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Proposal: rollout to thousands of independent musicians

Value of this proprosal

  • No value

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 10 dash

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 50 dash

    Votes: 1 25.0%
  • 100 dash

    Votes: 2 50.0%
  • 150 dash

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 200 dash

    Votes: 1 25.0%

  • Total voters
    4

feedbands

Active member
Hello dash community! Graham Langdon here, founder and CEO of Feedbands. I am completely in love with Dash and want my company that I have been building for the last five years to be a launchpad for Dash into a large and thriving community of independent musicians.

About Feedbands:
Started in 2012, Feedbands is a music streaming service where members (similar to masternodes) vote on albums (similar to proposals) and every month the artist with the most votes gets their album pressed to vinyl and sent to members who get the vinyl in the mail every month (proposal approved!). Artists give up no rights to their music and get their vinyl made.

But we are on another missions as well and that's where dash comes in. Our vinyl record subscription service provides the revenue needed to operate the company profitably, so we give artists 100% of the sales of their music and merchandise on our site. So when artists sell digital music, CDs, Tshirts, posters, etc we simply pass the money directly to them and take no cut. Zero. But you know who does take a cut? Visa. Mastercard. Paypal. Supporting yourself as a musician is hard, damnit. $3.00 in fees literally makes a difference. And that's where Dash comes in with the sub-cent fee. It is a way we can process payments and actually give the artist 100%. Well, 99.99 percent but that's good enough, and probably as close as we're ever going to get.

The Proposal:
Feedbands would like to become the first online music service to implement Dash as the *exclusive* payment solution for music and merch on the site. This means that folks purchasing a digital album, Tshirt, or CD would have to pay in Dash, and the artists would have to accept dash, and that is the only way commerce would happen between fans and musicians on the site. Thousands of artists would need to create dash wallets to accept dash. Any customer looking to purchase music, tshirts, cds, etc. would have to pay in dash. No paypal. No Visa. Only Dash. We'd be a case study. The first of it's kind. A beacon of hope in the dismal sea of processing fees. A sign to internet merchants everywhere that Dash is a way out of said fees.

This would provide many benefits to the dash ecosystem: Lots of new people using dash, a comprehensive rollout to a market segment, and then the publicity generated as a webservice / music streaming provider only accepting dash.

Roadmap:

Phase I: Integration
Our developers would get to work immediately changing out paypal and visa processing to dash only. I don't think this would take very long or be very complicated, and could absolutely be done to coincide with the release of evolution.

Phase II: Testing
We would test on our staging server to make sure it's all working properly.

Phase III: Documentation & Feedback
Technically the documentation would occur during phase I and II. Meticulous and detailed documentation about how we integrated Dash into our service could be helpful to the millions of other online merchants who want to incorporate Dash. We would put this documentation out in the open for anyone who wants to download it free. In addition, valuable Feedback would be provided to the Dash core team to help improve the service and implementation at such a critical time in the midst of the evolution release.

Phase IV: Rollout.
We email our 3000 artists, as well our our 20,000 members/users/listeners about the change, explain that we have finally found a way to give artists more or less 100% of their music and merch sales. We will of course provide instructions for them to complete the Dash integration with their account. We will provide full customer support, online and over the phone, for artists as they create their dash wallets. We also serve as a conduit of feedback back to Dash core team, notifying them of anything our musicians and customers had trouble with that could be improved upon. And we'll get them excited! Accepting Dash will be their first foray into this whole cryptocurrency thing, and we'll hold their hand the whole way.

Phase V: Publicity
What good is switching to Dash as an exclusive payment solution if we're not going to let the world know that one internet startup switched completely to Dash because of the unbeatable the transaction fees. We can be a case study, a champion of dash, public and vocal proof that Dash is a solution to payments and we don't need Visa and Mastercard anymore. I'll give interviews, talk to the press, blast it out to our promotional partners and work with the dash PR teams.

Proposal Amount:
I don't have an amount in mind. I want to see what the network thinks is fair, and if this is something the network would want to support. Maybe you have bigger fish to fry than a few thousand independent musicians. I'm open to anything as I love Dash and want to see it succeed. If Feedbands can help, we're here and ready to start running.
 
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I am a fan of both this and your other proposal. But where are your costumers supposed to get dash? Currently there is not easy mechanism to go straight from USD to Dash. That will hopefully be changing soon, but for now that is the case.
 
Sounds interesting. Regarding the proposal amount, ask yourself how much money you need to make this happen and add 10% to account for volatility.
 
Correct, dash will need to be easy to buy before we flip the switch on the live server. Plenty of coding to do between now and then though.

My understanding is that Evolution will make dash very easy to buy, with an alpha release in a month or two and full scale release within a year.

The goal would be to get all coding done by then and flip the switch once evolution is released.

I am a fan of both this and your other proposal. But where are your costumers supposed to get dash? Currently there is not easy mechanism to go straight from USD to Dash. That will hopefully be changing soon, but for now that is the case.
 
We've got roughly 1000 on vinyl subscription and about a thousand more who make regular purchases not part of a subscription.

One thing you could do is give a 10% discount to each fully paying member that uses dash; A three month campaign would cost $6000 ($2 x 1000 x 3).
 
You need to know how much this integration is going to cost you to complete. Then you can start looking at discounts etc. Then approach the DAO for approval


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I reached out to ultracart, our shopping cart provider, to get a quote on integrating dash.

