This ten-year content infrastructure company is surprisingly an invisible Web3 pioneer

Author: Liao Liao, ODAILY

In the past year, with the explosive emergence of the Web3 concept, a quiet transformation of the business paradigm surrounding the "traditional internet" has also begun.

Among various sectors, the content industry has become a pioneering track in this round of major upgrades due to its characteristics such as low offline dependency, large bilateral markets, and urgent needs for rights redistribution. From Mirror, which focuses on text content sovereignty, to Superare, which concentrates on the art field, to Livepeer, which aims to reshape the streaming service landscape, and even the more generalized decentralized domain ENS, many content industry projects native to the Web3 era have made significant progress in the past year.

In addition to these Web3-native content industry projects, a large number of Web2 "traditional giants" such as Meta, Universal Music, Netflix, Christie's, Line, and Visual China have also begun to explore whether they can find new business opportunities under the new internet narrative.

Looking at these projects or companies that view Web3 as the key to unlocking the next era, although each has different starting points, business models, content categories, and target audiences, they all narrate a common vision—to create a closed-loop value flow from creation to consumption in a fair and open manner, building an open, symbiotic, and sustainable content industry ecosystem.

Fairness, openness, symbiosis… these keywords are not new to the content industry.

Previously, while tracking potential companies in various internet sectors, we came across a content infrastructure company called "Seeing Music," which emphasizes the concept of "openness, equality, and symbiosis." They hope to serve as a foundational layer (non-blockchain settlement) to build a mutually beneficial value flow system for creators, institutions, developers, and content demanders across the entire music industry chain.

A Decade of Layout? Seeing Music's Perspective on Web3

Coinciding with the tenth anniversary of Seeing Music, and riding the wave of the Web3 concept, ODaily recently reached out to Seeing Music again. When we mentioned the term Web3, they expressed to us: "We were founded ten years ago for this purpose; it just has a new name now. There will be other names in the future, but the evolution of the internet will inevitably shift from pursuing efficiency to pursuing fairness, and the revolution of production relationships is bound to happen."

As a leading music industry infrastructure company in China, currently holding the largest music asset scale in Asia, Seeing Music has achieved full-chain digital capabilities in creation, protection, distribution, management, and commercialization. It supports over 1 million global creators and connects with more than a thousand demand institutions, including Spotify, YouTube, Douyin, and NetEase Cloud, covering 95% of music consumption channels and over 30 music demand scenarios. Currently, more than 20 million music digital assets are circulating within the system.

How can a ten-year-old internet company be involved in Web3? It sounds somewhat disjointed, but as we delved deeper into discussions with Seeing Music, we gradually understood their interpretation of the Web3 spirit (including the trade-offs they made) and what path they intend to take in Web3.

As stated by Seeing Music, they position themselves as a Web3 capability provider, supporting other participants in the ecosystem with a digital operational framework, truly returning data ownership to creators and users.

Since its establishment in 2012, Seeing Music has focused on building efficient bilateral transaction infrastructure between upstream creators and downstream users. After ten years of evolution, they have further expanded the derivative function chain, such as copyright protection, storage, interfaces, transmission, store building, and website building SaaS, PAAS, etc.

Throughout this decade of development, Seeing Music has consistently implemented the concept of "openness and equality" in a subtle manner. On the creator side, Seeing Music has never played the role of producing music since its inception; instead, it allows creators to freely upload and distribute various original music works through an open platform. The copyrights and most related economic benefits do not belong to Seeing Music but are fully controlled by the creators. On the user side, Seeing Music adopts a uniform approach to all channels, not favoring any particular channel due to unique advantages (such as traffic). Whether it is the demand for flexible, large-scale, on-demand access to global music digital assets or the need for quick sampling and usage, it can be achieved through a globally equitable, efficient, and low-loss infrastructure.

Today, as the spring breeze of Web3 begins to blow, Seeing Music is gradually bringing the concept of "symbiosis" into its ecosystem. In the operation of the entire industry ecosystem, Seeing Music does not "take over everything," but continuously opens up revenue services while integrating contributors who have been overlooked in the past digitalization process of the industry chain into the ecosystem, allowing more participants within the ecosystem to gain consensus and benefits based on their contributions, promoting the innovation of production relationships in the digital content ecosystem.

Of course, as a foundational platform, Seeing Music will extract revenue in the form of Gas Fees, but this revenue will ultimately be indirectly fed back into the system through improved infrastructure, ultimately building an open ecosystem that operates autonomously, circulates value, and co-creates and shares.

"Openness, equality, symbiosis," this is Seeing Music's understanding of the core concepts of Web3, and the development over the past decade is the answer they have provided based on this understanding.

Does the Foundation Need to be Decentralized? Seeing Music's Trade-offs

In the previous text, we hinted at a point—Seeing Music has made certain disassemblies of the Web3 spirit to make trade-offs. The "trade-offs" emphasized here refer to Seeing Music's choice of centralized servers for the settlement layer instead of decentralized blockchain, and they have not used tokens or NFTs as intermediaries in their business operations.

