The playbook for driving profitable Sound.xyz mint revenue on Boost
Attention is a scarce commodity traditionally bought and sold through advertising. In web3, Boost offers brands and individuals the same opportunity to gain distribution, but natively onchain.
After struggling to capture attention, onchain music label Coop Records is now a top Sound.xyz creator driving over $23k in mint fees. The success was possible because they started boosting their artists’ work.
In this post, we'll explore how Coop Records’ playbook strategy for bootstrapping mint distribution and generating onchain revenue.
The challenge
Founded in 2022, Coop Records set out with a clear mission to empower artists to earn from their work without giving up ownership. Through Sound.xyz - an onchain music platform - they monetize their catalogue directly through mints, channelling a majority of revenue to their artists and collaborators. But when the initial excitement of NFTs faded, Coop Records knew they needed to find new ways to attract collectors.
Fortunately, their onchain efforts paid off, earning them over 51k OP in grants from the Optimism RetroPGF. This funding provided a fresh marketing budget to reinvest back into growing their artists.
Similar to how brands use Facebook or Instagram ads to promote their work, Coop Records saw the potential of using Boost as a native onchain advertising tool. By incentivizing mints and paying only for results, they saw a low-risk opportunity to drive distribution and conversion actions.
The magic moment
To start, Coop Records ran several small boosts to test different reward amounts. Knowing that the standard cost for a user to collect a “free” edition song on Sound.xyz is 0.000777 ETH, they wanted to experiment to find the optimal amount to reward users. This ranged anywhere from giving a 50-70% fee rebate in OP to cover the user’s cost to collect.
Because of how easy it is to boost a mint, Coop Records was able to deploy multiple boosts at once, gather data, and iterate and optimize very quickly in real-time.
In fact, it was so easy that within a week, the magic moment happened.
On the Sound.xyz viral chart list, 7 of the top 10 songs were under Coop Records’ label. And just like that, they went from struggling to get distribution and mints to dominating the trending charts. But did this virality translate to profit?
Their playbook guide
"We found Boost to be the most effective and efficient way to drive mints to our catalogue and have been pleasantly surprised by the number of returning collectors that have left meaningful comments and become true fans of the artists on the back of our campaigns.” - Cooper Turley, Founder of Coop Records
Their playbook is simple: use Boost to bootstrap mints, go viral and drive organic mints.
Take a look at ‘Coming Home to You’ by Baker Grace. Released by Coop Records, this song held the #1 spot on the viral chart for weeks and now has over 24k mints. It all started with a single boost that incentivized 300 mints.
Within a few days, the boost claimed out, but the minting didn’t stop. New collectors were discovering the artist through the trending charts and minting it without any incentive, driving a profitable return for the music label.
And Coop Records isn’t the only one finding success with boosting mints. Nearly 80% of Sound.xyz creators on Boost are generating a positive net margin by incentivizing mints. This playbook shows that bootstrapping mints can effectively drive the initial traction necessary for organic growth and distribution to happen.
What is Coop Records’ advice to Sound creators?
“[Boost is] a very tangible way to drive attention to your collection, something that all onchain creators should take very seriously.” - Cooper
Reflecting on their journey, Coop Records shares a simple piece of advice for fellow onchain creators: don’t wait to start. Learn the basics and understand what it means to grow onchain.
Just like how traditional advertising has become the standard to scale distribution, Boost can be used as a tool to drive attention and bootstrap growth for any web3 creator or community. Why wouldn’t you want to start boosting?
See the full impact of Boost on Sound.xyz creators in this Dune dashboard. To learn more about how to use Boost, read the Boost Guide for Creators.