Overview
Sick City is a music platform on Cardano that lets independent artists release a new song as a digital collectible every five days. Listeners can claim each drop for the cost of a small network fee, collect past releases, or earn bonus tokens by pooling their ADA with the project's stake pool. The team also runs custom mint services for other artists and creators looking to launch on Cardano.
The project was started in late 2021 by an operator who goes by Jimmy, with a partner named Freddy who previously ran the TAILS stake pool and Mermada Minting service. Sick City sits within Cardano's media corner of the directory, alongside other community-driven projects. Together the team says it has helped release more than 400 NFT projects since launch1.
Key Features
- A new music drop every Cardano epoch. Sick City releases a fresh music token roughly every five days, which is one Cardano "epoch" (the regular five-day cycle Cardano uses to hand out network rewards). Each token is tied to a specific track or piece of media, so the catalogue grows on a steady, predictable schedule1.
- Bonus tokens for people who back the pool. A stake pool is a group that people pool their ADA into to earn small rewards. Point your ADA at the Sick City Music pool and you get the usual ADA rewards plus partner tokens, sent through DripDropz, a tipping service that splits extra tokens to a pool's members2.
- Custom minting services for other projects. Beyond its own releases, the team offers tailored launch help for outside artists and project owners, handling the technical setup so creators can focus on the music or art1.
- A SICK community token. SICK is a token issued directly on Cardano, with a total supply of 800 billion. The token is registered in Cardano's official token list and is used to grant community perks rather than to represent royalty rights3.
- Project Catalyst funding history. Sick City has been funded through Project Catalyst, Cardano's community-funded grant program, with proposals focused on bringing traditional musicians into Cardano-native distribution4.
What to Expect
The Sick City website is a single, simple landing page hosted on WordPress. Click through the homepage links and you can read the project's whitepaper, jump to the Discord, follow the X account, or pick up branded merchandise through Krypto Threadz. There is no dashboard or app on the site itself. The activity happens off-site, through Cardano wallets, stake pool explorers, and Cardano NFT marketplaces.
Listeners who want to collect releases usually go through one of three doors. They can point their ADA at the Sick City Music pool through any Cardano wallet and let DripDropz send the tokens to them. They can hunt down past drops on a secondary marketplace. Or they can pick up the SICK community token directly. There is no membership tier or paywall, and the music is meant to circulate cheaply and widely.
One note for newer visitors: Sick City helped build a separate music collectibles marketplace called The Record Store with two partner projects, NEWM and NMKR. NEWM has announced it is shutting down. Music collectibles already held in wallets stay on-chain, but new ones cannot be created through that storefront5. Sick City's own epoch-based releases continue on their own.
