Sync.Land has completed its Project Catalyst milestones
At a glance
- Project: SyncLand / Metaverse & Video Game Music Licensing (Awen), project number 1100272
- Fund: Project Catalyst Fund 11, Cardano Use Cases category. Project Catalyst is Cardano's community-run funding program.
- Status: all five milestones completed.
- What Sync.Land is: a peer-to-peer marketplace where independent artists license music directly to filmmakers, game developers, streamers and other creators.
- The split: the artist keeps 70% of every paid license, and Sync.Land keeps 30%.
- Where it runs: the marketplace is live at sync.land. The on-chain license demonstrations in our milestone evidence ran on Cardano's pre-production test network, called preprod.
- Links: Catalyst project page, milestone module, public repository
Sync.Land has completed all five milestones of its Project Catalyst Fund 11 grant, and the marketplace is open to artists and creators now.
What we promised
Licensing music for a video, a game or a stream has long meant agencies, long waits and unclear terms. Our Fund 11 proposal was to build a marketplace and an Application Programming Interface (API, a way for other software to talk to ours) where rights holders set their own terms, creators license music directly, and payment goes straight to the artist. Each milestone was a checkpoint on that build, and the evidence for each one is public.
All five milestones are now complete. Catalyst's project page and milestone module hold the review record for each one.
Milestone by milestone
Milestone 1: Initialization
We set out the design, the infrastructure, and the timeline for the work. The evidence folder holds the design report, the project timeline and a status report.
Milestone 2: Development
We built the first working version and chose the pilot users. The evidence folder includes a recorded test that mints a license record on the preprod test network, a recorded test of account registration and song upload, and the pilot marketing plan.
Milestone 3: Marketplace Launch and API Development
The marketplace went public and the first on-chain license purchase ran end to end. We also published the API documentation and released a curated part of the platform code as open source under the MIT license. The evidence folder has the launch survey and user feedback report, the on-chain evidence, and a recording of a license purchase on preprod.
Milestone 4: Marketplace Updates and API Launch
This milestone covered the work after launch: five shipping cycles of marketplace updates, a feedback report, and the API in use by software we did not build into the site. The reference application is the Sync.Land dock for Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), the free streaming tool. Anyone can check a license through a public verification endpoint without an account. The evidence folder starts with an index that maps each acceptance criterion to its proof, plus a recorded test and the server play log from that test.
Milestone 5: Finalization
The close-out package: an evidence index, the Catalyst project close-out report, a full retrospective, and a close-out video presented by Ian McCullough. The retrospective also covers the roadmap beyond Fund 11. See the evidence folder.
What you can do on Sync.Land today
- Artists, license out. Create a free account, upload your music and list it for licensing. You keep 70% of every paid license. Browse the artists already there. The sync.land homepage currently lists 249 independent artists and 1,170 songs.
- Creators, license in. Search the catalog by genre, country and mood and stream each song in full before you decide. A free license covers personal, education and non-profit use with attribution, and a commercial license covers monetized work. The licensing page lists the license types and what each covers.
- Streamers, play only what you are cleared to play. The Sync.Land dock adds a licensed playlist to OBS and shows a credit overlay on stream. Its source is open at github.com/Awen-online/syncland-obs-player, and we explained the setup in our dock announcement.
- Developers, use the API. The specification and the milestone API documents are in the public repository. Verifying a license needs no credentials.
Every license comes with a PDF certificate and a public verification page, so anyone can check it without asking us. The milestone work also proved an on-chain license record on Cardano. We are not offering that record on new licenses for now. The records already made stay on chain and can still be looked up.
What comes next
We lay out the roadmap beyond Fund 11 in the close-out report in the public repository. We would rather you read the plan there, in full, than get a summary of it here.
Try it and tell us what you find
The best test of a marketplace is whether people use it. If you make music, list a track. If you make video, games or streams, license one. If something is confusing or broken, send us feedback. User feedback is a documented part of the milestone reports, and it is how we decide what to fix next.
Start at sync.land. Thank you to everyone who helped test it, and to the Project Catalyst community for funding the work.
Ian McCullough
Principal, Awen
Sources
- Milestone status and reviews: the Project Catalyst milestone module for project 1100272, which lists the project as Completed and records each approval.
- The proposal: the Catalyst project page.
- Evidence for each milestone: the docs folder of the public Sync.Land repository, one folder per milestone.
- Artist and song counts: the sync.land homepage.
- Licensing terms and the on-chain record: the Sync.Land licensing page and help pages.