Nina/The FADER
Just shy of five years after its initial launch, independent music platform Nina Protocol is shutting down on July 15. Though the project was a lasting holdover from the blockchain and crypto bubble that burst around 2022 (remember those monkeys?), its original premise was full of hope. Founded by independent music veterans Jack Callahan, Eric Farber, and Mike Pollard, the trio rode a wave of indie-circle frustration surrounding monolithic streaming ecosystems and an influx of Web3 venture capital to create the distribution platform.
The platform pitched itself as a grassroots alternative to Spotify and the other oligarchic corporations that have swindled artists and flattened listening habits. In the process it came in with several great features: the ability for fans to purchase and download directly from artists and labels and for artists to keep 100% of their revenue. The platform regularly featured underground and niche music scenes, developing what felt like communities rather than userbases. But in a commercial ecosystem that prefers scale to passion, Nina Protocol simply wasn’t able to rally the wide and quick interest necessary to stay afloat.
“We built this [to] help people share their music for those who might be interested outside of traditional models,” Jack Callahan, one of Nina Protocol’s founders and an experimental DIY musician based in NYC, says. “So many people were able to find community in music. It’s been an incredible experience.”
Even while being swarmed with interest from major players in the tech and music industry, Nina stuck to its original vision of being a platform by independent and experimental musicians, for independent and experimental musicians. Nina brought artists like james K and Galcher Lustwerk to Nina Nights, a live performance series that quickly became a destination for music heads in New York City. Its curated playlists and selection of guest blogs nurtured a specific corner of the independent music world its curators were clearly passionate about. “They had great taste and were beloved for discovering artists early on,” Kelley Lin, the label manager at True Panther, says. “We owe a lot to the community they were able to build.”
Nina stuck to its original vision of being a platform by independent and experimental musicians, for independent and experimental musicians.
That community also included other highly respected independent outlets and platforms, including the buzzy N.Y.C. rap blog no bells. Bells and Whistles, its monthly column on Nina’s site, helped the blog pay its freelancers and release their print magazine, according to its editor Millan Verma.
Quickly, though, Nina became embroiled in wider tensions between the technology it utilized and the massive disinterest of anyone in the independent music industry not looking to make a quick buck. Beneath its undeniable passion for independent and underground artistry, Nina was, fundamentally, a blockchain platform, a technology that utilizes a network of nodes, instead of centralized data centers, to store transaction records, and in this case, data. This was made possible by something called Arweave. Nina also operated on Solana, the blockchain Donald Trump’s memecoin currently utilizes. This meant all users needed to create a crypto wallet, the kind that could cause you to lose a quarter billion dollars, if they wanted to use the platform. If all of these words seemed to go in one ear and out the other, you’re not alone.
"Blockchain had too significant adoption problems. It was complicated to explain and interact with at the end-user level,” Laine Nooney, an Associate Professor of Media Industries at New York University says. “Combined with the fact that so much discourse around blockchain was inseparable from crypto and NFTs, blockchain just inherently seemed scammy and unreliable to everyday users.”
With its tech industry bones and independent music audience seemingly at odds, the platform was ultimately unable to reconcile the massive pressures that come with any venture capital-backed project with the profit-agnostic passion that fuels working-class musicians.
In its last year or so, ideas were thrown around the Nina team to try and keep the train on its tracks, but nothing quite stuck. Once its greatest feature, Nina Protocol’s refusal of widespread adoption also became its eventual downfall. The company once boasted that “if we ever hit 10% of Bandcamp’s daily volume, we’d be profitable,” but it was a metric it was never able to achieve. According to a company statement, Nina was “unable to find a revenue strategy that would give Nina a path to sustainability at its current size.”
“The decentralized nature of something like Nina Protocol might have been buzzy and utopian but the funding model wasn't,” Nooney says. “It was contradictory thinking to believe economic equity for artists was ever going to come through venture capital involvement.”
The music and tech industry that birthed Nina feels utterly unrecognizable now as the power of information, communication, and curation have re-centralized under the corporate thumb thanks to AI. The days of renegade disruption within the industry have seemingly all but gone. Nina Protocol has learned the lesson Pearl Jam and Neil Young learned in decades past: it’s a fool’s errand to try and fight the uphill battle against the megacorporations that have poisoned the industry.
But this doesn’t mean there’s no hope for artists, fans, and other passionate parties to envision a more equitable future of buying, selling, and distributing music. The path forward might be one already within our grasp. The artists, labels, and blogs that Nina championed are still open for business. It doesn’t take a blockchain to put money back in the hands of artists, that’s what the merch booth is for. Permanent ownership of recordings shouldn’t require a crypto wallet; it’s as easy as a vinyl record or a download link. The embrace of fundamental and principal interactions is always available, even when newfangled things aren’t.