no for me, you can do all the calculations you want, I am not buying, its a 200 a pop price and if I am nice maybe a $50 per person. We may as well give give away for 100 per person. We will have an instant 50.000 new users.

You are completely right. My feeling as well. These numbers are just cooked up..

This is proposal is far from what should be minumum acceptable standards to receive treasury funds..

Estimate total: 28,901 - 41,902 dash acquisitions
Cost of initiative $500,000
Est. cost per acquisition: $11.93 - $17.30

3400 artists currently on Feedbands required to create dash wallets
1500 people at the Feedbands Festival who create dash wallets to spend on beer, t-shirts and vinyl
A percentage of the 875,000+ people who see the performing artists' facebook posts and buy some Dash online. Conservative estimate 1,000 (0.12 percent) - 10,000 (1.2 percent)
A percentage of the people who hear the artists talk about dash on-stage but did not create a Dash wallet at the event: Estimate: 1000
New artists signing up to Feedbands, as a result of ads and PR (80k budget) who are required to have Dash wallets: Conservative estimate 10,000
People learning about Dash from the PR placements who then decide to buy some Dash: Estimate: 10,000
People learning about Dash from the youtube videos of our artists performances: Estimate: 1000
Fans who create dash wallets to try out paying artists in Dash: 1,000 to 5,000
Founders and CEOs who hear about our initiative and decide to integrate Dash into their business: 1 to 2

Are your artists enthusiastic about being paid in Dash? I imagine some (many?) artists might reasonably expect that fewer people will purchase songs if they have to somehow acquire Dash first.

This is true. However, our artists are very excited to earn cryptocurrency and don't know how to begin and don't have the funds necessary to simply purchase it. There are plenty of places for them to sell music for fiat and not a single place on the entire internet to sell their music for crypto. Yes, we are creating a barrier. But we are also compensating for it with a heroic PR and ad campaign.

Quick update, Dash Core lawyers are preparing a legally binding exclusivity agreement that we will be signing immediately upon receipt. Dash Core will then update the comments here that the exclusivity agreement is in place.

Video testimonial from Liliana Urbain, former Pixar employee and full time musician:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCwgs_UBkMM&feature=youtu.be

Exciting announcement coming soon about new confirmed headlining artists.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we've reached out to Matt over at core to ask if we can turn over the wallet embedded in this proposal to them so that they can handle Escrow. We'll keep you posted.

There are many issues with this proposal because of which this should be an automatic NO.

#No proper pre-proposal/discussion: Why skip this important when all proposals go through a discussion?

#Lack of escrow for a big amount($0.5Million), without any history with the Community. ?

#>75% Money being spent to sponsor just ONE event and on things like free alcohol?. This is an inappropriate way to spend treasury money..

Also, For 1500 participants the sponsoring amount should be $30,000 and not $300,000($200 per person for what ?) See other conference proposals.. They work out to be a fraction of the cost..

# Almost no scale when it comes to your own reach. For $500,000 one would expect atleast reaching out to a million users to get any sort of return. See acquisition cost numbers on the dashmaximalist proposal, plane advertising proposal to compare. Your website has almost no serious userbase..

If you reduced the ask to something below 100 dash, went through a proper pre-proposal, spent no more than $30,000-$40,000 on the event(which is fair) or raise it from other sponsors, it would become somewhat acceptable.

At this cost, this looks like we are sponsoring a $300,000 swanky frat party..

“#No proper pre-proposal/discussion: Why skip this important when all proposals go through a discussion? “

That’s just straight up not true. See here: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-dash-sxsw-music-festival.18393/#post-151281 And here: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-rollout-to-thousands-of-independent-musicians.18392/#post-150027

“#Lack of escrow for a big amount($0.5Million), without any history with the Community. ? “

On the day he entered the proposal, the cost of Dash was $872 or so. That’s still a substantial amount of money, but it’s not half a million. You shouldn’t really blame the guy because the value of Dash went up.

“#>75% Money being spent to sponsor just ONE event and on things like free alcohol?. This is an inappropriate way to spend treasury money.. “

The industry under discussion at the moment lives or dies based on the ability to do microtransactions. Bitcoin (or any of the other top 10 cryptos) could never take on this use case because their transaction cost is too high. The whole purpose of selling a beer for a quarter is to prove that Dash indeed owns the micro transaction use case. So A, it’s not free, and B, it’s cheap for this very specific and essential reason.

