Hey everyone, greetings from IIMG, hope all of you NEARians had a great month with the market doing its own thing these days! 
Project Name: Indian Indie Music Guild ( Read introduction )
Project status: In progress
AstroDAO: iimg.sputnik-dao.near
We’re building IIMG to be a healthy community to nurture emerging artists. We want to educate more artists and collectors about the Web3 ecosystem and about various aspects of the independent music industry on a larger scale, and encourage them to participate in a variety of performance-oriented online and offline events and trade more NFTs on NEAR.
We’ve planned artist mental health, marketing and artist resources workshops to help emerging artists smoothly navigate their way into the industry, along with providing them with gateways into the Web3 world.
Council:
Shivang Arora : Founder/Administration ( https://www.instagram.com/shivang.wav )
Nivedita Lakra : Administration ( https://www.instagram.com/niveditalakraa )
Avanti Nagral : Jury ( https://www.instagram.com/avantinagral )
Komorebi : Jury ( https://www.instagram.com/komorebi.music )
Osho Jain : Jury ( https://www.instagram.com/oshojain_ )
We are pleased to have support from KalakendraDAO
@Monish016
Social Media:
Instagram: instagram.com/theiimguild
Discord : https://discord.gg/hDmwUYAU
Key Activities till date:
- We gave artist scholarship worth $1000 to 2 emerging Indie artists and onboarded them onto the NEAR web3 ecosystem. We will be minting more NFTs with them as they keep making more music.
- Offline NFT education and onboarding workshop with indie artists in New Delhi
- Community building activities with paid promos on Instagram, reaching 111K+ people
- Hosted India’s first indie metaverse open mic in collaboration with NEAR Hub and Tamago
Challenges :
In the past few months, we have onboarded 70+ new users onto NEAR. Our team learned that a majority of these users are reluctant to start their web3 journey because of a prior bad experience. We have identified these major challenges -
- Lack of web3 education and technical know-how in the Indian audience
- Scattered collectors community
- Inefficient web3 onboarding
How we plan to work around them :
The IIMG team will provide these new users with a comprehensive solution to these challenges by,
- setting up our own education wing to teach people about web3
- community building exercises on our Instagram page to get more collectors under the same community
- setting up one-on-one calls with creators/collectors ensuring a smooth web3 experience right from the start
In this post, we have added the details of our second proposal.
Requested Budget -
• Artist Scholarship - Two Indie Artists to be funded for the month of September. The scholarship will be used by artists for various activities like marketing or music videos based on their needs. It will be different for each artist. We, as a guild, would just be awarding them the scholarship to recognise their talent and help them with their music. Once that is done, we’ll empower them to mint those songs and music videos as $NEAR NFTs : $1000 USD ($500 each)
• IIMG education wing : $400
The education wing is our effort to build IIMG into a self-sustaining community that continues to educate and onboard artists and collectors into the NEAR web3 ecosystem.
Through this programme, we will provide in-depth courses to emerging artists about :
- Blockchain, NFTs and Web3 (focused on the NEAR ecosystem)
- Music production
- Songwriting
- Mixing and mastering
- Music and NFT marketing
- Instruments (guitar, piano, etc.)
and much more.
We will use the funds to hire teachers and employees. We will try our best to organise these workshops in the metaverse, and personally onboard each attendee to the web3 ecosystem.
• Offline Indie Concert in New Delhi : $400
“Naayab 2.0” concert is in collaboration with an indie music community from India called Indiegasm.
Their previous event, “Nayaab 1.0” had a line-up of 12+ established musicians and a footfall of over 80 people. “Nayaab 2.0” will be a bigger festival with India’s top indie artists and a footfall of over 120 people.
“Nayaab 2.0” is scheduled for October 2022. Indiegasm has already started raising funds and preparing for the concert. The expected footfall for the indie concert Nayaab 2.0 is currently 120+ attendees. After IIMG’s sponsorship and collaboration for the concert, we are expecting about 250 attendees for the same
Campaign:
During this event, we will onboard all the audience members and performers into the NEAR web3 ecosystem by creating wallets for the attendees and minting NFTs for the artists.
We will also have a special set of IIMG artists performing at the event (including the winners of the IIMG scholarship in June).
The funds will be used as follows -
• Sponsorship for “Nayaab 2.0” : $200
• Wallet creation + NFT minting : $100
• NFT Rewards - Giveaways : $100
• Discord campaigns with large and active music communities of established Indian indie artists to educate and onboard musicians - Includes wallet creation for all attendees : $150
• Online event with established indie musician - Includes Web3 education for creators as well as collectors : $50
Total: $2000
Goals for the month of September and October:
- To fund two Indie musicians for the month of September
- To launch NFT projects with established artists and create wallets for their communities
- Successfully onboard 250 members into the NEAR web3 community through “Nayaab 2.0”
- Establish an education wing with consistent web3 education and onboarding through a series of workshops and courses
- To grow the community to 2000+ members: Discord, Instagram, Twitter and Telegram
- Live sessions on Discord, Twitter Spaces and Instagram with established indie artists
- AMA sessions: 2 online sessions in September
- Metaverse concerts showcasing live performances by IIMG artists
