The Nina Protocol Retrospective

How do you listen to music? Does it feel good? What would a better environment feel, look, and sound like? Floating atop the sea of music streaming services, one is more likely than not to develop nausea. SS Spotify dominates the Western waters, leaving Tencent Music in charge of the far East coast. Yachts crash into each other ~ Apple Music, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Amazon Music, Tidal (lol) ~ attempting to guard the coast. But at the turn of the quarter-century, a new blue sailboat appeared on the horizon, by the name of Nina. It felt like the tides were finally shifting. “It could be the start of a revolution in streaming”, declared Rolling Stone; DAZED simply asked: “Is this the music streaming platform of the future?”

Music, as a “technology of the self,” informs our on-going work of self-construction.¹DeNora, Tia. 1999. “Music as a Technology of the Self.” Poetics 27 (1): 31–56, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-422X(99)00017-0. Our identities are intrinsically linked with the music we listen to (duh), and the affective resonance of music-listening cannot be understated. There’s a reason why some people collect James Ferraro tapes while others amass Taylor Swift vinyls. But today, 80% of music-listening is mediated through digital streaming, rendering the tactical formats of CDs, vinyl records, and cassette tapes mostly obsolete, reserved for retro hobbyism. If art is experience, as Dewey suggests, then streaming renounces music to a single-sense experience, removing it from any ritualistic physicality.²Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Company. You can’t even count on variety! The streaming giants all circulate the same catalog of 100 million songs, and the days of Tidal Exclusive albums are far behind us. When did the act of listening to music become so spiritually chopped?

Today’s music-listening seascape was not built by (or with, or for) music-listeners and working musicians in mind. Spotify spearheaded the streaming model of music, but their first U.S. patent in 2007 described a platform that would circulate “any kind of digital content” including music, video, digital film, or images ~ as long as it utilized the adtech experience of founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon.³Pelly, Liz. 2025. Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Simon & Schuster. As detailed by Liz Pelly in our interview for CKUT 90.3 FM, “these are platforms with immense influence, run by people who really have no idea what it looks like to try to make a living as a musician.” Spotify gets away with enshitiffication, bloating their interface with unnecessary AI features and doling out paltry payouts for artists, while facing little consequence. As of 2026, Daniel Ek is worth $12.5 billion, making him richer than any musician who has ever lived.

Despite these brutal realities, and a bevy of other ethical concerns, we stay subscribed. If there truly is “no ethical consumption under capitalism” then what is the point of trying to find an alternative? Platform hedonism turns into platform realism turns into platform nihilism. To adapt an abused quote attributed to each of Jameson, Žižek, and Fisher: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Spotify.”

~~~

Ahoy! In sails Nina Protocol, a promising imaginary emerging during the early-2020s NFT boom as a blockchain-operated streaming alternative with a strong editorial vision. “Something like Bandcamp for the Discord generation,” Nina Protocol aimed to release independent musicians from the grips of Big Streaming, offering them the chance to sell their music on their own terms. No more one-size-fits-all payments, context collapse, and reductive algorithmic discovery. Just real connection and fair compensation. Over the years, Nina received coveted co-signs from labels like Warp, AD 93, and Hyperdub, as well as artists from ML Buch to Yung Lean. One of Nina Protocol’s co-founders boldly proclaimed, “I can see a world where Spotify no longer exists.” For a time, this world seemed to be approaching.

But in May 2026, after five years of diligent existence, Nina Protocol announced it would be winding down operations, eventually sunsetting in July. Nina’s team concluded there were “no viable paths forward.” Hope had been lost, once again. Nina was not, in fact, fated to be the streaming platform of the future.

In this retrospective, I hope to reflect on Nina Protocol’s short-lived (but meaningful) existence from a number of perspectives: as a user who discovered new music on Nina, as a collaborater who worked with the Protocol on promotional content, and as a researcher who studies alternative music streaming platforms professionally.⁴I know, my parents don’t think it’s a good career move, either.

I am not affiliated with Nina Protocol. I am interested in what we can learn from their successes and failures. Musicians are not the only ones who stand to benefit from a discussion of alternative music streaming models ~ cultural workers of all shapes and sizes around the globe are dealing with increased corporatization, precarity, delegitimization, and funding cuts in the arts.⁵Eckenhaussen, Sepp. 2026, Goodbye Poverty Jetset: How Art Workers Make Solidarity Economies, HumDrumPress. Asking questions about new models ~ What went well? What went wrong? How can we change course? ~ will eventually lead us to the final question, the most important question of all: What are the viable paths forward?