“Also, For 1500 participants the sponsoring amount should be $30,000 and not $300,000($200 per person for what ?) See other conference proposals.. They work out to be a fraction of the cost.. Almost no scale when it comes to your own reach. For $500,000 one would expect atleast reaching out to a million users to get any sort of return. See acquisition cost numbers on the dashmaximalist proposal, plane advertising proposal to compare. Your website has almost no serious userbase..  “

It’s not just the participants that show up for the conference/festival. It’s all the artists who will be affected by all the shakers and movers at this conference. All the artists affected by this deal will be allowed, encouraged and required to feature Dash on their digital media, so now we’re talking about reaching half a million people at least, not 1,500. The cost per interaction/conversion now falls into exactly the range you are talking about.

The current model of streaming services is a zombie. It’s still moving, but the fundamental economic model will never work. It’s because they have too much overhead and can’t efficiently and profitably do microtransactions. But Dash can…..

https://gizmodo.com/streaming-music-services-from-most-screwed-to-least-sc-1793612699

A number of services directly link artists to their fans, which proves the acute need for a better model: https://www.makersupport.com/ https://liberapay.com/ https://www.podia.com/ https://steadyhq.com/ https://ratafire.com/

As much as I hope they all make it, none of them have the amazing infrastructure advantages of Dash. Better for the artist, better for Dash. The music industry is about to discover that you can only screw over the content creators for so long before something pops.

solarguy

We did hold pre-proposal discussions on both ends and received strong support:

Regarding the festival:
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-dash-sxsw-music-festival.18393/#post-151281

Regarding the platform integration:
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-rollout-to-thousands-of-independent-musicians.18392/#post-150027

It's true we do not have a track record with Dash, but we have a track record with the internet at large and the music industry. Five years of stellar history and not a single complaint about us on the internet. We are not a random individual showing up about whom nothing is known, we are a known, respected and loved organization.

Again, the alcohol is not free. It costs 25 cents, users pay in Dash, and it is used to simultaneously demonstrate the micropayment use case and draw in large numbers of people.

1500 is just the number of people who will get Dash wallets at the event. It does not factor in the publicity of all the performing artists' social media blast which will reach an additional audience of approximately 500,000 people, and additional publicity received from the high visibility of the event, and all the additional artists who will join because of the event. It also does not factor in everyone who will see the videos of the performing artists' sets. We have someone from *Vice* coming to shoot the videos.

The real value in what we are bringing is the artists. It's true that we are still a small startup, but we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building out our streaming platform and we have not yet publicized it widely because it was not ready.

100 Dash would get us the event production and the stage and then we would not have the artists. These are world class artists from around the world with dedicated followings. This event will make waves.

The wasnt a formal preproposal with a budget etc for this. The above are only general posts..

Why not escrow ? This is a substantial proposal..

The sponsorship amount is usually in the $10-12 range / person. Or $20k tops. Your costs add up to $200 per person for a general music event.. This is excessive.. You should charge a gate fee if this is indeed valuable to people..
No brand manager will ever pay this kind of money for an event.

We would gladly escrow and will reach out to core.

Again I don't think you're factoring in the 500,000 Facebook reach of the artists. The 1500 people getting loaded with Dash wallets is just one piece. The other is the social media of performing artists, our YouTube partner TheNeddleDrop with 1.2 million subs, and the videos of performances for these artists that will communicate Dash's advantages. Altogether this will bring in many more than the 1500.

That's awesome, I didn't even see Fantano was associated with you guys. He is one of the only YouTubers I actually watch

Yes, we have an agreement in place with Fantano which will be executed upon successful funding. We've worked with him several times in the past and he has always delivered a massive amount of buzz.

How many people will this bring to Dash?
3400 artists currently on Feedbands
1500 people at the Feedbands Festival who create dash wallets for beer, t-shirts and vinyl
A percentage of the 500,000 people who see the performing artists' facebook posts and buy some Dash online. Conservative estimate 1,000 - 10,000
A percentage of the people who hear the artists talk about dash on-stage but did not create a Dash wallet at the event: Estimate: 1000
New artists signing up to Feedbands, as a result of ads and PR (80k budget) who are required to have Dash wallets: Conservative estimate 10,000
People learning about Dash from the PR placements who then decide to buy some Dash: Estimate: 10,000
People learning about Dash from the youtube videos of our artists performances: Estimate: 1000
Estimate total: 27,900 - 36,900.
Cost of initiative $500,000
Est. cost per acquisition: $13.55 - $17.90

Let me just say that the current revenue model for musicians on the various streaming sites is mediocre to terrible. There is tremendous potential to help artists and very significantly help Dash as well. It will take me a day or so to produce a detailed post about why the current system is ripe for overthrow. For those who can't wait, here is a sample of how bad it is.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/05/26/band-1-million-spotify-streams-royalties/

I still have to poke around in all the nooks and crannies of the proposal, but my first order analysis leads me to voting yes. This use case just screams for a decentralized person to person solution. And if it works here, we can do the same thing for other categories of content producers. I'm thinking we break the knee caps of Youtube next.

