Alton Washington has always aimed for success, even though it was never expected of him. Raised by a single mother in South Jersey, he started working at the ripe age of 7, helping his mother at her janitorial business and sending her weekly bills for his work. “The first thing my mom taught me to do was to save, and I was always interested in how to grow that money.” He knew from a young age that he would probably not be able to afford the Ivy League education that he believed he needed so he devised a plan. He decided he’d go to military school since it was free and offered him the best chance at furthering his goals. Alton graduated from the US Naval Academy in 2001, months before 9/11. “The whole environment changed, all of a sudden my classmates were going to war.” Luckily, he spent most of his time in the Navy on other assignments, not directly involved in the conflict. 

Once his military service was complete, it was time for the next step. Alton applied to Harvard & Wharton business schools and got into both. He decided to go to Wharton to focus on business and once again graduated at the perfect time, right before the 2008 financial crisis. He got a job on Wall Street and got to see firsthand how things were evolving. “There were a lot of historic moments happening and I was at a place that was the forefront of navigating that environment. It gave me a very systematic view of investing that I still use today,” he explains.

After moving to DC in 2015 to work for another finance firm, Alton began to feel more disenchanted within the industry. “Over time I was less interested and less engaged in the work, mainly because I was working for rich white guys and making them richer. Although it was financially lucrative, I didn’t feel fulfilled.” While in DC, he began getting involved in the music industry, making his own beats as a hobby and going to studios to meet producers and engineers. He quickly realized the massive amount of talent that DC had to offer. Although his beats were a bit subpar, he figured that the best thing he could offer the artists in the city was his business expertise.

Once he started working with a few local artists, Alton recognized that what they needed was to be able to sell their music instead of giving it away for free in order to promote merch or ticket sales. A chance encounter with a friend familiar with blockchain helped him realize the potential application in regard to artists, mostly centered around non-fungible tokens or NFTs. “NFTs and crypto are the things that can help any artist whether they have 500, 5000, or a million fans. You don’t need to have mass distribution through a label, you don’t need to have 10 million streams on Spotify each month to survive anymore, now you only need 1000/500 people to buy your music and you can make more music.” With all this in mind, he decided to create Phlote.

The name “Phlote” comes from the Greek Philotes who is the sub-goddess of friendship. Initially, the idea for Phlote was to be a collaborative network and it now operates as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO) meaning that anyone can partake and earn rewards or ownership in the company simply by participating.“It’s like a new type of startup that you don’t need to apply to, don’t need a resume, don’t need an interview, you can show up on a website or wherever they are located and start to contribute and earn rewards of some kind” he explains.

Phlotes’ objectives are simple, “How do we use blockchain technology for music in a way that is beneficial to the entire ecosystem around music? From the artist to the curator to the journalists, and the early fans, who are mainly who we care about.” One way has been by directly working with and onboarding artists to Web3. To date, they have helped around 25 artists mint their first NFTs with over $200,000 in sales. Despite that, they understand how important it is to operate in the physical world. Phlote uses their live events to bring people around good music and in that process teach the artists about web3 and NFTs.

Despite all this, Alton acknowledges that people are skeptical about NFTs. “People think that they are a money grab but a lot of artists just want to put their music out, they’re not trying to take advantage of anyone. NFTs allow artists to archive their work and ideas. The blockchain will never go away as long as there is internet and electricity on the planet. You don’t need to sell an NFT. You can just use blockchain technology to archive your work which we think is very valuable.” NFTs allow artists to retain all the rights to their music even after selling, which is not a music industry standard. Artists also earn royalties on NFTs for life which can be crucial for artists whose work might not sell for much at first but may gain value upon every sale.

Phlote is all about innovation and they are already building a downloadable music player to use as a way to curate and distribute music from artists that use its platform. In addition to that, they are working on a collaborative mixtape series, taking curation a step further and actually creating with the artists. They plan to use the blockchain to automatically set up splits among the artists so that as soon as it sells, everyone is paid. 

Many people have their suspicions about NFTs, understandably so, but for Phlote the end goal is to put the power back into the artists’ hands and this is how they believe they can achieve it.