About the project
What is Song A Day?
A new song, every day. Forever.
Song A Day is different from other NFT projects. It did not grow directly out of the blockchain. I had written 2000 songs before Ethereum was even invented. I wrote another 1500 before I learned about digital scarcity. But from the moment I saw CryptoPunks, I knew that Song A Day was a perfect fit.
Song A Day is many things. It's about *time.* I measure the days by songs.
Song A Day is a journal. It is quite literally a record of my creative life.
Song A Day can be a burden, a joy, a challenge, a bore - all at the same time.
Above all, Song A Day is an invitation to make stuff. Sometimes it's good stuff, sometimes it's bad stuff, but the making is the most important part.
History
At the height of the 2008 financial crash. I was unemployed. I decided to try to write a song every day in January. By the end of the month, I was having so much fun (and I was still unemployed), I aimed for a year. At the end of 2009, I made the project indefinite. As of now, on the cusp of Year 14, I hold the Guinness World Record for “Most Consecutive Days Writing a Song.”
For the first few years of the project, I made my living entering online video contests. I'd enter 12 contests in 12 days, win one or two of them, and that would be my income for the month. As time went on, I started cobbling together a living from many different sources: Patreon, YouTube ads, streaming revenue, commissions, playing at conferences, writing themes songs and much more.
It's always been my dream to make Song A Day itself my sole source of income. Now, thanks to you, and this DAO, that's finally a possibility.
Who is Jonathan Mann?
I write a song a day.
I started writing songs when I was 12. I wrote my first song on the back of a pizza box. It wasn't a very good song.
I feel really lucky though, because from that age onwards, I had a singular focus in my life: I wanted to write songs. I couldn't really sing, and I barely played guitar. It took me a long time before I made anything good. But none of that mattered: Writings songs is the only thing I have ever wanted to do.
I went to college at Bennington where I started learning how to record myself. My friend Will and I stayed up all night and wrote and recorded 40 songs, each forty seconds long. My friend Thomas and I staged a giant rock opera calledThe Last Nympho Leprechaun. From 2003-6 I wrote a song almost every week for the online songwriting competition,SongFight.org.
In grad school at CalArts I made the world's first rock opera based on Super Mario. It was featured on G4, the premiere gaming channel of the aughts (iykyk).
Subsequently, I got an internship at G4, and ended up writing a bunch of songs for different shows on the channel, culminating in the musical episode of their flagship review show, X-Play.
The Mario Opera on G4
X-Play (The Musical) on G4
Who Draws The Art?
Each year is illustrated by someone different!
Each Song A Day NFT is a 1/1.
Each Song A Day has an accompanying illustration.
Each illustration's attributes are derived from the song itself:
- Topic – what the song is about.
- Mood – the feeling I had when making it.
- Instrument – the main instrument that's played.
- Location – where the song was recorded.
- Genre – the genre.
- Style – what the song sounds like.
- Noun/Proper noun – whether there's a specific person, place, thing or idea in the song.
- Beard – the state of my beard in the video for the song.
These attributes become layers in the illustrations that represent each song.
The illustrators
Song A Day World, Song A Day, and SongADAO © Copyright 2022 Jonathan Mann & SongADAO LCA
Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.