SeaNaps - blockchain music festival, Germany

Project name: SeaNaps - A blockchain based music festival

Project location: Germany

Website: http://www.seanaps.net/
http://www.visionbakery.com/seanaps-net

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seanapsfestival/

Project description:

SeaNaps is a new music festival based in Leipzig. It aims at drawing connections between networks of music, economy and politics through concerts, workshops and debates. It also proposes a very concrete proposition for alternative cultural economies.

SeaNaps will be a real time, city scaled blockchain experiment! We will propose a way of payment almost exclusively based on digital currencies, at our food and drink stands at the Grassimuseum, as in various partner places around the city.

So in a few words:

Our festival is for free, but every buying action (drinks, food, etc.) happening during it will be done with bracelets charged with Lips. Every festival visitors can get our bracelets at our stands in the Grassimuseum.

Each time you buy a drink or a meal at our festival or in a store of our local partners, the money you spent will be split and directly transferred on the different accounts of those who contributed to this festival (artists, security staff, suppliers, but also local associations, shops, etc.). The percentage each account receives will be chosen on a democratic and public decision before the start of the festival.

Goal and purpose of the project:

We want to point out:

the importance of a fair and transparent payment of all contributors involved into an event
the importance of the local production and economy circles upon the existence of cultural events.

The whole process of establishment of the re-partition key and its execution will be public, documented, and followed as an economical, political and sociological experiment, which aims at finding new ways to underline the artists influence and importance in the economy of a cultural event, and within the local economy hosting it.

If SeaNaps is basing its whole experiment on the notion of connection and chose the slogan "No Human is an Island", it is due to a firm belief: our actions matter, even the smallest.

What we do, what we say, what we support, what we buy, consume, has repercussions.
To know it is to make it a strength.
Through its blockchain experiment as well as through its own internal organization, SeaNaps is acknowledging these connections and making it its fundamental basis. What one drinks or buy at one side of the city is influencing the other side’s situation.

Therefore , the blockchain is here thought as a way to increase transactions’ vitalizing effect on the local economy. When a euro comes into our system, its “shadow” (the lips) processes through a world-wide distributed technology but locally implanted reality, irrigating the local circuit and its actors. The local production can hence be thought as a self regulated ecosystem, whose rules’ and mechanisms’ writing include its inhabitants and actors. A try for a humanistic and solidary economy, thought for those to whom it is only a means.

Motivation of the applicant / applicant team:

The main reason why we want to bother using the blockchain technology instead of using classical euro transactions like most festivals is because we believe there is a failure in the way those mainstream circuits are paying the artist.

In most festivals, especially “for free” events, most of the revenue of a festival (apart from its subvention and sponsoring funds) is coming from the sale of drinks during the live events. However, in the chain of transactions, payments among partners and fees taken by various third part (mainly banking and financial entities), the artist almost always ends up being the last (and less) paid.

Our aim is to give awareness to the festival goers on the direction their money is taking once they have spent it. To question the way our cultural economical system is considering the artists work. At a time in which the traditional and monopolistic music industry has shown its limits and yet continues on exploiting the 99,9% of artists who are not rich and famous, it is up to us to propose other solutions, be it for live or recorded music.
 

Use of prize money:

The 15 000 euros would be used for two concrete purposes:

• First and mainly: to design and produce the bracelets charged with our digital currency, as well as the phone application on which the transactions will be running. With this sum, we can produce enough of them to make a durable impact on the local economy circuit as well as on the consciousness of those who will use it.
• To finalize our mobile app, which will provide to the audience, on top of the “classical” line up and map of the festival, the possibility to recharge your crypted account directly via a credit card, to donate and to watch, in real time, the amount of “Lips” received by the artists and all parties involved in the contract.

With your help, let us prove once and for all, that "No Human is an Island".