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.

Attention Gods

Not long ago I watched American Gods, a TV show based on the Neil Gaiman novel of the same name. The story depicts a power struggle between old gods like Anansi and Easter – who have been forgotten or marginalized in modern America – and the "new gods" of technology, media and globalization, who have more recently gained power and influence. For all, human attention and belief are what make them real – it’s the marrow of their existence.

The concept is a good allegory for our digital media landscape, where attention is the ultimate currency – just not one that creators can spend at grocery stores. “The real winners of the creator economy are the attention and advertising aggregators,” Evan Armstrong wrote in the piece “What Happened to the Creator Economy?” (h/t Maarten Walraven)

“YouTube did $29.24B in revenue in 2022 which is more revenue than Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, and every creator economy startup on the planet combined. The companies who capture the majority of the value are the ones selling things all creators need: distribution and monetization (Google, Facebook, Twitter) or creation technology (Apple, Sony)...The internet does actually enable a new type of media company. It turns out the creator economy is real – it was just already well served by existing providers.”

Armstrong contextualizes the piece amidst the dwindling number of smaller creator startups – even the relatively large platforms mentioned above are facing significant personnel cuts. But as the tech pantheon reigns supreme, sustaining a model that effectively converts attention to dough, very little of that conversion is happening for creators.

In his excellent essay “Sacred Servers” – (h/t Aliya Jypsy) – Zach Mandeville says:

So as the myriad davids tumble over and over again beneath the mighty heft of a few goliaths, where do we fight our battles? Even as some gods fade – some people are suggesting Elon might be intentionally killing Twitter because it’s “a time suck, a focus killer, a rage generator” – it’s the other goliaths that rise to take their place.

TikTok just launched their own standalone music app, for instance, giving ByteDance its second streaming service (Resso). And Instagram/Facebook/Meta just launched their Twitter competitor, Threads, further fracturing our attention across broad, similarly featured products. Still, 100 million people signed up in five days. And why is it that we think Mark Zuckerberg will be a more benevolent god than Elon? Perhaps we’re just afraid we’ll miss out on something if we’re not there, and so we continue to offer our shares to their algorithms, to place ourselves at the feet of the same gods.

The Sound of Spreading Ourselves Thin

Now add on-chain and open source offerings like Lens and Farcaster that, while decidedly less manipulative and more connective, are still additional places for creators to consider spending their precious time and energy.

“Whenever creators ask for advice, the answer is “do more,” writes Rob Abelow in his newsletter Where Music’s Going. “This is bad advice. You should do less. Just do it better.”

In this recent edition, Abelow talks about attention fragmentation and doubling down on the key focal points that are already bearing fruit – “pour all your gasoline on the first sign of fire,” he says. He exemplifies the musician Violetta Zironi, who has fully embraced the on-chain music ecosystem.

Zironi used her genesis Moonshot non-fungible token (NFT) project as a launchpad, garnering $800k+ in NFT sales and earning 66,000+ Twitter followers and 1,500 community members. She’s even gone so far as to eschew traditional streaming platforms and make her music exclusively available on-chain.

One of those music homes is the music NFT platform Sound, which just raised a $20 million Series A. And they’ve coupled that windfall with an opening of the gates, making their platform – until recently self-curated – available to all artists.

It’s a major development in the midst of a bear market and an increasingly jaded on-chain music community – it seems that the powers that be (the round was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto fund) are still bought in.

So should we all turn our attention to Sound, which has recently taken all the sensible steps – releasing an artist community pages feature, embracing L2s by partnering with Optimism, removing artist fees from primary sales – to win the attention of those who have needed it most (the creators)? Is the mainstream ready to shirk the cozy confines of their streaming algorithms for an on-chain experience that is more artist friendly and more connective, but also significantly more complicated and saddled with a relatively infinitesimal catalog?

That’s the 20 million dollar question. It’s important to note that, even while the infrastructure is emerging, we have a long road ahead. There’s still no silver bullet when it comes to breaking through. Even Zironi, one of on-chain music’s greatest success stories, alleges to have spent 3,000 hours in Twitter spaces in her first year in web3 (for context, there are only 8,760 hours in a year). That’s a testament to her dedication, for sure, but also to the fact that even on-chain music requires an outsized amount of non-music effort to generate attention.

Thinking Quantum

I was recently chatting with my friend Glenn Poppe, who helped me connect the notion of attention with observation. In the world of quantum mechanics, an observer is fundamental to something’s existence. It’s the old paradox of the trees falling in the woods with no ears to hear them, and the same rings true of our attention.

What we give attention to, we give life to. Therefore if our attention is being manipulated, so are our lives. “The time is now to start building plan B,” writes MIDiA research founder Mark Mulligan in his piece “The music industry’s tipping point is Right Here, Right Now.” “To elevate a music world centered around fandom, identity, creativity, and exceptionalism.”

That sentiment can be abstracted to the entirety of our digital existence. Gratefully, we are not just observers, but observers with agency, and we can build a plan B. Because at risk is one of the better parts of our humanity, the bit that likes to share – and be shared with – authentically, for no other reason than connection. We don’t have to let that be exploited.

Coda

In the spirit of sharing, some music for you.

There are some records that feel deathless — rare compilations of sound that are impossible to tire of. You've exhausted it. You can account for every second of the recording, and yet you still can't find its end. Somehow its grooves, engraved in your mind the same way they're embossed onto vinyl, can be spun interminably.

This is one of those records. It is the manifestation of ease, joie de vivre, sunflowers, palm trees, dance, laughter, the sea.

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

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. Thanks for being here.