WHAT WENT WELL?

Surfing through Nina was the virtual version of visiting the local record store. One wanted to be seen on the Protocol, collecting a friend’s experimental pop project, liking Escho’s new release, or tending to a hub of loosely-related songs that would soon turn into a micro-genre. For appreciators of musical (sub)culture, Nina was a breath of fresh air, albeit clouded in Strawberry Ice vape smoke.

The platform was founded by three white guys:⁶Isn’t this just the best way to start a sentence? Eric Farber (a punk musician who codes listening to heavy metal), Mike Pollard (the founder of a noise record label at age 14), and Jack Callahan (an underground event organizer and sound engineer). They had met through “the scene”, bonding over their shared love of music and technology, in that order. In early interviews, they refer to Nina as their “new band.”

Nina Protocol was the first, and so far only, music streaming alternative to pay close attention to alternative (read: weird, online, Cool) music communities. Their only real competitor was wise elder Bandcamp, who, lacking a unified editorial vision and reputationally tainted after multiple rounds of corporate buyouts, failed to build a tight-knit network of scenesters. Nina’s editorial direction was notably fresh; they knew their way around the damn phone. Getting showered in Nina’s semiotic signature blue was an indicator of high cloutedness; Kieran Press-Reynolds called it the “hipster rec platform.” As a young artist making alternative music, it was in your best interests to partner with Nina, either through a text-in Q&A, a vertical-style street interview, or by cementing yourself as a cunning curator through their “Selected By” series. As described by Head of Music Cal Hickox, Nina wanted to build “a decentralized, traceable community of music freaks.”

In their prime, Nina Protocol was prolific, pumping out a new piece of curated content every day. Yesterday, a tongue-in-cheek street interview with former Dimes Square rapper BlakeTheMan1000. Today, a Q&A with hippie-chic ravers The Femcels. Tomorrow, a micro-genre report on “laptop twee” with RYM-approved Fisherian four-piece friends&. Artists like James K performed at Nina Nights, an event series for New York’s most tapped-in heads. I was lucky enough to get caught in the turmoil myself, regularly updating a “Selected By” hub on behalf of the music discovery page earFeeder, which was featured on Nina’s homepage until its final days. Truthfully, this demarcation felt like a badge of honour, divine recognition, even a vehicle towards legitimation for a low-clouted individual like myself.

Herein lies the first thing Nina Protocol got right: they tapped into a tribal energy, the ever-lasting human desire to belong. Sartre believed existence precedes essence, and our being-in-itself coexists with our being-for-others. As humans, we perceive ourselves through the eyes of others ~ our commitments would make no sense if there were not other people in the world. As much as we may enjoy being unique individuals, we must also feel like we are contributing to a greater purpose, a transcendental goal.

Part of this transcendence comes from pooling together shared ideas, like #kitchenpop, #crustaceancore, #angelstyle, #laptoptwee, #nerk, #bunkerjazz, #jumble, #scenecore and more. Nina was a hot spring for micro-genres, micro-institutions, micro-hubs of influence ~ digital community-building in the realest sense of the term.

Today’s digital music commodity is completely devoid of aura. As Walter Benjamin argued in 1936, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” ~ it’s essence, authenticity, unique spatial distance, all collapsed at the point of mediation. You can’t hold an MP3, feel the weight of its bits in your hands. The founders of Nina Protocol wanted to solve this problem by minting each release as a pseudo-NFT, supplying digital music with an imposed, false scarcity. Each record was an individualized node, with opportunities for personalization. On Nina, you could Grab a digital record, though you might have to get past the Glitch first.

90 years after Benjamin’s observation, the term “aura” has been colloquially adopted to categorize Coolness, that fluid and impossible-to-define quality which signals refined taste and self-assurance. Success in the music industry, like any other creative industry in the 2020s, requires a steady stream of content to be fed to fans. If an artist wishes to circulate this content in a Cool way, there are very few avenues to do so.⁷Btw, one is never in the active role whilst pleasing the machine. Machine-pleasing is an inherently degrading act, since classical humans do not set the terms of engagement and have no consent over how our content gets spread. We cannot fist the black box, for it would swallow us whole. Pleasing the machine, even in a tongue-in-cyber-cheek way, puts us in the role of its bratty submissive, fighting for performances sake but ultimately bending to the will of its desires. Libidinal? Definitely. Fulfilling? Only when we “go viral,” effectively making the machine cum. But, active? Surely not. Nina knew this better than any of their competitors.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

In the weeks following Nina’s announcement of egression, many speculated on the cause of their demise. For The Fader, Benny Sun: ”the platform was ultimately unable to reconcile the massive pressures that comes with any venture capital-backed project with the profit-agnostic passion that fuels working-class musicians.” For Components, Chris Good: “The boom-bust mentality and reliance on external capital… is obviously at practical and ideological odds with a stable independent music scene.” For ArtReview Robert Barry: “The tech bros got us into this mess, privatising and sacking our cultural media. Why on earth should we trust them to get us out of it?”

