Stems.fm takes a song, splits it into its layers, and sells each layer as an NFT on Ethereum.
Drums = a token. Bass = a token. Vocals = a token. So on.
Collect every layer of a song, hit the forge function, and the contract burns those stems and mints you a single Song token. Do that for every song on an album, forge again, you get an Album token. Album tokens are the highest tier the platform supports.
The whole thing runs on Kyler Simzer's catalog. The music itself is still streamable everywhere (Spotify, Apple, all of it). What stems.fm adds is a market layer on top. Buy pieces. Trade pieces. Combine pieces.
Here's how it actually works.
The four pages you'll use
- /mint: new stem releases drop here
- /collection: what you currently own, grouped by song
- /forge: combine stems into songs, songs into albums
- /mixer: preview your stems as audio
Secondary trading also happens on OpenSea at opensea.io/collection/stems-fm.
Minting a stem
Hit /mint when a release is live. Connect a wallet. Pay the mint price plus gas. You get a stem NFT.
Each stem carries:
- Which song it belongs to (for example, "Star Town")
- Which type it is (drums, bass, vocals, synth, FX, percussion, guitar, keyboard, strings, brass, woodwinds)
- An audio + artwork reference
- A finite supply that sets its rarity
The UI color-codes by stem type, so /collection reads quickly. You can see at a glance which song you're close to completing.
The unrevealed phase
A lot of stems get released unrevealed. You mint, you get a token, you don't know yet what's inside. Drums? Bass? Common? Rare?
You can hold it sealed. You can flip it sealed. You can reveal whenever.
The first week or two of any release tends to be the most active because of this. People are pricing on probability, not knowledge. Once stems start revealing, the market sharpens. Common stems become priced as common, rare ones jump.
How forging works
Once you've got every required stem for a song, /forge lets you combine them.
What actually happens on-chain:
- Contract checks you own all the stems
- Contract checks they all belong to the same song
- Contract burns them
- Contract mints you a Song token
The stems are gone. Forever. There is no un-forge function. By design.
Why one-way? Because if you could un-forge a Song back into stems, the Song token wouldn't really mean anything. It'd just be a temporary state. The burn makes every completed Song a permanent record of you committing to it.
Same mechanic stacks. Collect every Song from an album, hit forge, songs burn, Album token mints.
Merge rules, two of them
Rule 1: same song. Drum stem from "Star Town" + bass stem from a different track → can't forge. The contract checks song IDs.
Rule 2: every required stem. If a song wants drums, bass, vocals, synth, then three of those four won't work. All four.
These aren't UI hints. They're contract-enforced. Can't be cheated.
What you get from a Song or Album token
- Audio access: Song tokens give you the full track; Album tokens give you the whole album
- A provenance trail: public on-chain record of which stems built it
- Liquidity: Songs and Albums trade on OpenSea like any ERC-1155
- Export: preview and download high-quality audio for what you own
- A receipt that basically says: I built this
On future revenue: the whitepaper notes that tokens may be tied to revenue distributions in future versions of the platform. Eligibility rules would come later. Don't collect expecting royalty payments today.
How to start, the actual steps
- Get a wallet (MetaMask, Rainbow, Coinbase Wallet, any of them)
- Put some ETH in it for gas
- Hit /mint or browse stems-fm on OpenSea
- Pick a song to chase, figure out which stem types it needs
- Buy or mint the pieces
- Forge when you have them all
Most people don't forge the day they finish collecting. They wait, partly because they're not sure they want to commit yet, partly to see how the market moves. That's normal.
Quick FAQ
Ethereum mainnet? Yes. Production runs on Ethereum. There's a Polygon staging site for testing but it doesn't hold the real collection.
See all my stems? /collection, grouped by song.
Can I trade? Yes. OpenSea, normal ERC-1155 mechanics.
Have to forge? No. Hold forever if you want.
Undo a forge? No.
Where's the deep doc? Kyler's whitepaper, Stems: A New Layer for Valuing Music (May 2026), has the design rationale.