Carry on, have fun, win!

solarguy

Thanks for your support and after five years in the music industry this is exactly what we have learned. Artists are struggling, none of the dominant existing music services offer a viable way for artists to actually earn a living, and the fans of these artists truly want to support them monetarily. Even if an artists earns just a dash or two through our platform, who knows what value it will appreciate to in two years time. Artists need to be earning cryptocurrency instead of dollars. It is the missing piece.

"Music startup ditches fiat currency and lets it's artists earn cryptocurrency instead" is the story we'd be pitching media outlets via the high powered PR firm provided for in this proposal.

My concern is the practicality of being an Dash only platform, as nice as the concept is. 5 years of exclusivity is great for Dash, unless your business fails because you can no longer support your platform. What will you do if Dash income is measurably lower than your current revenue model? Can you survive a year or two of low use while cryptocurrency becomes mainstream? I wouldn't be against paying your artists in Dash, and I certainly think that accepting Dash is a great idea, but I think that not accepting USD at the current time will make your position precarious.

I'm glad you brought this up as it is an excellent point.

Currently, we earn absolutely no revenue when people buy music and merch from artists online. As discussed in my video and proposal text, artists earn 100% of their sales on Feedbabds which is a huge reason why artists choose us. We're the only platform that doesn't take a cut. All of this commerce will be happening exclusively in dash moving forward.

Currently our company generates all of our revenue in vinyl subscriptions, for which fiat will still be accepted. Yes, we would fail immediately if we switched exclusively to dash for our vinyl sales. These sales do not involve the artist however, as they happen directly between the buyer and Feedbands.

This unique model is what allows us to offer dash as the exclusive payments between artists and fans, while still accepting fiat for our core business.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. That sets my mind at ease.

Yep. We can really launch this without risk of failing. We've been profitable for the last five years and will be for the next five.

Thank you for your enthusiasm and for considering Dash. I am of the (unpopular) opinion that all high value proposals should be escrowed, therefore I am voting no. Large transactions between parties always need a contract. Since we can't have one, maybe we could pay upon completion. Since this is also not possible, I believe we need escrow at a minimum. It would help if payments (or partial payments) were made after key deliverables are deemed completed by whoever is doing the escrow.

I'm concerned how easily these high value proposals are being voted yes without much due diligence on the part of voters.

We totally understand your perspective and the need for proposal owners to be tied to deliverables.

We will be deploying the entire first payment immediately upon funding to cover all the immediate costs. Deliverables will be presented before the close of voting for January, so MNOs would have the ability to discontinue funding if compelling deliverables are not presented.

Still $250,000 is a lot of money don't you agree? If you were to have this deal with Red Bull for example there would be a very long contract to sign. I know we don't have that at this time but I cannot vote yes on such proposal without some sort of guarantee. I'm sorry.

I treat newly created money as my own and agree 100% with Ryan Taylor on his opinion on unused budget:
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/an-open-letter-from-evan-and-ryan-regarding-dash-marketing.15537/

Agreed. However, we did secure contracts for all vendors involved (Roadway, High Beam, Takoba, AWM) and posted them in the project. These are the agreements we are executing immediately upon successful funding.

Also, in the same letter by Ryan Taylor you posted, he outlined the type of marketing he wants to see dash doing, and this proposal literally checks off every box:

"Here are the areas we feel marketing aligns most closely with our goals:

General awareness: Industry events and trade shows, general branding, and communicating our vision and mission to general audiences

Features: Many digital currency users are unaware of Dash’s features and benefits. Increasing awareness of our instant payments and low transaction fees are examples of messages that can increase awareness for what makes our product unique.

Business partners: Advertising the services of our business partners (assuming they approve of the campaign) both encourages the use of the Dash network and provides incentives for merchants to integrate with Dash and continue utilizing it. For example, advertise that using Dash can you get 15% off Amazon gift cards at Bitcart. We could also advertise to businesses the benefits of integrating with Dash.

Use-cases: Build awareness of specific use-cases, like cross-border money remittance or speed-sensitive transactions."

We still don't have a guarantee between you and the Dash network. I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but you do understand the need for a guarantee that you will do the job? We can't sue you and payment is made in advance (1/2 at least).

Other masternodes might be more flexible with this but in my opinion we cannot afford to be naive with money as we've been in the past.