Indeed, Nina’s operations reeked of techno-optimism from the start. The idea to use a “decentralized stack” came from spitballing at New York’s oldest bar in 2021 ~ who can’t relate to good old fun like that? Solana blockchain (home of shitcoin pump-and-dump marketplace “pump.fun”) was chosen for its cheap fees and quick settlements, easing users into their inevitable crypto futures. In early days, Nina only supported purchases in USDC, a “stablecoin” pegged to the U.S. dollar. Music was hosted on Arweave servers, with the guarantee that content would be stored on the permaweb for 180 years (a noble pursuit, until you realize the lengths it would take to access your music after protocol dissolution). Nina’s approach was to make crypto more accessible for artists.

Diving deeper, it seems like the team at Nina was not as evangelical about crypto as their investors from Greenfield Capital may have been. Nina’s Head of Music told an MA researcher, “we experimented early on with Web 3 concepts like limited releases and resale markets, but we found that music fans don’t want music to become a stock market.”⁸Bianchi, Virginia. 2025. The Stream Of Consciousness: Rethinking a Music Streaming Platform Artist-Centered and Community Driven. Master’s Thesis, MA Media Studies. Erasmus University Rotterdam. The founders themselves admit that many of the characters in the crypto space are “shitty people.” The Protocol was never proud of their crypto roots, and was careful not to advertise their infrastructural dependency on the blockchain.

Crypto craves proximity to Cool just as much as the rest of us. Subcultural capital is the ultimate paradox of desire ~ the only form of capital that is impossible for tech bros to acquire, since as soon as they earn it, it ceases to become Cool. Generating subcultural buy-in becomes the behemothic goal on the mountain to acquisition.

Just ask the founders of Silknode, a self-described Pinterest-meets-Tumblr curated-internet-chicslop platform which recently closed an $800k pre-seed round. Or Zora, a speculative art marketplace where you can “trade what’s trending.” Zora’s Instagram editorial team has a similar target as Nina’s: young people with underground, alternative tastes. On Zora’s grid, one finds interviews with airbrush artists, ragecore rappers, Firkin fashionistas, and Create Mode storytellers. But the users and beneficiaries of the “tokenized creator economy” platform itself are nowhere to be found on the feed.

The vast majority of people who align themselves with Zora’s Instagram feed would find the activities of the platform itself aesthetically defunct. The aesthetics of prospectively nouveau-riche Silicon Valley builders, in all their Ghibli-generated glory, are not Cool. I would be shocked to find out that top trader $jessepolak is  listening to Ava Lions in his free time (if he has any). From a look at his most recently-updated Spotify playlist My Peleton Music, it seems like he mostly listens to 2010s electronica and contemporary feel-good pop.⁹Since the time of writing, it seems like $jessepolak has deleted all of his posts on Zora. Maybe this type of anti-network-effect pump-and-dump platform-exodus could be the topic of a book written by someone more technically knowledgeable than I am. The Feed merely serves as a facilitating mechanism to get more people gambling on the website.

“No wayyy Zora tapped in”, reads the comment on Zora’s first Instagram post from late 2025. Well, at least someone on the team seems to be. Zora’s goal is to make crypto Cool, to position their technology as something that appeals to the youth, not unlike Nina Protocol. Despite the best efforts of crypto bros, there is still a lack of cultural cachet and buy-in for blockchain infrastructure among artists (though Spike Art Mag is putting their best foot forward). Robert Barry puts it best: “I can think of no dire situation, historically, which was improved by the addition of baroque speculative financial instruments.” The boundary delineating profiting from profiteering is porous. Web3 is a scam; let’s hold out hope for Web4?

