When we started building Nina in February 2021, we saw a landscape where artists were increasingly dependent on platforms that weren’t resilient. We wondered: can you have independent music if everyone is dependent on three or four corporations? Is your music really yours if it can only be accessed through a private company’s database? Why should a corporation decide how much of your listeners’ financial support you earn? These questions have only become more pressing in the last two and a half years.

Early on in the project, we saw the potential to use open source technologies (yes, blockchains) to put control back in the hands of independent artists. We wanted to use open source networks to publicly and permanently host music and facilitate direct payments to artists. We wanted to build a platform where everyone and everything was connected—from artists, to fans, to releases, and more—and to create new, more human-centered pathways for discovery. We wanted to create an online music ecosystem that reminds us of the DIY scenes we came from, that parallels the structure and interdependence native to these spaces.

We used to joke that Nina was the hardest way to release music online. That’s no longer the case. In fact, we think it might be the easiest.

Nina v2 is now live.

Beyond being easier to use, it comes with the features our users asked for the most, including the ability to upload albums, better tools for discovery and an interface that allows artists and fans to buy and sell music using a card—no crypto required. 

Nina v2 gives artists a way to permanently store their music without a subscription fee. It allows supporters to pay artists directly, and is a place where people can build context around their favorite music and scenes. 

Traditionally, a tech company’s most valuable assets are your data and their code. We wondered if we could build from a different perspective, one where music could be hosted permanently and publicly without a subscription fee, and where artists could be paid directly without a platform fee. So that’s what we did—all built on code that is publicly available for anyone to review, copy or adapt as their own. 

We spent nine months building Nina v1 while working day jobs. We went live on November 18, 2021. This was during the peak of the crypto hype cycle, which brought us attention from a variety of people, including musicians exploring alternative ways to release their music online and crypto speculators looking to make a fast buck. The crypto people quickly discovered that Nina wasn’t interested in turning music into a speculative commodity—if you sell a release for $5, it will always be $5—and peaced. But the artists stuck around. From their early feedback, it was clear what we needed to build to make Nina a viable solution to their problems.

In September 2022, we sold an 18 percent interest in Nina to investors, allowing us to grow to a team of seven and focus on Nina full time. Since then, as part of our Nina Nights series, we’ve put on 20 concerts in our office and at other venues around NYC, featuring performances by the likes of James Ferraro, Organ Tapes, Huerco S. and Bergsonist. We’ve produced the 400 Floor podcast, where underground artists come together to talk about their shared context across different musical movements and geographical scenes. We’ve commissioned mixes and editorial features that have highlighted artists and labels from North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Today we’re also publishing the first pieces from Nina Editorial, an in-house daily publication that features musicians, writers and sounds from across the vast and expansive niches of internet-native music today. It will be published through Nina’s writing tools, a new avenue for creating context on Nina, which will be publicly available soon. 

We’re thrilled to feature columns from some of the most important writers and curators in independent music today on Nina, including Passion of the Weiss, No Bells, Shawn Reynaldo of First Floor, pi pi pi and John Chiaverina of John’s Music Blog.

If you’re an artist, label, listener, writer or just someone else who cares deeply about music, we invite you to try the new Nina and tell us what you think.