The problem MESA solves

The landscape of music creation has been transformed by technological innovations, making it increasingly feasible for artists to forge self-sufficient careers. In 2023, 50% of revenue on Spotify came from independent musicians; that number was only at 12% in 2017. Record label services are not as coveted as they used to be.

Even though anyone in today’s age can be an independent music creator, record labels provide crucial administrative capabilities for artists. Without these administrative capabilities, artists often fail to capture the value that they’ve created. 67% of artists don't have an established process for discussing and establishing ownership splits; 69% of artists have lost money due to missing out on rightful ownership or credit in a song.

Additionally, music has become commoditized, and artists can no longer make a living from their recorded music. We believe that on-chain music systems will bring value back to music and improve monetization models for artists. The marketplaces are being built out right now, but the space lacks rights management infrastructure. This lack of infrastructure stems from the fact that a typical song has many rights holders, making it challenging to manage and distribute on chain earnings fairly. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that not all rights holders have the necessary understanding and tools (wallets) of on chain systems.

Challenges we ran into

One of the significant hurdles we faced was managing and merging two different codebases. This issue was particularly pronounced due to scope expansions that required us to migrate and build a substantial amount of UI elements unrelated to the original scope. The divergence between the two codebases made it difficult to maintain consistency and integration across the project. We got over this by having our team be more intenetional about organizing tasks.

Coinbase Smart Wallet was hard to

open

using wagmi. We were only able to get it working when we used the connect UI component with onchainkit.

We started running into a bunch of Smart Wallet issues the night before submission, possibly due to congestion on testnet.

1. Long delays waiting for transactions to finish. wallet just hangs and is “polling” for the user op receipt.
2. ⁠Persistent wallet error: invalid nonce. The smart wallet I had been using now gives this error on every transaction.
3. ⁠I created a new smart wallet which got a different error saying the account was not deployed.
4. ⁠Can’t switch smart wallet network via RPC. This is a known limitation, but makes it harder to use Zora.
5. ⁠Difficulty with smart wallet login on Zora. Forces you to add an email address via privy. SIWE verification failed.
6. ⁠Difficult to switch between smart wallets once connected to a site. Can be done by clearing browser storage related to wallet and website domains.