The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Identity

As a child I had a debilitating stutter. It was a distinct part of my identity that I sought to discard and forget with every bit of my being. Still, it was there. It wasn’t until I discovered (and later interviewed) the stuttering composer Alvin Lucier – one of the premier names of the 20th century avant-garde – that I found solace in shared identity. It was the beginning of a long, slow embrace of a painful and defining part of myself.

I’ve been thinking about both shared and distinct identity as manifold technologies supporting identification continue to emerge across web3. Cointelegraph dedicated an entire piece to the power of digital identity, while the company Protokol announced a blockchain-powered technology that will enable cross-border identity verification for EU citizens. Identity’s narrative with music gained steam when Imogen Heap’s Creative Passport arrived in 2018, and the promise of cross-platform provenance continues to be one of the most enticing aspects of on-chain music. Yet in the minds of many, that aspect remains an afterthought.

In the most recent edition of his great newsletter Penny Fractions – titled “Does the Music Industry Still Want NFTs?” – David Turner writes, “That music technology in the 2020s so far can be summed up in trying to find new ways to sell functionless MP3s and wasting incredibly labor and energy-intensive technology to produce cheap soundalikes mirrors a broader malaise in the industry. NFTs/Web3 promised to revolutionize the industry but it’s even more intellectually bankrupt than labels chasing TikTok hits. Those songs at least get heard.”

I’ve ranted and raved about many of these same issues, but it’s hard not to remain bullish on the immense, blockchain-facilitated value of knowing who’s there on the other side, and with whom you share some resonance, so that it can form the building blocks of relationship.

Incremental gains

That promise is central to the successful $15 million round of Lens Protocol – an on-chain social graph powered by the team at AAVE. And it’s the same sentiment behind writer and thinker Ted Gioia’s recent treatise on “disintermediation” – “a clumsy word, something a slick young MBA must have concocted after the second scotch neat on an expense account…but it’s a lovely concept,” he writes. “You practice disintermediation when you bypass all the gatekeepers and middlemen, and go straight to the source. You’re dissing the intermediaries.”

Examples of other similar incremental developments are The Box, Decent Protocol’s new tool that facilitates NFT buying without switching networks or bridging funds, and the music NFT platform Sound.xyz’s new partnership with Optimism, a full embrace of layer two blockchain technology, where transactions are bundled and thereby much cheaper and faster for the consumer.

These aren’t sexy features, but they’re improvements toward an on-chain world that has fewer “intellectually bankrupt” qualities and more frictionless routes for going “straight to the source,” allowing folks to maintain more of their identity, tell more of their story and rely less on the often misaligned incentive structures that define platform capitalism.

And why’s that particularly important for music?

Add to that a recent Luminate report suggesting there are 120,000 songs released on streaming platforms every day. And today even the layperson will understand the existential threat that artificial intelligence poses to artists – both creatively and financially.

Now, using AI, it’s even possible to resurrect dead icons to release new music. In an interview with BBC, Paul McCartney said AI was used to “extricate” John Lennon’s vocal from an unfinished demo – speculated to be the unreleased 1978 Lennon composition “Now and Then” – and finally finish the piece, which is slated for release later this year.

And here’s Abelow again for the key insight:

All of this compounds the importance of identity, and of embracing the parts of ourselves that make us, us. How else will we ever break through the noise?

Metalabel’s Yancey Strickler recently explored similar themes in finding a singular, 1-of-1 purpose for his work. For Metalabel, that means “make joining and starting a release club so easy to understand and desirable that we inspire a new way to make creative work together.” His other projects, like Kickstarter and The Creative Independent, started with 1-of-1 bases of their own.

With 1-of-1 comes more thoughtful intention, and more colorful contours of the qualities that make us – and our work – distinct.

As Strickler wrote, “You must be able to live inside of your vision in such a way that you can communicate its emotional essence, its core truth, to the immediate world around you.”

What does that mean, I thought, to those who have difficulty communicating? During my call with Alvin Lucier, I paid attention to his stutter. I recognized the same techniques that I use to elude the stammer: pausing mid-sentence, improvising on the fly, exchanging the still unspoken word with a more easily uttered synonym. It was all there, unnoticeable to most, perhaps, but to the afflicted, it was as clarion as the speech of a well-seasoned orator.

Prior to his death, Lucier wrote a blurb for a book called Whale Song that explores animals that use echolocation for survival. "It affected me very strongly because whales and dolphins and bats—any creatures that echolocate—those beings cannot cheat when they're looking for food," he explained to me. "They cannot add a flourish." If they did, they wouldn't eat, and they wouldn't survive.

Stuttering, though not a matter of life and death, certainly affords a greater appreciation for sonic phenomena like these that function so flawlessly. We stutterers all wish we could function this way, too. But perhaps we shouldn't try to cheat our stutters with tricks and flourishes. They are the bits that make us recognizable – that provide connective threads in the face of fears that we are alone in our peculiarities. The more space we create for people to go straight to the source, to celebrate and cultivate our unique bits and bobs, the easier it will be share them.

Coda

RIP to the singular Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto, who famously sang “The Girl from Ipanema” and enjoyed a long career as a bossa nova singer, earning the Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

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