Underneath the mesh wire, Nina Protocol functioned much more successfully as a music promotion machine than as a music streaming platform. Before breathing its last breath, Nina experimented with “Community Revenue Share” ~ a $1 fee split up into five microtransactions:  20¢ for the first collector, 20¢ split between the link sharer and hub curator, 5¢ to the person who invited the buyer to Nina, 5¢ to the person who invited the artist to Nina, and a whopping 50¢ to fund Nina platform operations. Shockingly, even a series of 50¢ fees couldn’t save the Protocol. In his analysis of Nina data, Chris Good shows how only 17% of the 37,000 releases listed on Nina Protocol were ever “collected.” Only $50,000 was spent on the Protocol over the course of its existence.

HOW CAN WE CHANGE COURSE?

The word “stream” first appears in the early 12th century to mean "anything issuing from a source and flowing continuously", derived from Middle English strem: "course of water, current of a stream, body of water flowing in a natural channel", carrying Proto-Germanic roots. “Streaming” is then used as a verb in the early 13th century, meaning to "flow copiously, move or run in a continuous current." Centuries later, the expressions “stream of thought” and “stream of consciousness” appear in the fields of psychology and literary criticism (though Buddhist scriptures had been describing citta-saṃtāna (sanskrit for ‘stream of mind’) and viññāna-sota (pali for ‘stream of consciousness’) for centuries). Today, we primarily use the verb in reference to streaming media such as on-demand TV, livestreaming, and music streaming platforms.

Streaming as a biological metaphor is particularly apt when studying the techno-social environment of music streaming platforms, given the myriad connections between water and sound. The foundational element of a stream, like that of a sound, is the waveform. Tides have their own cyclical rhythm, responding to the gravitational pull of the moon. When considering the vast infrastructure of fiber-optic underwater cables that power 95-99% of international internet traffic and high-speed data spread, the conceptual connection between streaming as a flow of water and streaming as a flow of content becomes crystal clear, and difficult to disentangle. We shape the stream as much as it shapes us.

From a quick glance at the above image mapped by strategic advisory firm Water and Music, one gets the sense that the music industry is a deeply complex system, bound up in a tsunami of power. Nina Protocol is too small to even be mapped. Outside of music streaming platforms like Spotify and Bandcamp, a varied set of transectorial players hold stake in the game: private equity firms, institutional finance, major media & tech conglomerates, major record labels, indie record labels, music rights companies, commercial radio, campus/community radio, booking agencies, promoters, ticketing services, music creation & production tools, instrument makers, business management tools, music media publications, performing rights organizations, artist unions & alliances, and many more.

Changing course requires an acute awareness of the levers we can pull to influence power. Most working musicians are not shareholders of Spotify, meaning they do not materially benefit from the upside generated by the financialization of their labour. There are so many business-people in music, but where are the music-people in business? McLuhan dubbed the “acoustic space” mediating our interactions with the nature world as “intuitive, mystical, inductive, experiential.”¹⁰McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill. Could we tap into the instinctive, intuitive nature of music and apply it to the structure of music streaming? Could we inject our principles of handling organization ~ trust, solidarity, care, fair pay, cooperation ~ into the music industry? Could we use artistic thinking to challenge the extractive industry within which we operate?

This is easier said than done. People don’t get involved in music scenes because they want to make money (and if they do, they’re sung off as clout-chasers). The starving artist archetype remains a romantic ideal. Independent music scenes have an aversion to profit-making, and for good reason.

Easier said than done, but certaintly not impossible! The toughest things tend to be the most fulfilling.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” ~ Wendell Berry

WHAT ARE THE VIABLE PATHS FORWARD?

Two months after announcing their shut-down, Nina Protocol followed up with another surprising announcement: their remnants would be acquired by music streaming platform SoundCloud.

The term “acquisition” is a bit misleading; artists with music on Nina can seamlessly migrate their discography over to SoundCloud, and are graciously gifted a 5-month coupon to SoundCloud’s Creator program. Nina Protocol’s actual sale price to SoundCloud has not been publicized, but its fair to say that none of the artists who contributed to the website will be receiving a share. Nina’s editorial content will be “archived” but it’s still  unclear whether their editorial team has been poached.

Appearances can, famously, be deceiving. Nina Protocol’s artist-first language and alternative positioning cloaked an allegiance to the capitalist order that they seemed to be opposing. Liz Pelly speculates that this “acquisition” happened because SoundCloud needs some brand rehabilitation after their last year of scandal. SoundCloud’s CEO Eliah Seton recently revealed that he gets insight from an AI Board of Directors trained on the “writings and thinking” of people like Billie Eilish, Lucian Grange, and Kendrick Lamar. (Austin Robey, CEO of cooperatively-owned music platform Subvert, cheekily implies AI Billie Eilish gave Seton the idea to buy Nina Protocol. Though I doubt Billie even knew about Nina... maybe the Board was also trained on the “writings and thinkings” of Smerz.)

