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.

A brief ode to the tactile

Happy September Beat readers – it’s good to be back. After a few weeks adventuring through Japan, spirited away by magical onsen waters and lost in smoky listening bars in the basements of unassuming stripmalls, I must admit it was with reticence that I reopened my laptop. And since then, I must also admit that the digital world has felt markedly unfulfilling.

The time away was a reminder of the importance of tactile experience and physical wonder. It provided commentary on the limitations of the digital, and while I won’t disregard the Internet’s incredible utility, I will argue that we should acknowledge the place in which it stops being enough.

Catching up

Ok anyways so what’s happened these past few weeks? Well, YouTube launched a TikTok-like Samples tab. Friend.tech – a new crypto app that allows people to trade shares in their friends (I’m going to dive more into this next time) – attracted 100,000 people in less than a week. OpenSea killed creator royalties, and Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist teamed up to drop a long-lost album on Gala Music – and it’s only available on-chain.

It’s a big moment, and a big test for Gala, which is seeking to find that elusive balance between free streaming, track ownership and the artist-fan relationship. It’s an interesting experiment, and a small tear in the traditional garb of the streaming release cycle that centers major streaming platforms and the pursuit of virality.

Gratefully, more and more people are dedicating editorial space to highlight the ills of chasing “moments” over sustainable career paths, chastising the platforms that encourage virality at the expense of development and depth. As per usual, misaligned incentives bear much of the blame.

Some more good news? Maybe people don’t care enough about AI for it to truly transform our lives. As Ted Gioia notes, consumer embrace is already declining, and despite AI being touted as a transformative technology, its adoption rates aren’t looking like those of other transformative technologies, like telephones and color TV, air travel and smartphones.

“Who is buying all those AI-written books? Who prefers AI-made songs to human music? Who wants to rely on AI journalism to keep up on the news? Who trusts AI in any mission critical job?” Gioia asks. “I don't know anybody doing this.”

All of these were heartening observations amidst my restrained return to the online world. In diving into the happenings of the past few weeks, it feels like there’s an emergent resistance – at least in my little bubble of consumption – and a yearning for humanness and shared physical spaces.

Take this “Elegy for big box bookstores” from buidl.fm’s Rory Ou, a nod to indies and an ode to Borders-esque stores that welcomed all kinds to peruse, digest, play Dungeons and Dragons in squirreled away corners and sprawl out on the carpet between aisles, devouring entire books.

Or this essay from Mento Labs’ Tobias Kuhlmann titled “Money backed by nature.” Kuhlmann builds a proposal around thinker Charles Eisenstein’s thesis in his book Sacred Economics, where he observes that “whatever money is backed by, people tend to create more of it.”

So imagine if “money is backed by something the world needs more of – the value of biodiverse forests, clean rivers, and protected oceans,” he says. Perhaps, Kuhlmann suggests, because carbon allowances and new carbon markets have made measurable our ecological care and carelessness, and because the blockchain can enable a digital representation of that value, there’s something to work with. It’s idealistic, sure, but it’s a more tangible asset than our social agreement around fiat currency, so why not? And how might we interact and engage with nature if it were intimately tied to our economics? Something to ponder the next time you walk in the woods.

A kiss for the jazz kissa

And here’s something else to ponder for all you cratediggers out there. Coincidentally, on the day I went to my first Tokyo listening bar, Gioia published an essay titled “We Need More Jazz Vinyl Cafés,” detailing a history of the Japanese “jazz kissa” and only semi-facetiously enjoining vinyl collectors to transform their expensive hobbies into businesses.

I’m for it. Being seated in a corner booth while my bartender combed through 10,000 records, always nailing the transition and the lemon twist, was like heaven on earth. Let’s do more stuff like that.

Coda

RIP to Jimmy Buffett and Smashmouth singer Steve Harwell, who both made a lot of music in their lives but were mostly known for one song.

And on the other side of main streams, happy 15th birthday to Cafe OTO, a cornerstone of experimental music that sits quietly (except in the evenings) in the London neighborhood of Dalston. I recently caught Marc Ribot – the legendary guitarist who’s played with everyone from Tom Waits to Caetano Veloso, Elton John to McCoy Tyner – for an intimate night of solo acoustic guitar. Ribot played a bedraggled old ax that he’s likely schlepped all around the world, and I watched behind a makeshift arrangement of chairs and a hundred-odd people while (giddily) standing next to Toby Jones.

Through Dalston’s gentrification and past the unwritten laws that suppose experimental music doesn’t have enough draw to be economically viable, OTO has persevered. “I think it’s good not to attribute any particular genius to OTO for its longevity,” said John Chantler, OTO’s senior producer until 2014, for this nice Bandcamp feature by Matthew Blackwell. “People need it — OTO respects that (maybe therein lies the genius?) — and that is why it continues to exist.”

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.