Maybe contact Core or greencandle and see if they're willing to escrow this proposal for you?

We would absolutely sign a contract with Dash Core for the deliverables and escrow.

I don't even know if Dash Core is a legal entity, they are probably not able to sign contracts. Your best bet is https://greencandle.io/. If anyone knows another escrow service for Dash please comment below.

We've reached to Dash core to setup both Escrow and an official exclusivity agreement

Love this, I'm in..

Thanks for your support!

5 years exclusivity? Now thats exclusivity. Some should take notes. Great project, voting yes.

We thought about offering eternal exclusivity but hey fives years in crypto years is basically the rest of time, right?

Have you or will you sign a contract with dash core regarding the exclusivity? We have had proposals that promised exclusivity and then just went back on their word and without a contract, we could do nothing about it.
You seem like somebody who truly believes in what they are doing but i'd like to see such a contract for any kind of proposal offering exclusivity.

We sign a contract with core in a second. Part of what excites us so much about this is that, as crazy as it sounds, we believe in Dash to the point that we are literally willing to bet our company on it.

I meant to say yes, we *would* sign a contract.

Yeah, probably the equivalent of a century in pre-crypto/internet time. Thats a big commitment.

This Idea is dead on arrival. Funding this is like spending money on a better walkman 2 years after the iPod.

# Nobody spends money to buy individual songs from random sites. Thousands have tried and all have failed.
Its is all Apple Music or Pandora..
Exclusivity means nothing for a business that has no chance of succeeding..

I am also completely against spending most of the $500000 budget on a party, which is what this proposal is, more or less..

Alcohol: $6,000 for 40 kegs ( Seriously? Do you expect us to buy everyone free drinks? )

Lack of escrow for a big amount( Half a Mil), no prior history, spending treasury money on a party with no objectives confirm my NO vote.

The "party" is to create a real world use case for getting and spending dash. We can load 1500 CEOs, founders, bloggers and tech evangelists with Dash. For these people it will be the first time they are spending cryptocurrency in the real world. It gives us the opportunity to communicate it's unique features and benefits.

As for whether or not people are buying directly from artists, you are quite incorrect. In 2016 our single largest competitor Bandcamp sold $200 million worth of music directly between artists and fans:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/daily.bandcamp.com/2017/01/24/everything-is-terrific-the-bandcamp-2016-year-in-review/amp/

So we know the market is at least a $200 million dollar market but if you include artist merch tables at shows and artists own websites we are addressing what is easily a billion dollar market.

Sorry to be so upfront but Market Size numbers are just eyewash. I can come up with a search algorithm and claim that google is a competitor. Your website doesnt have traffic to back this up.

Specific Questions

#1 What are your daily active user numbers, what the revenue you processed last month for artists for albums from Feedbands alone, (not counting any product sales). --> This is the number relevant to dash.

#2 Is it appropriate to ask for treasury money for giving away free alcohol?

#3 You are trying to unload every cost on us without investing anything much. Big red flag. Can you confirm if you are getting some other investments or is it just Dash you are looking to.

All good questions.

Under this proposal, the treasury is not giving away free alcohol. We are selling it, and people are paying in Dash. Of course, to motivate them, we're making sure it is really good beer (craft, local microbrew) and it is really cheap (25 cents). The cheap cost helps us illustrate the fact that transaction fees are less than a penny. These aren't everyday people who have gathered in Austin this week, these are CEOs and tech founders and engineers. They will wonder how a digital currency can complete a 25 cent transaction. It is a perfect demonstration of a use case for micro transactions. Can bitcoin ever be used to pay for a coffee? No. Why? Because of transfer fees. Can dash be used to pay for something that costs 25 cents? Yes. This is why we are wanting to draw them in with the cheapest and most delicious beer anywhere in Austin and sell it for 25 cents. So yes, I do feel this is entirely appropriate. But it is just our opinion. Perhaps Dash does not want their coin being used to purchase alcohol. It is not for us to decide, only to propose.

As for unloading cost, we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last several years building out the platform. We are asking for the funds necessary to implement Dash and then announce the implementation to the world in a way that will create the maximum impact. Every line item on the proposal is to Dash's benefit. No we are not seeking other investment, this proposal is 100% for Dash as this move is to pivot to the only platform that allows musicians to earn cryptocurrency, that the cryptocurrency will exclusively be dash.

Daily users are in the hundreds and yearly users are tens of thousands per year. Of course this is before the massive PR and ad campaign alotted by the proposal to drive increase in users and dash wallet holders. I will have to have our developers run some reports on the amount of transactions happening between fans and artists. Because we pass the transaction directly to the artists' paypal, we do not touch it so there is no easy reporting in a payment processor or paypal account.

