Spotify threat, mattress sellers and free chili... Carlos Diaz live

• A successful podcaster himself, Carlos Diaz founded Uncut.fm to provide a new source of income for content creators.

• It offers podcasters the opportunity to sell membership cards in the form of NFTs, giving access to a page reserved for them.

• The amount collected can free the creator from the sponsorship-paying access-patronage triptych or be managed in a community way by the fans who bought the NFT

With each iteration of the web, Carlos Diaz has innovated and undertaken.

With the advent of Web 3, the investor that many know today for his Silicon Carne podcast has set up a new company: Uncut.fm.

This platform for connecting content creators and their audience is intended to revolutionize the monetization of podcasts.

We received it on Tuesday, June 21 on our Twitch show, 20 Mint au Carré. 

Why did you start Uncut.fm?

As a podcaster, I had the frustration of not knowing my audience.

Silicon Carne is a great podcast.

I have numbers but they are called

.

I have a number of downloads every month but I don't know who is listening to me.

We asked ourselves the question of how we could use these new web 3 tools to create a new relationship with our audience because today centralized platforms, such as Spotify or Apple Podcast, do not want creators to have directly with their audience.

It's their business model.

We think it's our audience but it's not our audience.

It is an audience that we rent to these platforms.

What changes Uncut?

Uncut.fm's motivation was to create the first blockchain infrastructure for podcasters.

To allow them to transform their content into tokens and offer these tokens directly to their audience.

These tokens can be a complete episode, an extract from an episode, anything else, an image, a video, a 3D object, etc.

Today, on our platform, podcasters have a page dedicated to them.

And they will be able to drop useful tokens on this page.

For example, with Silicon Carne, the token grants access to the Hacienda which is a gated community around the show.

I organize a lot of things with these people who have identified themselves as my super-fans, who trust me and support the show.

I give them access to exclusive things and we do lots of very funny things with them.

Why talk about token and not NFT?

The problem with the term NFT is that it is overused.

It is often perceived as a speculative object.

I don't think my audience buys a Silicon Carne token because it's going to make a profit.

Maybe there is a secondary market for these tokens, but that's not the point.

They are fan tokens, community objects around which people gather.

But technically, yes, they are NFTs.

Does it change anything to mint NFTs?

You are no longer dependent on a centralized hosting server.

When you mint NFTs, on Uncut.fm, the media part (the content) is automatically hosted on Arweav which is an IPFS server, decentralized, and therefore it is available forever.

There is an address that is created for this content.

Which means that if I, the creator, remove it from my RSS feed, it remains accessible.

I am no longer in control of this content, the community has control over it.

It has become a public good.

And the right to be forgotten?

There, it's over.

From the moment the content was minted, it was made public and eternal.

Unless each of the owners of this token asks Arweave to burn it...

And if you

But that's also why we created Uncut.Fm.

We know very well that centralized platforms play a role of moderation, sometimes positive but also very negative.

They decide to promote this or that creator according to their economic interests.

Spotify is a real threat to independent podcasters.

They have their own podcast production that they will promote at the expense of independent podcasts.

Web 3 allows us to free ourselves from this diktat imposed on us by the platforms and to regain power.

That's to say?

Blockchain was not invented to make us richer but to make us freer.

This is the real issue.

We were wrong about this last year of euphoria, especially around NFTs.

Today the power is concentrated between a few platforms and it is very problematic.

We invented with the web a protocol that was open and at one point we screwed up because we needed technological capacity that we were no longer able to offer for free.

Companies have taken advantage of this to invent tools that are certainly brilliant, but which have come at a cost: our freedom.

How does Uncut.fm fit into all of this?

By getting rid of intermediaries.

Our idea is to put the podcaster and the listener in direct contact.

We do not take any cuts on sales that are made by the creator.

100% of the revenue generated from the sale of the tokens goes to the podcaster.

The creator is allowed to invent his own economic model.

And how do you get paid?

That's a big question (laughs).

We will certainly be in a model where the platform will be free.

You will be able to mint X tokens for free and if you want to mint more, you will have to pay a price per minting.

In fact, I'm selling you the vinyl wafer, the technological material, but the price at which you sell the content is none of my business.

I will not take a cut.

The idea is to win just enough to run the platform?

You say I'm not going to make any money, but that's not what I tell my investors at all.

If I have a creator who has a huge community, he is going to need to mint large amounts of tokens, and therefore I will make a lot of money with the big ones.

OK, I'm going to do very little with the little ones, but I'm not here to steal candy from the kids.

We have to get out of the diktat that says that to live we need millions of listeners.

It is a model that relies solely on advertising.

Me, I think you can fund your podcast with a community of 1,000 fans.

I may not make a lot of money with these creators, but I will make money with the biggest ones.

Them, I'm going to take a lot of money from them (laughs).

You've been experimenting with Uncut.Fm with your own show for two months.

It works?

As I speak to you, I have minted 205 tokens.

They were all sold out within hours of their release.

This allowed us to collect 3.37 ethers (3500 euros at the time of the issue).

80% of the sale of these NFTs, I keep them in the wallet.

And this money, I use it to create a war chest that the community will use as it wishes.

There were sick thoughts.

There are people who want to set up camp at Burning Man and hand out chili con carne to everyone there.

And why not?

Can you figure out why people are willing to pay to buy your tokens?

My message to my community is very simple.

I tell them "we don't want a sponsor for Silicon Carne".

I don't want to turn into a mattress salesman with this show.

I don't want an advertiser.

I refuse to put my content behind a paywall.

There is a huge injustice in saying "if you have money, you will have access to my content, pay. And even pay every month".

No, my content I want to share with as many people as possible.

I don't want to ask for charity either.

I want to create things for you, offer them to you and if you like them, buy them and that takes the form of a token.

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