shellac (noun) [shə-’lak]: the resin used for making 78rpm phonograph discs, replaced by vinyl in the 1940s

Shellac! is a free-to-use Web3 music streaming service that features high-quality, lossless digital transfers of American phonograph records in the Public Domain.

With a curated focus on early jazz & blues (1890-1924), Shellac! highlights a period of American music that is as profound as it is presently overlooked––a period that set the tone for the ensuing century of popular music. Shellac! exists to make that music more accessible to a wider audience than ever before.

Shellac! boasts your favorite streaming service features (the ability to ‘Like’ tracks, to create/share playlists, to follow other users and your favorite artists) but with a twist: it is powered by Discography on the Blockchain.

Discography is the library science of recorded sound.

Pioneered by jazz record collectors in the 1930s, discography began filling in the informational gaps left by record companies. By assiduously researching and cataloguing the complete personnel, date and location of a recording alongside its song title, composer, lead artist, record label and catalogue number, discographers created the best way to explore recorded music: for listeners to follow their ears, to identify what they like about a record and to seek out more of it . . . and to be able to find it.

While scholarly and rigorous, discography has always been grassroots – more of a community than academic endeavor. Enthusiasts organize social clubs and symposia in which to deliberate their research, which is often published independently for circulation within the record collecting community.

Shellac! will be the first platform to integrate all of these aspects of discography into the music streaming ecosystem. Users will be able to search records by every discographical parameter, all of which will be interactive metadata assigned to each track.

And in the community-oriented spirit of the discipline, Shellac! users will be able to contribute to its blockchain discography through a user Feedback Portal. This will both create a digital gathering space for discographers and ensure that the metadata that powers the platform is rigorously up-to-date.

The Public Domain is the body of artistic and intellectual works unrestricted by Copyright. These works belong to everyone, to enjoy and share as we please.

Works generally enter the Public Domain by dint of their age, around 100 years after their original publication. This eventual nullification of copyright has helped proliferate important religious texts, Beethoven’s symphonies, Shakespeare’s plays, folk songs——living artifacts of our cultural heritage. The conceit of the Public Domain is that those who are willing to be stewards of such heritage should be able to do so freely, without censure.

The Public Domain is now entering a new phase in which mechanical media such as film and recorded sound are entering its catalog. At the same time, digital technologies like the Internet furnish the possibility for unprecedented public access to these works.

In 2018 the President signed the Music Modernization Act, Title II of which codified the United States’ Public Domain pertaining to audio (see Jenkins 2019). This new federal standard has unlocked a massive catalog of commercially recorded music (at present, records released up to and through 1924) to be shared and enjoyed freely, by anyone anywhere in the United States. And with each passing year, the U.S. Public Domain will acquire another year’s worth of century-old records . . . and so will Shellac!

Information pertaining to the Public Domain should be rigorous, accountable, open to public input, and permanent. Blockchain technology, the infrastructure of Web3, makes that possible.

Encoding its data across a distributed network, the Blockchain is both public and protected. Encoded in a database of blockchain certificates as the infrastructure for its discography, the metadata that powers Shellac! is thereby given a public-facing and permanent home on the Internet into perpetuity.

Blockchain ledgers boast an additional feature that makes them invaluable for a working, evolving archive like Shellac!. Most well-known for its use in the buying and selling of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain ledgers permanently record every change made to them——every time a digital artwork is sold, in the case of NFTs; or in the case of Shellac!, every time discographical metadata receives an update.

With the use of blockchain ledgers, the sources of discographical information and every successive update/revision of it will be permanently recorded in the Shellac! discography – including users’ contributions through the Feedback Portal. By aggregating its discographical metadata in this transparent manner, Shellac! will empower the aficionado and casual listener alike in their endeavors to peruse and enjoy its catalog of American phonograph records.