70 START-UP ALLEY Hearo
HASHGRAPH IS QUICKER ANDMORE EFFICIENT THAN BLOCKCHAIN, WHICH WAS NEVER DESIGNED TO BE SCALED UP TO USE FOR GLOBAL HIGH-PERFORMANCE APPLICATIONS including Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfelt and Aniello Callari, a former ad exec for Saatchi & Saatchi. According to Brian, the brothers spent “years” building out the compression software that allowed them to take artists’ H earo is a tale of two brothers, Andrew and Brian Antar, both classically trained violinists, who want to create a fairer streaming site for musicians and a more rewarding experience for fans. Their platform, Hearo.fm is a social networking and streaming platform for independent artists. Their aim is to create a decentralised Spotify, which uses distributed ledger technology (DLT) to process with micropayments. The concept for the business originated eight years ago at the brothers’ respective universities – Andrew at Brown, who had created a social network for fellow musicians, and Brian at the University of Pennsylvania, who was working on a direct-to-fan distribution model to help promote local hip hop artists. “It was our dad who pointed out what now seems obvious: ‘Why don’t you two get together and talk?’” Andrew recalls. The Antars moved to California to build out the tech for a musician-to-musician and musician-to-fan platform, with high- profile funding angels backing the venture, HEARO COUNTRY: USA STARTED: 2011
authentic masters (super high-res audio files) and compress them into usable streaming and download formats. Even nailing this and amassing thousands of artists (5,000 to date) on the platform, thrashing out a sustainable business model has been a challenge. “Micropayments are difficult to manage via credit card payment networks, who take a large fee for processing,” says Andrew. He adds that the artists often receive next to nothing after everyone has taken their cut. “Often, intermediaries are necessary to account for and manage the payments owed to rights holders, and artists are left with very little after everyone from labels to publishing companies takes their cut.” The duo decided that if they were going to create an à la carte payment option which rewarded artists directly (the artists get to keep 90% of the payment while Hearo takes 10%) then a traditional cash payment system wasn’t going to work, so they decided to look at crypto currency. The solution they settled on is the Hedera Hashgraph platform, a DLT alternative to blockchain which uses a different data structure capable of handling tens of thousands of micropayments per second from anywhere in the world. “Hashgraph is quicker and more efficient than blockchain, which was never designed to be scaled up to use for global high- performance applications,” notes Brian. The brothers are in the process of ripping out fiat (cash) currency from the platform and have created their own crypto currency, the Jam token, which sits on top of the Hashgraph network.
MY HEARO The platform rewards artists while also offering an intuitive user experience
They hope that the user experience will also be frictionless and stress that users don’t need to be crypto enthusiasts to use the platform, only download an app to buy or earn tokens. Hearo also offers incentives that benefit users of the ecosystem: on sign up users receive free tokens; there are opportunities to earn tokens by listening to music that artists are trying to promote. Posting a song or album review also is also rewarded with tokens. “At the end of the day you could never put a dollar into it so long as you are helping to keep the community going. But if fans do choose to put money into the platform they are directly supporting the artist,” says Brian. The platform will relaunch early next year as TunedOut.fm with this newly tokenised economy. Hearo is also in talks with major record labels and talent to onboard more artists. The brothers also hope to launch an Independent Coin Offering (ICO) in Q4 of this year for their series A funding round, rather than relying on traditional VC funding. “ICOs allow anyone to invest a very small amount and get tokens in return. We can raise funds far quicker in this kind of decentralised fashion from many people rather than having to prove out all kinds of things to just one person,” he adds.
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