We all love to sing.

Some of us sing professionally. Others sing in the shower. And still others record themselves singing and upload the video to mobile karaoke apps.

For this latter group, however, their creative endeavors usually become a product for somebody’s else’s gain. In fact, singers often have to pay for the privilege of having some tech company profit off their talent.

This is where SOMESING comes in. This potentially revolutionary karaoke DApp leverages blockchain to create a transparent ecosystem where everyone – singer, supporter and platform developer – receive fair rewards for the talent and effort.

Everyone a creator. Everyone a muse. 

SOMESING seeks to overcome what its creators see as a limitation of existing karaoke apps.

These apps provided the musical accompaniment to which they could sing.  But the free versions were very restrictive, and to make use of additional services, users needed to pay. And if users uploaded their covers onto the network, garnering followers in the process, they got nothing in return except, perhaps, comments from grateful fans.

Put simply, the singing user pays everything. And gets nothing in return.

This is unfair, argues SOMESING. Singing is a human impulse and a creative activity that beautifies the world around us. It creates value. So why shouldn’t that value be rewarded?

Using ICON’s blockchain technology, the DApp lets users sing whatever they like and rewards producers for recreating and remixing songs. The result? Everyone taking part in the music creation process gets rewarded. This, in turn, should lead to much more creative activity. The users becomes both artist and muse, inspiring one another on a peer-to-peer basis.

At least that’s the theory.

CEO and founder Kim Heuibae explains, “I thought that using blockchain could make things easier for the user and if we did a good job creating the ecosystem with tokens, we could create a service where users stake rather than pay fees.”

Though young people in their teens and 20s constitute the DApp’s primary target, the service’s user base is quite diverse in terms of age and national origin. “We’ve even got a grandfather who sings only trot music,” says Kim. You have non-Koreans singing K-pop and Koreans singing the latest Billboard hits. The project has also entered into partnerships with music-related companies throughout the world.

Karaoke revolution

SOMESING lets would-be crooners around the world to sing over 40,000 titles – including many of your K-pop favorites – anytime, anywhere. The service is completely free; singers don’t pay a thing. In fact, the DApp’s ecosystem uses a variety of methods to actually reward users based on their contributions. SOMESING uses blockchain’s immutability to create a transparent user-centered compensation system that returns 70% of total accumulated tokens to the users by forming wallets for the content created. Said wallets are then stuffed with gifts and support from other users, outside marketing products and more. “The singer gets 50%,” explains Kim. “Supporters get about 20%. The remaining 30% goes to us – we paid the royalties to the music companies and put in the initial investment to build the ecosystem.”

Not only does this rewards users materially, but also helps expand their fan bases and communities.

SOMESING’s staking system takes two forms. Users should make a one-time token deposit to save the songs they’d like to sing for free. When they leave the service, they get their deposit back. The other involves the tokens accumulated through content production. These tokens are staked for the four to eight weeks that viewers can usually see a song.

Karaoke and more

SOMESING won’t turn you into superstar. But it does its best to help.

The user can adjust the key of the accompaniment to match their voice. The application syncs the voice input and adjusts for audio latency in real time. The volume of the accompaniment adjusts to the user’s voice. You can even add audio effects such as echos and reverb.

You can use editing and mixing software to create duets. Maybe add in some video, or multiple videos. The creative options are endless.

SOMESING hopes to do even more in the near future. By collaborating with streaming services, the DApp hopes to provide users with a richer musical experience by allowing them to switch from listening to the original song to listen to their own covers. Using the DApp’s own coin, SSX, users will be able to purchase third-party services. By combining blockchain technology with AI, users will be able to use big data to analyze song selection, comments, ranking and token usage. It also seeks to create new musical stars by facilitating the off-app careers of participating singers. The DApp also hopes to link stars and their fans.

SOMESING released its beta version last week.

Kim knows there are a lot of empty projects out there. He aims to show people SOMESING is different. “We wanted to be a pioneer, to show people that you could produce an actual example, that people who didn’t know a lot about blockchain could make use of its strengths,” he says. “We’ll work to produce actual services.”