How Nina Protocol Plans to Quietly Revolutionize Music Streaming

For all of its convenience, streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have introduced a brutal kind of efficiency to how we listen to music. Algorithms prune and shear outliers, molding our tastes into perfectly symmetrical vectors filled with the same familiar superstars — Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake (still). Meanwhile, independent artists have spent years expressing their frustrations with the paltry payouts of most DSPs. All the while, overall streaming growth has slowed in recent years, squeezing artists’ margins even further.

This is where Nina Protocol , a scrappy New York-based music platform founded in 2021, hopes to change things. A remnant, or perhaps a survivor, of the early 2020s NFT boom, the platform works as a peer-to-peer streaming service that allows artis