This is also the biggest point of divergence in our discussions with Seeing Music. As a journalist who has long tracked and reported on crypto and Web3, I am well aware of the advantages of using decentralized foundations and firmly believe that this is the trend of the future. However, the explanation provided by Seeing Music from the perspective of a mature commercial company still left me in deep thought, which is worth further consideration for all Web3 practitioners.

When discussing their choice, Seeing Music indicated that it was due to both policy reasons and considerations related to operational and developmental stages. Although decentralized on-chain ecosystems have achieved breakthrough developments in the past year or two, the current performance of blockchains is still limited, and the related infrastructure is not yet perfect. Whether it can support commercial-grade business operations has not been fully tested. For a company that needs to operate positively and continuously invest in construction, centralized services can help them handle various events in real business scenarios more flexibly and efficiently.

I personally agree with this. In the past two years, the most common application categories on-chain have mostly been "limited state applications" represented by DeFi, characterized by the ability to derive all transaction logic simply by verifying changes in address balances. However, for commercial scenarios in the music and other content industries, related transactions will involve a large number of state changes beyond balance fluctuations. This is what we often refer to as "infinite state applications" when discussing Web3. The smooth operation of such applications requires not only higher performance from the blockchain itself but also relies on further development of related infrastructure such as storage services.

Seeing Music further explained that, not to mention the digitalization of the entire content industry, even in the actual operation of music content, there are many challenges that outsiders find hard to imagine. For instance, in simple content commercial circulation, how to trace and attribute the rights of various rights holders such as lyricists, composers, mastering engineers, mixers, and arrangers; further, how to apply these rights to a rich and growing array of consumption scenarios (advertising, karaoke, background music, sports, etc.); and how to protect emerging rights more quickly and normatively after relevant laws and regulations are updated, ensuring that corresponding revenues can be fairly and transparently distributed to all rights holders; in a constantly evolving technical environment, how to authorize various rights of content to more diversified subfields and channels (the reality is that most demanders do not understand, accept, or cannot use blockchain, tokens, or NFTs)… These are issues that companies encounter in their daily operations, and it is difficult to derive a desired answer when assessing them against the current blockchain capacity.

Seeing Music's judgment is that most of the Web3 projects emerging in batches at this stage are still at the conceptual level, and only a few landed projects have not yet expanded in scale. These projects are mostly still in relatively early stages; they do not escape the challenges mentioned above, but the time has not yet come. In contrast, for Seeing Music, which has a ten-year history, experience tells them that to break through in fierce market competition, they cannot become constrained in any aspect.

However, this does not mean that Seeing Music denies the future of blockchain. Although they currently have no intention of fully transitioning to on-chain, they have conducted detailed research on the technical difficulties and costs of service migration. The company also stated: "Whether it is cross-chain, consortium chain, or public chain, the evolution of sharing and decision-making mechanisms is a matter of timing, not technology. The ecosystem scale built on flow, collaboration efficiency, and fairness can achieve a leading position from the start."

Different Paths to the Same Web3 Goal

In summary, we can conclude that Seeing Music's vision is highly consistent with the recently emerging batch of Web3 content industry projects, all hoping to create a closed-loop value flow from music creation to consumption in a fair and open manner, building an open, equitable, and symbiotic content industry ecosystem. The difference lies in the fact that, due to compliance, operational, and developmental considerations, Seeing Music has not currently adopted blockchain as the service settlement layer but has chosen centralized servers. At the same time, not using tokens also avoids speculative and price volatility risks to some extent.

As the Web3 concept continues to gain popularity, in the new competitive landscape of industrial upgrades, we must not only pay attention to those Web3-native content industry projects but also cannot overlook Seeing Music, which is advancing from another direction.

As one of the earliest companies in the "traditional" internet sector to awaken to Web3 awareness, Seeing Music has a profound understanding of the core concepts of Web3, such as "openness, equality, and symbiosis," and has clear plans for implementation. For a long time, it has been committed to providing foundational infrastructure and innovative environments for the production and operation of content assets. Meanwhile, Seeing Music also possesses operational experience and industrial resource advantages that emerging projects lack, such as comprehensive rights confirmation and protection plans, mature rights flow systems, a large creator community, and rich demand channels (Spotify, YouTube, Douyin, NetEase Cloud, etc.). The ten years of "accumulation" are expected to achieve a stronger "release" in the new era of Web3.

In the new race of Web3.0, those who are ready to take the lead may become the rule-makers, ecosystem creators, and holders of innovation dividends. Considering that the vast majority of activities in the content industry chain still occur in Web2, Seeing Music is likely to maintain a significant positional advantage for a long time.

Two different paths, both leading to Web3; who will reach the finish line first remains to be seen.