Chorus - Licensed Mainstream Music for Venues in DCL

by 0xb9d4e75f6cb09d8ae722ea94d5d5286922234da2 (Gary)

Should the following $32,025 grant in the In-World Content category be approved?

Abstract

The goal of this grant proposal is to fund the pilot expansion of Chorus to venues across Decentraland. Chorus is the world’s first turnkey music tech and rights solution for Metaverse platforms. You can license popular mainstream music to your geofenced virtual locations via ready-made tech and curated playlists.

Increasingly, commercial music rights holders are investigating the use of their music illegally within metaverse platforms. Chorus protects venue owners against any DMCA takedowns and removes the burden of royalties and the music industry.

The pilot will cover the license fees for 15 venues across Decentraland and provide 24/7 background music into those venues for up to one year.

Grant size

32,025 USD in DAI

Project duration

3 months

Beneficiary address

0xb9d4e75f6cb09d8ae722ea94d5d5286922234da2

Email address

garyrutland@lickd.co

Description

The Grant

We previously submitted a poll to establish appetite for the service and how the community would want to manage the process: https://governance.decentraland.org/proposal/?id=9b9bc9f0-eb51-11ed-ac2d-876c6fc9416f Feedback was positive and has given us a guide on how to manage the selection process.

Grant Size - $32,025

The grant will cover the setup costs, supply, ongoing management and royalty fees for 15 venues for up to one year of use and 24/7 coverage of background commercial music into those venues. The aim of the grant is to improve the engagement levels in venues across the platform by providing high quality, recognisable music into venues that wouldn’t otherwise have the means to directly pay for this service. If the pilot is successful and there is more interest from additional venues, there would be an additional grant request for further expansion in future.

The $2,135 per venue per year will be used in the following way:

• The majority of the fee goes to commercial music rights holders in order to pay royalties to their artists.
• Around 50% of the remaining fee goes to Lickd (builders of Chorus) to cover the setup of the tech and player along with management and curation of playlists.
• Around 50% of the remaining fee goes to an “umbrella” company to manage implementation for each venue and ensure usage meets the requirements set out in rights holders agreements (i.e. no firearms venues). On acceptance of the grant, LickD will consult with the community to accept tenders from any company that wishes to take the position of Umbrella company.
• Lickd & Umbrella Company will co-own oversight of the music use and ensuring venues stick to the usage policies around venue types and usage.
• Part of the fee will go to the panel selected to approve venues from the application process, we propose this to be around $50 per individual per session required for the pilot which we expect to be 2-3 sessions overall

The Value of Chorus

There is lots of research that tells us selecting the right music for your retail outlet, restaurant, bar or social space in the real world is critical to driving customer or visitor behaviour and engagement in the real world: https://www.lsretail.com/resources/7-reasons-play-music-store\ https://thinkgrowth.org/stores-are-using-music-to-make-you-spend-more-d6c85974b20b\ https://www.startlemusic.com/blog/create-perfect-soundtrack-your-business\ Chorus aims to translate this science and research from the real world into the metaverse by providing access to playlists containing recognisable music and enabling venue owners to create more engaging experiences for their visitors

More about the tech

Chorus is a location based (x,y,x) authenticated music streaming system, where a player that enters a scene that is integrated with Chorus we check that the player is in a permitted location to connect using a combination of DCL signed requests and the catalyst server(s). We continue to check the players position while listening to the stream through heartbeat monitors. When a player leaves the scene or the heartbeat monitors detect that the player is no longer where they're meant to be (i.e. closed browser, internet disruption) than that player is disconnected from the Chorus stream.

More information on our Chorus DCL library: https://github.com/lickdltd/chorus-dcl

Roadmap and milestones

Application & Selection Process

If the grant proposal is approved, we would open up two application processes:

1. Application process for the umbrella company and two members of the DAO community to join the panel that selects venues and the order in which they would receive the service as part of the pilot.
2. Application process for land/venue owners that are interested in receiving the service for their venues or scenes within DCL.

The selection panel would be made of 4 members - 1 member from Lickd, 1 member from Umbrella Company, 2 members from the DAO community. The DAO community members would be voted in via a poll. The panel would meet after the application process to review applications and select venues. The aim would be for the panel to select a set of 15 venues for the pilot that would then receive the implementation before the end of the year. All pilot venues should be set up and live within 3 months of the close of the application process.

Timeline

• October - DCL Fund Application Process
• October - Umbrella Company, Panel & Venue Application go-live
• October - Panel Selection Poll go-live
• November - First panel meeting to select 15 phase one venues
• November - Phase one venue implementation
• December/January - Panel meeting to review pilot and build report to send back to DCL

This proposal is summarized due to technical limitations. To view it complete and vote on it, visit the DCL DAO Governance dApp