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.

Happy Women’s History Month – this one’s dedicated to all the amazing builders, curators, artists and caretakers mentioned here and beyond. May we embody our words as well as they do. 🌻

The Sonu Pledge

As part of their SXSW activation – which just wrapped up last Saturday – Sonu Stream (the protocol and streaming platform formerly known as Sona Stream) launched a Fair Stream Pledge. “Music is worth more than $.003/stream,” the campaign says, a nod to the penny fractions the average stream currently generates. “The economics of streaming suck,” added co-founder Laura Jaramillo on Twitter, “but crypto (unironically) can solve this.” 

Pledge signers can contribute money to Sonu’s “artist rewards pool,” a protocol that distributes funds across all artists proportional to their listening share. It’s a pro rata model similar to major streaming platforms, but on Sonu, every song also has an on-chain “digital twin” called a SONU, which connects collectors and artists without interfering with traditional royalty flow (more on how Sonu Stream works here). Importantly, the company takes no cut from the pledge proceeds.

“By taking this pledge, we stand in solidarity with artists globally in pursuit of a more sustainable and equitable music industry,” the pledge reads. “Do it for the love of music,” Jaramillo added in a tweet, “and to show how we can SHOW UP as a community.”

They’re sentiments we can all rally around, but how can we transcend the digital limitations of ‘showing up’ and embody the essence of a caring community? How can we truly live these words when we can’t literally show up?

Nurturing the Bodymind

Last year, in response to an essay I penned titled “How can we save music?” – largely a petition to resurrect the connective nature of music in our digital world – Kernel Steward Aliya Jypsy wrote a thoughtful ode to our neglected “bodymind unity.” (The term is borrowed from Dr. Gabor Maté, reflecting a belief that the body and mind are inherently one, unable to be disconnected.) 

“[Digital] technology is incapable of recuperating or imitating this phenomenon central to the human condition,” Jypsy wrote, “that our body has thoughts and emotions too, not just our mind, and it not only requires recognition, but expression and affirmation too.”

It feels notable that such a connective and pervasive technology as the Internet – one that so many of us rely upon for our social and financial well being, which is very much inclusive of our bodies – is so abstracted from the body itself, and from its own forms of expressions.

“We’ve adapted and learned to neglect our bodymind’s messages, and this carries through when we listen to music digitally, often in isolation by ourselves at a desk,” Jypsy continued. “How many of us can still even surface the visceral urge to enjoy music in community…because of the number of years or decades that have passed without it being a custom of the computer culture while we sit down to use [this] technology?”

I had a meditation teacher who once estimated we spend about 80 percent of our awareness in our minds and 20 percent in our bodies. In an ideal scenario, they posited, we should live the inverse. 

Why? Because we’re becoming disembodied, with our biological “hardware” deprioritized to our “software” – our thinking patterns. “It's like the software can't keep up,” Akiya Collective Founder Michelle Huang told me during an interview last year. “It allows for a dissociated effect on our bodies, which leads to mental illness – not very conducive to flourishing.”

In time, we lose touch with important embodied wisdom, like how to recognize and reckon with our emotions. Remote work and an overreliance on social media perpetuate our digital overload – as does the algorithmic bias of our feeds, filtered through our own limited understandings of the world. 

Our growing reliance on AI – specifically text-based interactions with unbodied chatbots as means of support and context-building – will continue to exacerbate that disassociation. 

For Music X last year, Tristra Newyear Yeager – Chief Strategy Officer of music PR firm Rock Paper Scissors, Inc – wrote: “Humanity feels disconnected from expression; there will be pictures, poems, and songs in the age of autophagous AI, but they will have little relation to human experience. Our models mapping experience to expressive acts have already collapsed.”

Perhaps that collapse explains our faith – for better and for worse – in curators. We need people – or machines – to tell us what we feel because we’re forgetting how to do it ourselves. Distracted by – or lost in – a sea of digital noise, we struggle to find direction, or reasons to care enough to do more than heart a photo, smash subscribe or add our names to a petition. We might even deceive ourselves into thinking – despite nominal emotional or physical effort – that we’ve SHOWN UP.

“We need to set aside our squeamishness around emotion (the ironic/cynical turn of past decades) and the pathologization of profound feeling, which isn’t necessarily mental illness,” Yeager continues. “We can strive to imbue whatever we make, however we make it, with powerful, distilled human emotion.” 

