Welcome!

Hello Dash Community, 

By offering to pay 10 cents per stream to musicians, we can offer a service that would see tremendous demand while solving a massive real world problem. 

Feedbands is a five year old music streaming service. On June 4-6 we tested a feature where we paid our artists 10 cents in Dash every time a song of theirs was streamed. During that time, we were able to:

• fix some bugs (not all streams were paying)
• test out some fraud preventative features (can discuss in private with MNOs)
• poll our artists on their desired payment frequency
• evaluate the general reception to the feature

Results
During the days that we ran the test, artists from around the world earned small amounts of Dash each time a song of theirs was played. 

• Technological capabilities. Working with over a hundred artists averaging 100 streams per day, we generated over 20,000 payments to artists in real time as their songs streamed. Each payment is verifiable by copying the recipient address from the block and pasting it into the Feedbands search bar.
• Polling results. Our poll found that 50% of our artists prefer to be paid in real time with each stream, with an even distribution after that preferring daily, weekly and monthly payments.
• Anti-fraud features: the few anti fraud features we tested worked properly.
• General reception: The general reception was fantastic. Many artists posted on twitter and facebook about their music and about Dash See here. Artists are excited to earn decent money for their streaming, and at the rate of 10 cents per stream, this experiment paid 100x more than Spotify pays per stream (currently .1 cent).
• Verification: every streaming payment was verifiable in the blockchain by copying the recipient of a streaming payment, pasting the address into the Feedbands search bar to reveal the artist it was sent to. We can go over a few examples in the comments if people would like to test this.

Goals
Our goals through this initiative are to:

• Create an automated, scalable way to distribute dash
• Create a distribution channel that it is relatively passive but not a "giveaway"
• Create a new userbase for Dash: people earning small amounts on an ongoing basis and not as an investment, making their Dash "spendable"
• Pay artists an extremely competitive rate for streaming.
• Create and implement a powerful use case for Dash.
• Get people excited about Dash. 

Proposal
We would like to keep this distribution channel open and flowing to the artists streaming on our site and welcome more artists into the program. There are still many elements in this equation that need to be figured out, so we are only asking for enough money to keep the channel turned ON for a month, and a small development budget to build out some features that were requested (daily / weekly payment batching, facial recognition / identity verification checks for new artist signups).

Requested budget:
95 Dash: to be distributed directly to artists with every transaction and recipient publicly verifiable
30 Dash: development budget
5 Dash: proposal reimbursement

Note: we are aware it is a very tight month. If this proposal has support but does not pass due to budget restrictions, we are happy to resubmit next month. However, we wanted to give the network the option to turn on this distribution channel beginning July 1, hence the proposal this month. With this budget we can turn the feature back on and adequately pay for current volume. 

Benefits to the Dash Network:

1. Distribution. Getting Dash into more people's hands is an important task for the network to undertake, as it creates network effects. Many people believe that Bitcoin is not primarily a currency, but a network effect. 
2. Terrific PR. Paying artists 100x more than Spotify and "fixing" the "broken" streaming economics is a tremendously newsworthy endeavor. Dash can get that attention, or someone else can. 
3. Enthusiasm and Excitement. The musicians who will be earning this Dash will feel tremendous goodwill towards Dash. You can already look at some of the twitter posts people have made about this. People are EXCITED and RECEPTIVE. See here. 
4. A new type of user in the ecosystem. Up until now, most of the people who have Dash have purchased it probably do not want to spend it. By allowing lots of people all over the world to earn small amounts of Dash, we have a new type of user in our ecosystem: someone with small, disposable and spendable amounts of Dash. 

Sustainability:
We have a number of ways that we plan on reaching sustainability with this initiative, including selling advertising and subscriptions. We do not plan to rely on Dash treasury funding forever, but hope to eventually create a business where we are purchasing the Dash to distribute. This is a goal and a hope and something we will be working towards, but there are no guarantees we will be able to achieve it. It is an experiment in distribution at this point.

In fact, one sustainability initiative is already live: Dashfair.com where are our artists can take the few dollars they have made streaming and buy music gear like guitar picks and instrument cables and also hundreds of household basics and pay in Dash without going into fiat. We are going to be allocating 100% of the profits from Dashfair back into the streaming payout pool without first converting to fiat.

Managing expectations with our artists
Currently we are telling our artists that the Dash per stream is not guaranteed in any way and just something we are experimenting with. There is no guarantee any stream will be paid or that payments will be available for any specific period of time or on any specific days. It is all purely experimental at this point with no expectations.


Earning crypto is the next phase of crypto
Bryan Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, famously tweeted that most people who have entered crypto are investors, and the next phase of the crypto space will be ignited by people earning crypto instead of buying / investing.

We believe Dash needs a real and tangible strategy to help many people around the world to earn small amounts that does not involve the technical and financial challenge of mining.

Verifying transactions
For blocks where our payments occur, you can copy paste the recipient address into Feedbands search to see the artist it went to. Let's do an example together:

The following block contained some of our streaming payments:
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/block.dws?881975.htm

• If you look for transactions in the amount of .000322 this was us making payments to artists. 
• The first such transaction in the block was to the recipient XxzDgk1e4bpL3LMTM5h57SJv4ecRe1pJCS
• If we paste that recipient address into the search bar on feedbands.com we can see the artist is "The Movement"
• 100% of our streaming payments are verifiable in this way.

Newsworthiness:
Using the blockchain to pay artists 100x more than Spotify would be one of the most newsworthy things to happen in the music industry this decade. We would seek to seize that moment and opportunity for the benefit of Dash.