Rondo’s Jonathan Finberg on building cryptocurrency standard in the music industry

South African Entrepreneur, Jonathan Finberg, is launching his 5th business and this time to revolutionize the music industry using blockchain technology. His new startup is called Rondo, an aggregator of all the music-related blockchains.

An industry veteran, Jonathan has huge experience in the key markets of the EMEA region. We at Blockmanity had a chance to catch up with Jonathan and discuss his new startup.

Blockmanity: Hi Jonathan, thanks for taking out time and giving this exclusive interview. To begin with, can you explain to us as what is Rondo?

Jonathan: Yes, essentially we are a digital currency ecosystem for the music and live entertainment industry. The idea of Rondo is to be an aggregator of all the tokens in the industry of music. The big dream is to be like Bitcoin for the music industry.

Currently, there are many projects working on a unique solution for the problems of the music industry, but none of them are addressing the core. How does a musician who is earning cryptocurrency, use the cryptocurrency in the real world? Most of them have a small market cap to be listed on any exchange.

For example, if I earn Crypto on a platform called Choon, once the user listens to a song, the Notes (currency in Choon) are distributed to the parties involved in creating the song instantly. The people have the tokens on their platform, but there is no easy way to cash out the cryptocurrency.

Enter Rondo. We plan to introduce a debit card, not our own but through a third party such as Wirex, gift cards, etc so musicians can easily spend their music tokens. We plan to partner with as many music tokens as we can and create a standard ecosystem for the musician.

In the future, we plan to expand into festival travel as well.

Blockmanity: I see, and how is Rondo using blockchain? Apart from RND token are you using blockchain in any other way? Do you plan to stream music through blockchain, like some of the projects are doing?

Jonathan: We are not getting into the music streaming business. We will be using blockchain to store artist information in a decentralized manner, so as to create a decentralized interactive database in terms of the music industry.

Our wallet, will be used to tip artists and provide them with UMI (Universal Music INcome). UMI is a basic income we plan to introduce to support artists who are making music.

Blockmanity: You want to provide a basic income for musicians. How will Rondo acquire funds to fund musicians?

Jonathan: There are 2 ways, the fans can tip their favorite artists to fund their music productions. The second way we want to increase our token adoption through our products so that more token holders more the value of the token. We can then use the value of the token to fund the musicians.

Blockmanity: In your websites, there is something called Smart Wristbands, is that your physical product?

Jonathan: Smart Wristband is the physical product that we are launching next year. If you go to any music festival you get a standard NFC wristband which may have some credits which allow you to buy food and drinks. But after the festival, there still might be some credits left. Usually, organizers profit from this.

So smart wristbands solve this problem. Smart wristbands will allow you to pay at these festivals while the remaining balance can be used on other festivals as well. This way a person doesn’t lose extra funds.

We can expand it to conferences as well. The wristband is still in R&D phase.

Blockmanity: Do you plan to do an IEO to raise funds for Rondo?

Jonathan: We are currently raising angel investment. We also have an RND buying mechanism in place, so that if anyone wants to purchase RND they can with our automated smart contract.

If you send 0.007 ETH to our address right now you get 3,944  RND tokens. We are currently using this mechanism to raise funding and support for the project.

Blockmanity: Pretty interesting, and I wish you good luck with it. What do the timelines for Rondo look like?

Jonathan: We plan to continue token adoption until the end of the year. We plan to do an exchange listing in Quarter 4. We will also be launching a prototype Wristband at Quarter 4 and further development next year.

We are not doing an ICO, as we want it to be a community-run project.

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