We must abandon the idea that genuine progress in the music industry will come from purely technical solutions, and let our growing wariness of techno-optimist fixes grow more and more wary. As Benny Sun writes, “The path forward might be one already within our grasp… It doesn’t take a blockchain to put money back in the hands of artists, that’s what the merch booth is for… the embrace of fundamental and principal interactions is always available, even when newfangled things aren’t.”

In 2025, Nina was placed alongside Subvert, Are.na, and Silk Node, in a semi-viral map of the post-naive internet era, representing a cohort of companies building digital infrastructure primarily for niche communities and their needs. Nina may have drowned but her contemporaries are still wading.

Nina’s failure is not an indication that we should stop trying to think up alternatives. On the contrary, Nina’s memorable splash in the sea of music streaming suggests a demand for such imaginaries. In his short piece titled It’ll probably fail, still worth trying, Shaad D’Souza writes: “That Nina even tried to build a new model for distributing music with fair compensation is, in my mind, an extreme win: Music people seem to suffer from an extreme lack of imagination, especially when it comes to business, and so most attempts to move anything forward seem to usually end in Pyrrhic victories or, a lot of the time, genuine losses.” Imagination is important. As apocryphally stated by Gloria Steinem, “Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”

If you currently use Spotify, but want to transition to a healthier platform, you can begin by dipping your toes in the alternatives. Become a member of Subvert, the co-operatively owned music marketplace (this is where I feel the most hope for the future). Look into Cantilever and Qobuz. Redownload Soulseek. Winamp is still a thing. Resist convenience culture and algorithmic taste-making by buying an MP3 player and slowly migrating your music library. Visit your local campus/community radio station and tour their music library. Start a CD collection, start a vinyl collection. Take pride in owning your music. Build your own small-scale music streaming server via open-source code (it’s easier than you might think). Go against the grain, embrace friction. Fight network effects by telling your friends about the alternative you’ve chosen to adopt, and why. Get them to join, too.

Critical awareness of, and interest in, the internal governance structures and external funding sources of music streaming platforms can only benefit independent artists. When we have more nuanced conversations about the overflowing creep of venture capital and private equity in art, we start to carve alternative tributaries. The easiest (and least expensive) thing you can do today is have a conversation with someone about music streaming. Ask them: How do you listen to music? Does it feel good? What would a better environment feel, look, and sound like?

Notes/References:

[1] DeNora, Tia. 1999. “Music as a Technology of the Self.” Poetics 27 (1): 31–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-422X(99)00017-0.

[2] Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Company.

[3] Pelly, Liz. 2025. Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Simon & Schuster.

[4] I know, my parents don’t think it’s a good career move either.

[5] Eckenhaussen, Sepp. 2026. Goodbye Poverty Jetset: How Art Workers Make Solidarity Economies. HumDrumPress.

[6] Isn’t this just the best way to start a sentence?

[7] One is never in the active role whilst pleasing the machine. Machine-pleasing is an inherently degrading act, since classical humans do not set the terms of engagement and have no consent over how our content gets spread. We cannot fist the black box, for it would swallow us whole. Pleasing the machine, even in a tongue-in-cyber-cheek way, puts us in the role of its bratty submissive, fighting for performances sake but ultimately bending to the will of its desires. Libidinal? Definitely. Fulfilling? Only when we “go viral,” effectively making the machine cum. But, active? Surely not.

[8] Bianchi, Virginia. 2025. The Stream Of Consciousness: Rethinking a Music Streaming Platform Artist-Centered and Community Driven. Master’s Thesis, MA Media Studies. Erasmus University Rotterdam.

[9] Since the time of writing, it seems like $jessepolak has deleted all of his posts on Zora. Maybe this type of anti-network-effect pump-and-dump platform-exodus could be the topic of a book written by someone more technically knowledgeable than I am.

[10] McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill.

Bio: Firuza Huseynova is an interdisciplinary researcher and radio DJ based in Montréal. Her MA thesis in Digital Humanities at McGill University, titled Reorienting the Stream, dives into alternative futures for music streaming platforms. In her spare time, she curates the Channel Surfing web series and burrows down Wikipedia rabbit holes. She is currently interested in friction, kitsch design, Hobo font, cybernetic noise collectives, and the concept of Cool. Her most-used words are 'dope', 'epic', and 'awesome'.