everwave is a web3-based, collaborative music production platform that has just launched its closed beta phase on app.everwave.xyz, bringing together musicians and producers to reimagine how music is created and collectively managed using blockchain tools.

Organized as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), everwave is the brainchild of French music scene veteran Cyril Guiraud, who first imagined it as a global community of musicians, producers and music fans collectively creating online. In the Summer of 2021, Cyril met with Jazzy Couscous label manager & Telcoin co-founder Alix Zerd, and together they defined the basis for what the platform would be. Soon they were joined by jazz and broken beat legend Mark de Clive-Lowe, also pioneering in the music NFT and web3 space, and Kevin “mido” Rodriguez, Metalabel alumni and boss of SENSE - recent winner of the innovation award at MaMa Convention in Paris. Along with the rest of the team, they form a highly qualified group of deeply experienced professionals with a united vision to redefine what collaborative music-making in the age of web3 can be.

everwave reframes artistic collaboration through a digital, web-based object called a “wave”. A wave contains the complete evolution of a collective creation - from the initial spark of inspiration, to collaborative tracks and the off-shoots they give rise to. Every wave starts with an original idea: usually a very simple, incomplete piece of music, a demo to inspire others. Stems are made available to the community, and from there everwave’s creators can add new stems, remix existing stems, or use the stems to create a completely new track, which once contributed gets added to the wave. Each wave grows into a collection of different tracks born from the interaction between musicians and producers, each inspiring the other in a creative feedback loop of infinite possibilities.

This whole creative process happens in the open. The ongoing wave, including newly added tracks, can be listened to by anyone visiting app.everwave.xyz, and if they feel inspired they can then join the everwave community and create original music together. At the end of a wave’s creative process, contributors get rewarded in the governance token ($WVE), the music is minted as NFTs, sold through everwave’s marketplace, released to streaming platforms and made available for sync and licensing, with revenue being distributed back to the creators via smart contracts. Creators of an everwave asset receive an equal royalty split as each other, mitigating the conflicts and challenges that every music collaborator already knows too well, and all of the music created through everwave is collectively owned by its community. 

everwave intends to go beyond being just another NFT marketplace, or an onramp for artists to mint their own NFTs. Using “waves”, everwave is proposing a creative context that has never been seen before, while using blockchain technology to make the whole (usually painful) process of administrating artistic collaborations more transparent and equitable. The immutability and transparency of on-chain information offers reassurance to creators, while the on-chain governance facilitated by everwave’s governance token $WVE empowers creators to collectively become the prime owners of the music created through everwave. 

More than a hundred musicians (Taku Hirano, Hailey Niswanger, YahZarah, Marta Sanchez…)  and producers (Mark de Clive-Lowe, RJD2, Linafornia, Allysha Joy…) covering multiple genres, generations and based all around the world have joined the three ongoing beta waves, continuing to add their contributions and create new iterations. Amazing music that has never existed before is being asynchronously, collaboratively-created right now.

everwave is not a medium for pre-existing culture: it’s creating culture. It’s creating a community of like-minded musicians and producers - both professionals and hobbyists - who are passionate about creativity, and willing to embrace the possibilities web3 has to offer in developing a fair and transparent ecosystem that’s beneficial to artists. After countless years of only having one industry paradigm to work with - one that’s proven to be fundamentally antithetical to the artist’s interests - everwave offers another possibility showcasing the best of what web3 has to offer to the music world: community ownership, direct fan-to-artist relationships, self-custody, transparency, and disintermediation.

A little over one year since first inception, everwave is now live - facilitating collaboration, community, monetization and most importantly, the creation of so much beautiful music. What if the world could make music together? Maybe that’s not just a fantasy… everwave is on that mission.