Canistore: A New Platform Bringing Web3 To Multimedia
What Is Canistore?
Canistore is a next generation social store powered by Dfinity. Canistore’s motto is “Create, License, Play — Your Content, Your Community,” and it aims to eliminate multimedia platform risks (such as algorithm changes and bias) by developing a next-gen social-store mobile application governed and owned by the community.
Canistore Inspiration: How’d It Come About?
Canistore was created with the inspiration of wanting to feel safe in being able to securely store content online and not have it tampered with and removed by monopolized companies. Canistore, in particular, seeks to simplify the “storing, selling, and sharing of photos, music, and videos,” which is an essential part of modern social media life, entertainment, business, and the ongoing digitization of everything.
As a decentralized social media platform designed to revolutionize rights, ownership, and financial independence for creators, Canistore allows people to take multimedia to the next level. It does this by allowing (as stated above) the storing, selling, and sharing of photos, music, and videos on a blockchain-supported Web3 platform i.e., the Internet Computer.
Who’s Behind Canistore?
Canistore was created by Barry Paisley, a Sound Engineer from London, a former Artist/Current Artist Manager, and most importantly, a Co-Founder to the Canistore project.
In September 2020, Paisley drafted a Medium article titled “Journey — Intro,” which introduces his thoughts and journey behind creating Canistore. It’s a personal story that’s very much inspiring, so I’ll try my best to summarize and do it proper justice.
In early 2020 Paisley was a part of a team managing a club in London, which he had been doing for multiple years. Disaster soon struck as the pandemic started spreading around the world. Paisley then lost his job, his flat, and was unhappy and “didn’t know what to do.” Striving to get out of this situation, he met a friend that told him to just let go of the “negativity and be creative.” Although cliche, Paisley took this advice to heart and started grinding.
He bought a nice computer and a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, and began to learn a new skill. He was particularly good at Audition, which is probably because Paisley has a native itch for music. So he got better at this craft and doubled down on music.
Once the lockdowns ended Paisley returned to the Studio to start making music again. He connected with a friend (who had been teaching him graphic design) and then started teaching this friend about sound. In the process of teaching his friend about music, the conversation deepened to learning not only about sound, but to discussing how “the industry” works in general — and scrutinizing the issues around licensing, contracts that restrict artists, breadcrumb royalties, and content ownership. Paisley concluded the industry needed change.
The timing was perfect. The world was witnessing a resurgence in cryptocurrencies and going through another wave of blockchain popularity. This is when Dfinity entered the scene. Paisley was invited to the Dfinity Tungsten Event, but to be frank, he didn’t really understand what Dfinity was doing, nonetheless, he was interested.
The significance of this event came during a demo about CanCan, a decentralized alternative to TikTok. During the demo he pitched an idea saying, “an Artist contract and licensing system would be cool.” This statement was the catalyst to his future Canistore idea.
My first takeaway from Paisley’s story is that Canistore’s first iteration is about empowering artists, DJs, and content creators. Moving forward, it’ll improve and grow as a place to upload content, create licenses, copyright materials, and for monetization. All in all, it’s a marketplace for intellectual property rights, which is insanely needed given the current IP and content ownership crisis.
It’d be an interesting exercise, but it’s probably impossible to calculate the unequal distribution and monetary loss creators have faced over the years, judging from the time music went from CDs to iTunes, and then on to streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music (excluding video platforms like Amazon and Netflix, photos, and text content).
How Does The Canistore System Work?
Canistore works through a licensing protocol. This licensing protocol is the arbiter that allows the community to upload, license, and securely store content on-chain. When the content is uploaded, it’s stamped to prove ownership, and it includes a legally binding agreement that’s recognized globally. These two factors will undoubtedly give creators a sense of security knowing that transparency is ensured through the blockchain, and comfort knowing they own their content in true Web3 fashion.
Moreover, global users can use the Canistore app as an everyday social platform. In this regard, you can think of it as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, and Twitter all in one, but with the advantage of being able to more easily monetize and distribute digital assets. Regarding this last point of distributing assets, it’s convenient to think of it in terms of e-Commerce (Amazon) and Only Fans.
