On a new primitive for music — the Audio Fungible Token (AFT) — and why the last decade tried to solve the wrong problem.
Music was never supposed to be an NFT.
That sentence sounds like a provocation, but it's really just a definition problem. For the last several years, the crypto industry has tried to give artists a fairer deal by turning songs into non-fungible tokens — one-of-one digital collectibles, priced by scarcity, sold to whoever wanted to own "the" copy. It was a well-meaning idea, and it mostly failed. Not because artists don't deserve a better deal, and not because blockchains can't help, but because a collectible is the wrong shape for what a song actually is.
So I want to make the case for a different primitive — one I've been building the full protocol for, and one I think the industry will eventually adopt as its own: the AFT, the Audio Fungible Token.
The problem no one actually fixed
Start with what's broken, because it's worse than most people realize. A streaming platform pays an artist somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. That's hundreds of plays for a single dollar — and only after the label's cut, the distributor's cut, and everyone else in the chain takes theirs. The people who make the music we build our lives around capture a sliver of the value they create.
Now look at the other side of that relationship: the fans. A fan can discover a song before anyone, share it, stream it a thousand times, and turn it into a hit — and own exactly none of the upside. All of the value their attention creates flows to platforms and rights-holders. The fan gets a memory; everyone else gets paid.
And the royalties themselves — the actual cash flow a song produces — are opaque, slow, and effectively untradeable. Payouts arrive quarterly, through intermediaries, in statements almost no one can audit. There is no liquid, transparent market where a song's future earnings can be priced and exchanged. The most emotionally valuable asset class on earth has one of the worst financial infrastructures.
Why NFTs were the wrong shape
NFTs were supposed to fix this. They didn't — and the reason is structural, not a matter of execution.
An NFT is, by design, non-fungible : one-of-one, unique, valued because there is only one of it. That model works beautifully for things whose worth is their scarcity — a piece of visual art, a signed original, a status object.
But a song's value isn't scarce. It's fungible and recurring. A track's worth comes from being played again and again, by millions of people, over years — streams, royalties, licensing, and a fanbase that compounds. That's not a collectible; that's a cash-flow instrument. Trying to express recurring, divisible, everybody-can-share value as a single non-fungible token is like trying to represent a company's earnings with a single trading card. The container fights the contents.
Fix the primitive, and the whole thing works.
The AFT: a new primitive
An Audio Fungible Token is a fungible, divisible token that represents a song — and it does three things a collectible never could:
1. Your balance unlocks the music. Holding the token grants access to the track. You buy it and you're in — instantly, in your own wallet, before any market even exists.
2. The transfer fee is the artist's royalty. Every time an AFT trades, a fee is taken and split automatically — the majority to the artist, the rest to fans who stake the token. The artist earns on the first sale and every trade after it , on-chain, forever. No distributor, no quarterly statement, no waiting.
3. It trades in a real market. Because it's fungible, an AFT can have its own liquid market — a price, depth, the ability for thousands of fans to each own a share and trade it whenever they want.
Put simply: an AFT is access, royalties, and liquidity in a single token. It's the opposite of a music NFT — and it's a far better fit for how music value actually behaves.
Why an AFT needs its own market (the hard part)
Here's the catch, and it's the reason this took real engineering rather than a clever token contract: you cannot just list an AFT on a normal decentralized exchange.
Because the royalty is built into the transfer itself, an AFT is what's called a fee-on-transfer token — every time it moves, a fee is skimmed. Generic automated market makers (the engines behind most on-chain trading) handle these tokens badly: they double-charge the fee, misprice the swap, or revert the trade entirely. The very mechanism that pays the artist breaks the exchanges that would let fans trade.
So the market has to be purpose-built. The protocol I've written is exactly that — an automated market maker designed from the ground up for fee-on-transfer tokens, where the royalty is charged exactly once per trade, never twice, and the pool always measures the real amount it received. A few design choices matter enough to name:
One fair fee. A routed trade moves the token straight into the pool and settles against what's actually there, so a fan trading an AFT pays the same single royalty they would trading it directly — they're never silently taxed twice.
The launch is honest by construction. An AFT starts non-transferable, and its market can only open at the price fans paid in the presale. No insider can spin up a side market ahead of buyers and dump on them. The first public price is the fans' price.
It can't be rugged, and it can't be bricked. The artist's royalty address is permanent and can never be changed. Pricing is manipulation-resistant, and the market can never be frozen by a failing price feed — custody and withdrawals never depend on anything downstream. Holders can read, in the code, exactly where the money goes and know it can't move.
What this unlocks
Line the incentives up and something rare happens: everyone in the loop wins, not just the platform.
Artists earn on the first sale and on every trade forever, automatically — turning a fanbase into a perpetual, on-chain royalty stream instead of a quarterly trickle. Fans finally hold something that pays them back — a real stake in the songs they love, with upside if they were early, instead of a collectible that just sits in a wallet. And fans who stake earn yield from genuine trading activity, so believing in an artist and supporting them become the same act.
That's the world AFTs make possible: a song as a living, tradable, royalty-bearing asset, in a market built to price it fairly.
Where this is — and what I'm looking for
I want to be honest about the stage, because it matters. The full smart-contract protocol for AFTs is written and thoroughly tested — the token, the artist-launch factory, the presale that sets a fair genesis price, the fee-on-transfer-native exchange, the router, and a manipulation-resistant price oracle. What it is not yet is audited or deployed. That's the road ahead: an audit, a mainnet launch, and the application and infrastructure layer around the contracts.
I'm building this in the open, and I'm looking for two things: a technical co-founder to build the app and infrastructure layer with me and take it to launch — a real partner with real ownership — and a small group of people who see what I see. If you build in web3, or you make music, or you just think the industry has been solving the wrong problem, I'd love to talk.
And whatever happens next, remember the term, because I think you'll be hearing it a lot: AFT. Audio Fungible Token. Music assets were never NFTs. They're AFTs — and you heard it here first.
— Melk (BlockDevMelk), blockchain developer. Building the protocol for Audio Fungible Tokens in the open.