Small Networks, Big Vibes

The word curation is derived from the Latin ‘curare,’ which literally means to ‘take care.’ An act of ‘care’ implies the act is imbued with concern – some form of “distilled human emotion.” But the word itself – like “community” and “indie” before it – has lost most of its meaning. It too has become disembodied, another palliative catch-all that can refer to an Instagram feed, Amazon search results, a Spotify playlist or an actual heartfelt mixtape. 

On platforms, context is often abstracted far enough away from the experience that we don’t feel much emotion either way. Perhaps we even forget to ask if this thing was curated by a human or an algorithm, or to wonder that, if the act of curation is done not out of care but for the purpose of maximizing profits, it can still be considered curation at all.

That ambiguity, and the ever-presence of ulterior motive, have generated apathy and distrust – especially in music, where digital systems have so often disappointed its makers. We may no longer be able to recognize genuine human curation, or words chosen and enacted with care. We’ve adapted to be wary, presuming all such acts are either corporate ruse or individual hubris.

“I think the word ‘curation’ can elicit this elitist institution – that the curators are the gatekeepers,” Lani Trock – founder of EcoDAO and co-founder of Leaving Records’ Genre project – told me on an episode of For the Record. “But there are these really novel models for decentralized community curation mechanisms, and I think that has the potential to disrupt these entrenched hierarchical power structures of curation.  

“There are all of these small networks emerging, like meta-labels or meta-networks,” she continued. “And we're vibing with those ones because we vibe with other people in the network.”

In small networks, there’s more transparency and room for intimacy, and thus more opportunities to discover shared vibes and, consequently, see through ulterior motive. Naturally, if a space yields words and artifacts that are resonant and curated with care, trust emerges. And if that trust can be bolstered by those “decentralized community curation mechanisms,” that’s powerful.

Consider cosigns on Catalog, for instance: simple, cheap – though still meaningful – and non-speculative on-chain music endorsements. Or the music NFT platform's “curation cycles,” ten-person curator cohorts that bring “on artists from music scenes, genres, identities and cultural backgrounds that aren’t yet well represented on Catalog,” Athena Yasaman, the org’s head of community and curation strategy who spearheaded the initiative, told me last year. “And artists that may not have heard about Catalog or be willing to experiment with a new tech if it wasn’t for their connection to the curator.”

(I was part of one of the curation cycles and invited two artists who are well worth knowing: Delcu, an excellent DJ from Sao Paulo, and Gabriella di Capua, a jazz singer from Milan.)

The blockchain, of course, is digital, but there’s a sense of embodiment in these “decentralized community curation mechanisms” – especially in the ways they can bring more depth to our words.

Consider how an artist could mint their lyrics – as Steph Guerrero suggested in her recently resurrected article from 2022, “One Song = Many Relationships” – using the words themselves as opportunities for shared meaning and deeper context.

“[Lyrics] are the strongest connection between fans and music,” she says. “They turn into tattoos, wedding vows, status posts or even captions to memories that are significant to them.”

Or consider Kernel’s beautiful Signature Economies, an interactive essay that asks: “How can we use technology to cultivate more reciprocal relationships?” You can sign it for free, or pay what you can for dynamic NFTs that help support the Kernel project. “To augment the meaning of words like 'ownership,’ we need media which act out what they say,” the essay reads. 

Like Signature Economies, the Fair Stream Pledge is accessible and actionable, with tangible short-term benefits. Pledgers receive a Proof of Pledge token – as of this writing, there have been 119 such token generated – and artists get paid to feed their bodyminds (and via much faster payment cycles – two weeks – than the typically months-long process on traditional streaming payouts). And because the experience is on-chain, our words and actions can be deepened with future media.

Perhaps, when handled with care, these tools can help us remap the routes between our experience and our expression, where our digital actions can carry embodied benefits – like swifter, transparent and more direct trans-actions – that are aligned with our surrounding communities, our small networks of big vibes.

In the words of Lani Trock: “The blockchain is a reflection of our emerging unity consciousness, and the technological and economic scaffolding of that next journey.”

Coda

To close this out, I’ve set a challenge for myself, and I invite you all to take part. When you read or write, consider the words not as bits of text on a screen, but as the end products of myriad processes of the bodymind. Consider that shared language is the foundation of community – indeed, civilization at large. Consider that it takes about 100 muscles to speak, and that singing can stimulate the vagus nerve, which helps regulate various bodily functions, like heart rate, digestion and breathing.

Consider that “words mean more than what is set down on paper,” as Maya Angelou wrote in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. “It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”

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.