So far users will have the choice of uploading their content and storing their digital media until a later stage when they can mint the content as an NFT to monetize and sell it. When users are not uploading content, they can discover content listed publicly by other members of the community. Hence, the comparisons to YouTube, Instagram, and Amazon.
What’s The Value Of Canistore’s Business Model?
Canistore’s value proposition revolves around: licensing content with no legal fees, personalized monetization, having proof of ownership of content, securing content stored on-chain, being able to mint any content as an NFT, independently broadcasting content, sharing/viewing content without algorithms that limit visibility, discovering new content, protecting data with content never being sold without your permission, and physical locations that support local talent.
What Can Canistore Do?
Canistore can do licensing, audio streaming, video streaming, NFT creation, social networking, tokens, and on-chain storage.
What’s The Market For Canistore’s Targeted Industries?
Let’s give some numbers to bring to life the potential of these areas above. Although not the greatest reference, it’s still a good one — the global music market was worth $26 billion in 2021, which means no matter what, there’s a huge market for licensing in this area. Interestingly, streaming accounts for approximately $17 billion of that revenue, and is expected to show an annual revenue growth rate of 8%.
In the music streaming segment as well, the number of users is expected to amount to 960 million by 2026, so just by numbers alone there’s a lot of promise out there for Canistore.
Regarding the video streaming segment, the global video streaming market size was valued at $370 billion in 2021, and is expected to grow at a cumulative annual growth rate of 20%. So Canistore’s video streaming target also seems like a valuable industry to develop on.
NFTs speak for themselves, and have really grown in popularity since spring 2021 when Beeple made news for the largest NFT sale in history. Since then the industry has really taken off, especially with NFT sales on Ethereum through the website OpenSea. Right now the number of NFT sales and volume are both down, but it’s widely predicted that NFTs are here to stay, with the market expected to grow by $147 billion from 2022–2026. So regarding NFTs, Canistore has chosen wisely to create a business that utilizes the tech.
Social networking, tokens, and on-chain storage are also promising segments, especially as we see a greater proliferation of decentralized social networking innovations, more tokenization of everything, and greater utilization of decentralized storage systems. So Canistore is in a good position to take advantage of all three of these segments. The future is bright!
Canistore NFTs: What Is Club 888?
So let’s explore Canistore NFTs, which is called Club 888. Club 888 is a collection of eight Audio NFTs created by a selection of musicians from around the world. The aim of this initiative is to shed light on the financial freedom that NFTs provide creators within the music industry. The NFTs will be launched on Entrepot.app, which is a decentralized NFT marketplace built on the Internet Computer.
So far, an NFT called Revolucio is the first Canistore Audio NFT that’s been launched on the Internet Computer. It was done in collaboration with one of the hottest producers P2J, who’s works feature connections to WizKid, Justin Bieber, Beyonce, BurnaBoy and Wretch32. With this we can say that there’s some real clout behind Canistore NFTs.
Canistore Token: CANI
As with most cryptocurrency/Web3-related projects, there’s a token involved, and Canistore’s token is called CANI. The Cani token is at the heart of the ecosystem in that it primarily allows creators to monetize their content easily. On the governance side, the Cani community governs the ecosystem by moderating content, aiding board decisions, rewarding distributions, administering votes on future app development, and excitedly, electing a winner at Canistore’s first Creator Awards ceremony. But all in all, the Cani token does similar functions as other project tokens, as it’s used to monetize, govern, and reward ecosystem participants.
Canistore’s Roadmap & Future
The Canistore team is currently working on further developments related to earning, customizing, royalties, privacy, licensing, ownership, voting, copyright, social, SocialStore, advertising, QR codes, storage, livestream, and PayPal. So moving forward when many of these features drop, it will resemble a complete application that’s likely to revolutionize the Web3 multimedia world. Creators and artists of all kinds will benefit surely from Canistore’s offering