The thought here is, if they complete the integration for us, then they can simply make it available to the tens of thousands of other merchants who use ultracart.

I received this response:

Hi Graham,

Dash is just another crypto-currency similar to BTC, but less valuable. UltraCart has had an integration with Coinbase for years and the reality has been that few merchants except it and even few customers shop with it. The idea that you're going to get rid of the transaction fees associated with credit cards is not going to materialize at this point in time.

Granted it has some features that I think BTC lacks which may ultimately increase its adoption, but investing the development time to add support for these fledgeling crypto-currencies is not worth it right now. We continue to keep an eye on the crypto-currency market and if they settle down and actually start having customer adoption in the real world then we'll add more. For now, I would recommend adding the Coinbase integration to your account so you can accept BTC which has the largest market cap of any of the coins.

Thanks,
Jonathan
UltraCart


I'm working on them and I'll keep everyone posted. I can't imagine they don't have a price tag.
 
I continued pushing ultracart, and received this response:

Hi Graham,

You've first got to find a gateway that can accept the dash payment and factor that into cash at the time of the transaction similar to Coinbase. No merchant can do real business with these crypto-currencies when they are swinging by 20% some days. That is why you see very little transacting in these currencies in the real world. Who wants to spend their BTC when it could go up another 10% tomorrow. Who can afford to take BTC when it could go down 20% in value by the time you need to pay a supplier in cash? I honestly think trying to make account which is a real business continuing to grow work with only a single crypto-currency is a recipe for disaster. In addition to is one thing, but as the sole form of payment... I think you are inviting disaster. What are your thoughts?


I told them I don't care about the volatility, and that it doesn't need to settle in cash, that we are happy to accept dash and would provide a discount to customers using dash. I am waiting to hear back.
 
Hey Graham, can you try a different approach just to test the waters for Dash Tokens?

Pick one possible partner and ask them if they'd be interested in a crypto tethered 1:1 to the Ukranian currency and let's call it DASH-UK (it may collide with United Kingdom but will deal with that later).

They'll be able to buy and sell products at the current price in fiat without any conversion so they won't fear any volatility or the need to convert prices to eight decimals every moment the currency changes. That's the whole idea for DASH Tokens in every country in the world, to spearhead the digital commerce revolution making it easy for consumers and secure for merchants to participate.

The crypto currency market is already saturated and nobody is paying attention to the immense need to have a crypto pegged to the local fiat for easy and frictionless transactions. What do you think?

Dash Tokens: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/dash-tokens.18408/
 
Hey Graham, can you try a different approach just to test the waters for Dash Tokens?

Pick one possible partner and ask them if they'd be interested in a crypto tethered 1:1 to the Ukranian currency and let's call it DASH-UK (it may collide with United Kingdom but will deal with that later).

They'll be able to buy and sell products at the current price in fiat without any conversion so they won't fear any volatility or the need to convert prices to eight decimals every moment the currency changes. That's the whole idea for DASH Tokens in every country in the world, to spearhead the digital commerce revolution making it easy for consumers and secure for merchants to participate.

The crypto currency market is already saturated and nobody is paying attention to the immense need to have a crypto pegged to the local fiat for easy and frictionless transactions. What do you think?

Dash Tokens: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/dash-tokens.18408/

Pegged currencies already exist:
https://nubits.com/
https://bitshares.org/technology/price-stable-cryptocurrencies/

I wouldn't vote for any of them in dash. They've all been gamed in the past and nation states can use pegged currencies to their advantage.
 
Thanks for the links, more info for my own research and more proof the need exists and nobody has been able to satisfy it.
 
Amazing how people build walls and limit their thinking.

Agreed. I'm shocked that they are actively trying to convince me not to accept Dash like I don't know what I'm doing. Ha!

That said, integrating with ultracart would be a win for Dash. I believe they handle checkout for 50 to 100k ecommerce sites, though that number could be significantly larger. They are reasonable people though and very accessible, I'm sure I can get them to give me a quote for the work required.

There are many popular shopping cart providers that would be great to integrate with of course. I just have an extensive history and relationship with Ultracart and do a lot of business with them so I'm not just some random person off the internet asking them to add Dash, like I would be if I contacted other shopping cart providers.

I'll keep everyone posted. We'll get em.
 
Agreed. I'm shocked that they are actively trying to convince me not to accept Dash like I don't know what I'm doing. Ha!

That said, integrating with ultracart would be a win for Dash. I believe they handle checkout for 50 to 100k ecommerce sites, though that number could be significantly larger. They are reasonable people though and very accessible, I'm sure I can get them to give me a quote for the work required.

There are many popular shopping cart providers that would be great to integrate with of course. I just have an extensive history and relationship with Ultracart and do a lot of business with them so I'm not just some random person off the internet asking them to add Dash, like I would be if I contacted other shopping cart providers.

I'll keep everyone posted. We'll get em.

By all means, if you can help get them onboard then yes. But, no offense, I'd rather have the proposal directly from them.
 
By all means, if you can help get them onboard then yes. But, no offense, I'd rather have the proposal directly from them.
Agreed, the less middlemen the better. Just trying to plug in however I can and share what I see in the landscape.

Though I will take the step of at least compiling a list of high profile targets / shopping cart providers.
 
Music is definitely an area where blockchain is still under-represented. I'll be following your development. Best of luck!
 
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