Sound just made music cheaper to collect.

The new partnership with Optimism allows artists to mint their songs at a fraction of the cost, and means collectors no longer need to spend upwards of $10 in gas to collect.

The wider story here is that music is built on the base of accessibility, and this feature is a major statement in the evolution of onchain music as a whole.

According to Sound, the upgrade unlocks a 90% reduction in gas and 6x faster transactions.

Users can collect with a credit card or ETH on Mainnet or Optimism - coming one step closer to a world where fans can easily get involved.

They’re kicking it off with a free mint from Optimism’s co-founder Ben Jones - one that will surely go down in onchain music history.

To mint - bridge ETH to Optimism here.

This comes with new music from Daniel Allan, Sammy Ariaga, Rae Isla, Bloody White, TK and ROHKI - among a slew of other prominent artists helping to ring in the new chapter.

Here’s why this matters.

*This post will be included in Invest in Music's governance proposals for Optimism.

What to Know

The conversation about onchain music moving to Layer 2 (L2) has been a hot topic for some time.

To recap - most songs are selling for less than 0.01 ETH per edition - but the gas cost to collect the song is often more than the song costs itself.

With Optimism - that problem *should* go away.

This means more money will go into artists pockets, and collectors can take larger positions in the songs they love.

“It is mission critical that collecting music should be about the music, not transaction costs, and this partnership helps us take a massive leap forward to bringing on the next million artists and collectors in the space,” said David Greenstein, cofounder of Sound.

This was not a light decision, as the choice of which L2 to build on is one the wider industry struggles with on a day to day.

What is Optimism

Optimism is an Ethereum scaling solution.

It makes it easy and faster to transact while maintaining the core tenants of the industry’s leading network.

Optimism recently launched its Bedrock update - enhancing the network’s speed and efficiency even further.

Optimism has built a robust infrastructure, with teams like Coinbase using their tech stack to power their own network called BASE.

Optimism is home to collect all of our blog posts on Mirror (including this one), and a network regarded by many as the most secure and reputable in the industry.

For Sound, Optimism is the network that most songs will live on moving forward.

Today - all of the songs on Sound currently live on Ethereum.

Now, any songs minted on Optimism will live on Optimism instead of Ethereum.

That’s a lot to take in - so let’s break it down.

Why Does This Matter?

Onchain music wins at scale.

Whereas most prominent NFT collections today are selling for thousands of dollars a piece, most songs are being minted for $10 or less.

Despite this, music has struggled from consistently high gas prices, making it really difficult for the average collector to meaningfully contribute to the ecosystem.

With Optimism, the financial barrier to entry just got cut in half.

You can collect more songs, faster, for less.

It’s a flag in the sand - basically suggesting that for low-priced markets like music, these collections will live on an L2 like Optimism vs Ethereum mainnet.

However - the biggest thing to keep in mind is that Optimism is built in tandem with and on the back of Ethereum.

This means it will be exponentially easier to move your NFTs across both networks, and make it so that you do not need to download a new wallet or buy new tokens to collect.

It’s a bit technically complex, but at the end of the day this upgrade unlocks collection music at scale.

With Sound recently enabling credit card transactions and quickly gearing up to open to the public, this launch is a fundamental part of Sound history.

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