The director of product at Ripple, Craig DeWitt, has been working on a personal project for a couple of months now. His sole mission is to connect digital content creators such as musicians directly with consumers to help cut costs. In an exclusive interview with The Block, he told that when you cut out the middlemen you get lower prices. As a result, it will create more revenue for the artists and encourage to create more art. Keeping this fact in mind, the Ripple executives have built a blockchain-based platform named “xSongs“. This is where artists can upload and sell their music contents directly to users and in turns gain XRP. When artists upload music to this platform, xSongs runs a series of checks including copyrights. The director of the project said.

How It’s a New Year Gift from Ripple for Music Artists?

xSongs, the blockchain-based platform, goes live in beta form on 1st January 2020. This means users can now buy songs in XRP. However, users have the option to pay either via the Payburner wallet or any other wallet depending on their choice. Payburner is a noncustodial crypto wallet on top of the XRP ledger which is also developed by DeWitt.

Answering the question, DeWitt told that the Ripple executives have built a wallet experience designed to allow artists to accept payments from anywhere in the world. And buyers get that one-click experience anywhere on the web. Furthermore, he said that he got the inspiration for developing the xSongs platform from Bandcamp. For those who don’t know Bandcamp, it’s an amazing online music company that allows artists to share and earn money from their music content. Adding to these comments, DeWitt said ” the platform has done a unique thing and they care about their indie artists who can’t able to monetize music contents without this platform.

The best thing about the xSongs platform is that it works on ‘direct to the artist’ model and not like Bandcamp that charges 15% plus a 6% processing fee. This means platform and processing fees in the xSongs platform will always remain 0%. Despite that +21 % fees, Bandcamp has over $445 million paid artists. $8.9% million have recently added to the Bandcamp fans club.

xSongs’ Monetization Plans

When questions raised about monetization plans for xSongs, DeWitt said that Ripple isn’t interested in doing so currently. Adding to his comments, he said he’s personally covering the cost and the team has built something that people love. However, monetization stuff will take care of itself in time.

As per the plan, DeWitt has personally funded about 500 Payburner accounts i.e. 10,000 XRPs currently worth about $1970. Because the ledger reserves 20 XRPs when anyone initially funds an account on XRPL.

xSongs was previously available in closed beta form and gain around 100 artists who upload 500+ songs on the platform. Looking ahead to this figure, DeWitt said he hopes to have at least 1000 artists on the platform and 10,000 music sales by H2 2020.

Revealing about his current plans, DeWitt said he’s working closely with Chris Opler on the xSongs project. Chris Opler is a software engineer at Ripple. The duo now has a hackathon team that works on the project in their free time. The project director said. Besides, he explains that once the follower base increase and the project see some real scale, the team will start adding the same kind of artist-centric marketing and content that Bandcamp offers today.

Explaining the plan, DeWitt further said that music is just the beginning. Users will eventually find anything digital such as e-books, arts, etc on the project xSongs sold directly from creators. Adding to his comments, DeWitt said that “With a peer-to-peer music marketplace scaling on its own, imagine all the other digital content that could be sold similarly.”

So, what do you guys think about Ripple’s this broad step? Is it a fruitful creator-to-artist model? Do comment below!