On February 2nd Coil announced they’ll be shutting down their service in March.

This was a bit of a blow - their service was a nice bridge between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, and we’d had people saying they were earning more from Coil than Spotify. We will be removing the Coil links/buttons from the site when they go offline. As payments will flow until Coil close, we’ll be leaving the payment pointers on the artist pages, even after they take their service offline - more on that below.

The site is designed to run very efficiently and we have enough money in the bank to run for many years. We’ve also been working to launch NFT support to the platform, and launching Future Sound of Bristol to support emerging labels & artists. Both of these are unaffected by Coils demise.

Whats less clear is how or if Web Monetisation continues to play a role in how Audiotarky works. In principle its an open standard, and lots of the Coil code is open source. Other players could provide a similar service, and diversity in the space would be a good thing (we’ve known that Coil being the single player in the space was our biggest “threat” as a platform since day one). The community around that technology is waiting to see where the technology develops.

There are other options that we’d like to hear opinons from our artists/labels on.

We’ll be using XUMM for our NFT feature. This could also be used to provide “tipping” or other similar features. It turns out that another GFTW grantee has been doing this for some time, and it’s been substantially more effective at generating income for creators than Coil. There are some legal questions to answer here (go search “Know Your Customer” to see the kind of questions to answer) along side making a smooth UX.

Another possibility along these lines would be pooling payment and distributing micropayments in near real time via XRPL. This would take more time to put together, but might be the closest to the “vision” we started Audiotarky with.

There are a number of options we can look at and we’re keen to hear what people would be interested in. Please do drop us your thoughts and we’ll try to take them into account with what we build.