Also, in addition to the real world use cases with 1500 critical stakeholders that this event will provide, and in addition to the 3000+ musical groups who will become Dash users, we are also getting so much additional promotion: high powered PR to broadcast to the world that there is now a platform for artists to easily earn cryptocurrency selling their music, music videos of every artists and every set uploaded to youtube with dash branding and feature communication, and Facebook broadcasts from the performing artists communicating Dash's benefits. Many of these artists have large followings. Larkin Poe alone has nearly 300,000 fans on Facebook. Imagine all the youtube videos of them this will create, all with Dash branding, along with every other artist performing, filmed and edited by HBO's Vice Director of Photography.

If we do the math on cost per stakeholder, before any of the ripple out benefits from publicity, youtube videos and internet advertising, we can guarantee the 1500 event goers and the 3400 artists, which totals 4900 stakeholders using Dash. If we divide the entire cost by this number of stakeholders, we get $102 per stakeholder, and again this is before any additional stakeholders from publicity, internet ads, youtube videos, and artist facebook posts which will reach an audience of millions of additional people.

Good energy, good idea. Voting yes!

I agree-looks good, the more we get DASH out there the more we get DASH out there.

thanks! We are ready to throw everything we've got at this.

Just got this message from one of our artists:

I highly recommend contacting UJO - talk to [redacted]. They are a start up music platform that has not launched yet and I have been in communication with them for a couple months. They are making a crypto currency music platform where fans can tip with Ethereum.

This is not the only startup working on a music platform for ethereum. We can beat them to it!

The business model of paying for music tracks individually -- or even as an entire album -- is becoming hopelessly outdated. Am I wrong?

It seems to me that the primary ways of acquiring music files are: A) to simply subscribe to a Pandora or Spotify-like service for a flat $10 per month; B) to pirate full albums for free using Bittorrent; and C) to listen to and/or rip songs from YouTube.

Am I missing something? Do you know of a tech-savvy, young, song-buying market that I'm not aware of?

You're missing half of the equation, and that is that artists need to earn money for their music. Yes most people use Spotify and Pandora but those services pay the artists pennies.

There is a massive community of independent artists and fans who want to support them materially by buying their songs, albums tshirts, etc. Feedbands will never replace Spotify or BitTorrent and we aren't meant to. Instead, we facilitate transactions between artists trying to earn a living and the fans who want to support them directly.

My apologies if my tone comes across as unfriendly, by the way. I appreciate your taking the considerable time you've taken to make this proposal, as well as the substantial fee you paid to make it.

Looking forward to your answers. Thanks.

Not at all, your question is important. We posted an answer above.

The proposal sounds great , just checked your site the traffic looks very low , how much revenue did you make in the last few years ?

Excellent question, allow me to address that both in terms of traffic and revenue. For the 12 months ending November 30, 2017, our traffic snapshot is 43,824 users, 60,341 sessions and 76,288 pageviews. Revenue for the same period was $279,014. We are certainly not as big as bandcamp / soundcloud / spotify, but we are profitable in the music industry (which is more than Soundcloud or Spotify can say :) and we have a very loyal userbase. To be honest, most folks have never heard about us and we've never had the funds necessary to really tackle PR head on. Which also works to Dash's benefit. For 95% of people, it will be the first they are hearing of Feedbands and we have the opportunity to make them associate Feedbands with musicians earning cryptocurrency. Included in this budget is enterpreise-level PR with a firm that counts the NBA, NFL, and Red Bull as it's clients. So we can expect all of our numbers to go up considerably. And of course, traffic and revenue impacts the integration aspect of this proposal, but the Festival component of the proposal relies on the talent we've identified over the years and allows us to deploy that talent as an asset to draw attention.

Good to know , thanks for the clarifying ... All the best .. One small favour , can you help get more music fests to get to dash , we have a ton of money going unused every month, we can sponsor some really big music fests you see

We've considered this idea with DASH as 'Official Payment Partner.' If there's support for this we have relationships with both Legends and AEG and would be happy to engage them in discussion... https://www.householdname.com/promotion

A 'New Member' here so let us know if this is the platform to continue this topic. Thanks!

That's what I'm thinking DashMaximalist.

This is a test to prove myself and Feedbands to the Dash community. Feedbands could actually throw a weeklong festival in the Pacific Northwest with a hundred artists and a hundred vendors and a hundred food trucks and have all the commerce happening in only Dash. That will likely be our follow up proposal after this one has run successfully and we have demonstrated the power of doing this!