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.

Gilberto Gil

Last night I saw Gilberto Gil play at Royal Albert Hall, the historic London venue that’s hosted speeches by Churchill and Einstein and exhibition bouts by Muhammad Ali – and once banned Pink Floyd for shooting cannons during their performance.

Gil, an 81-year-old music legend from Brazil, was playing his final show in the English capital – an event titled “Farewell to London, Aquele Abraço” (“that hug,” in Portuguese), referencing one of the artist’s most iconic songs.

Gil was one of the key figures of Brazil’s tropicália movement. Musically, tropicália was an amalgamation of Brazilian styles like samba and bossa nova with the avant garde and imports like American psychedelia and pop rock.

More than that, though, it was a political and cultural statement against the country’s military dictatorship. For that statement, Gil and fellow luminary Caetano Veloso were perceived as threats to the regime, and after imprisoning them for three months, the military expelled them from the country.

They relocated to London, and Gil lived here for three years, from 1969 - 1972, before moving back to Brazil. Through his music and other work, the artist has since devoted his life to activism and broader cultural institutions. From 2003 to 2008, he even served as Brazil's Minister of Culture in the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (who is once again Brazil’s president).

Gil led important programs during his stint as minister, captaining initiatives related to cultural diversity, the preservation of heritage and copyright reform. He also launched the National Forum on Copyright, which sought to rectify “fundamental imbalances” in Brazilian law and elevate the public’s right to access culture, tackling obstacles like “prohibiting the making of a complete copy of a work for private use without prior authorization” and “the reproduction of works for preservation and restoration.”

Gil’s forum was a catalyst for conversation, but it inevitably suffered setbacks. Dilma Rousseff – Lula’s successor – appointed the singer Ana de Hollanda as her Minister of Culture. Hollanda had close ties to the recording industry and the ECAD – the central office for collecting societies in Brazil – and was one of the greatest adversaries to Gil’s proposed reform, going so far as to remove Creative Commons licensing from the Ministry of Culture’s website.

Hollanda’s tenure didn’t last long, but the dissonance speaks to the broad cultural disconnect that features heavily across cultural industries: how can we protect creators’ rights while elevating public access to their art?

The emperors of music

Those competing interests are hard to reconcile. There’s the Internet Archive lawsuit, for example, where Universal and fellow major label Sony are suing the non-profit that, since 1996, has been archiving the Internet and digitizing cultural artifacts in an effort to “provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public.” Their mission “is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.”

The plaintiffs are particularly upset about the Internet Archive’s “Great 78 Project,” which aims to collect and digitize 78-rpm records (the standard vinyl format at the time) issued from the 1890s to the 1950s. Universal access is at odds with Universal’s access, it seems. We should consider the people who created these records, AND we should ensure these records are archived and accessible. The problem is not black and white, and suing a non-profit for archiving culture is not a solution to finding the right shades of grey.

But what about the recent “artist-centric” accord signed by Universal and Deezer? In a recent semi-satirical piece penned by Tim Ingham, the Music Business Worldwide boss played the role of “Emperor of the Music Business.” He adapts the recent “artist-centric” agreement to “Tim-centric,” portraying an imperial harshness in his decrees before sharing the real-world examples he’s riffing on.

Platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, he demonstrates, each categorically curb creator success through “minimum-popularity thresholds.” (YouTube won’t let you monetize your videos, for example, until you have 1,000 subscribers, plus 4,000 valid public ‘watch hours’ in the past 12 months — or 10 million valid public YouTube Shorts views in the last 90 days.)

The new “artist-centric” pact, Ingham says — which sets minimums of “500 unique monthly listeners on Deezer, plus over 1,000 streams in the same time period” to qualify for greater royalty payouts — borrows directly from big tech. If the model were ported over to Spotify today, he writes, it would mean more than 2.5 million artists – those with between 10 - 500 monthly listeners, arguably the emergent middle class — would have their royalties cut.

The more the music industry mirrors big tech, the greater the threat of cultural void. Music shouldn’t be treated like a scalable technology. Punishing artists for having less than 500 monthly listeners does not encourage the creation of art – it’s stifling, to the extent that we’d do well to imagine other technologies that can circumvent these power structures.

Punk technologies

Anna Lathrop defines such “punk” technologies as “responses, reactions, hacks, and workarounds of current mainstream technologies.” In a recent edition of Music X, Maarten Walraven channels Lathrop and muses on crypto music’s potential to play the punk:

Bringing music back to the center is crucial — and something I’ve been hounding on since I started writing about the on-chain music space. But questions of how crypto and music can best join forces continue to persist.

Take this tweet from Christina Beltramini, the head of growth and partnerships at Aave, the web3 company – best known for its valuable DeFi protocol – that released Lens Protocol:

“We need to strike a delicate balance between embracing the native elements of web3 to unlock value, while creating something that resonates,” her tweet ends.

The concern that crypto is pigeonholing itself within the crypto bubble is commonplace at this point, but even as the technology becomes more accessible — with innovations like account abstraction and the “trojan horse” of NFC chips that link to non-fungible tokens in merchandise — the delicate balance and resonance remain elusive. And as long as we see music primarily as an ownable asset — whether as a collectible NFT that will one day generate a return on investment or as a vehicle for IP that can be treated like a stock — it always will.

Folk methodologies

So, how can we protect creators’ rights while also embracing the truth that everything is a remix, that genius is a fallacy, and that collective attribution is a much healthier way to share and celebrate art?

More than ever, the resurrection of folk methodologies feels like the answer. The folk tradition is a custom focused on collectively developed and shared intellectual property – as well as its preservation. The blockchain’s superpowers of immutability and decentralization make it a fitting technology to reestablish more collective, folk-driven methodologies that can still be valuable to individual music-makers.

But it is, alas, still just a technology. How we conceive of, share and distribute ownership is cultural, and as such we need to champion the cultural narrative. We need to find that resonant, delicate balance, which is as simple — and as difficult — as centering the music.

Coda

Last night, Gilberto Gil performed for 95 minutes, playing songs that span the decades of his career, from infusing reggae into covers of bossa nova classics — like “The Girl from Ipanema” — and pop standards — “Moon River” — to his own hits.

Supporting him was a backing band of his grandchildren, and for half the show, he was running around the stage rocking out on an electric guitar (the dude is 81!). During his encore, he played “Aquele Abraço” and “Toda Menina Baiana” as London’s Brazilian diaspora danced and sang. It was pure fucking joy – the goosebumps were raining down my neck for ten minutes straight.

One of the great, beautiful mysteries in life is how every Brazilian somehow knows every word to every Brazilian song ever written. As a practicing, wannabe Brazilian myself who has attended countless musical events with my Brazilian partner, I can attest to the miracle that is Brazilian culture, and the profound sense that it is collectively shared and cultivated.

Back in 2005, a group of American online rights activists and scholars — one of whom was Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons non-profit — sat down with Gil in a living room in Rio de Janeiro. The then 62-year-old presiding Minister of Culture spoke about how “the fundamentalists of absolute property control” stood in the way of the digital world's promises of cultural democracy.

"A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property," he said. "No country, not the US, not Europe, can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world, of the postmodern world — and there's no use resisting it."

Gil summed up his team’s approach to intellectual property in the digital world with one word: “tropicalize.” The goal? "To make the digital world join in the samba.”

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. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.