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.

Vault

Back in 2022, I wrote about Vault, a web3 music platform started by Nigel Eccles, co-founder and former CEO of the popular sports gambling app FanDuel. Built on the Solana blockchain, Vault allows artists to curate exclusive content for their fans, packaging music, photos, videos, messages and VIP experiences in ‘vaults’ that only key holders – fans who purchase key-like NFTs – can open.

When we chatted, Eccles used Drake’s last album as an example of how superfans had little means of accessing premium experiences. “Millions of Drake fans were anticipating [his album drop]. If you had said to them, ‘Hey, for fifty bucks, you would get a premium version of this album’, he would've sold hundreds of thousands,” he said. “And instead he dropped it on Spotify and that's great because everyone gets to listen to it. [But] we just felt that the music industry was missing out on an opportunity to monetize top fans.”

Vault positioned itself as a gap-filler. To test drive the platform, Vault partnered with pop artist Thomas Pipolo, aka Pip. Pip’s ‘vault’ could be accessed by one of 500 NFT keys priced at $24.99, where each one unlocked early access to music, videos and other premium content.

It’s a direct-to-fan model like Patreon, but because it’s not subscription-based (i.e. the NFT key is a one-time cost), the burden on an artist to churn out consistent premium content is lessened – a distinction Eccles made when we spoke. And because Vault is on-chain, there are additional advantages across both data portability (e.g. fans don’t lose access to content if they stop subscribing) and composability – artists can deepen relationships with fans via future media tied to the NFT.

Keep this in mind as we move to chapter two, as another character with the same name and a similar identity enters the fray.

New Vault

Recall the James Blake story I highlighted in the Beat two weeks ago. The English singer-songwriter went viral for raging about the shit conditions of the music industry, vilifying various realities that are explored ad nauseum in this newsletter – e.g. streaming doesn’t pay properly, labels take too big a cut, TikTok sucks, etc etc.

Last week, Blake accompanied his fury with an announcement: he was partnering with Vault – and no, dear reader, not the aforementioned Vault, but a different Vault that, for differentiation purposes, I’ll henceforth call New Vault. 

How does New Vault work? It’s a direct-to-fan platform where fans can subscribe to an artist to access their unreleased music and a private chat.

The resemblance was not lost on Old Vault, who made themselves known every time New Vault was thrust across the Twittersphere.

But that didn’t stop New Vault – buoyed by Blake’s celebrity – from piercing the music media veil, earning coverage in Variety and The Guardian. They also became the focus of Shawn Reynaldo’s recent First Floor, as well as a thought piece from the inimitable Cherie Hu (Water & Music), who reminded us that: “1) People listen when artists talk, and 2) people are hungry for alternatives to the zero-sum status quo.”

She also reminded us that in the music industry – a tortured realm filled with jaded veterans and overeager newcomers – innovation tends to be circular:

So is New Vault different? Is the market primed (finally) for a non-zero-sum game where artists can capture their own money and data? Shall all artists follow James Blake into this New Vault and lock the door behind them on this withering era of platform extraction? Or is this just another well-intentioned but ultimately doomed upstart that didn’t even realize there was another company with the same name doing very similar work?

In an excellent breakdown of this saga, Create Digital Music editor Peter Kirn referenced a slew of other products that also offer similar solutions: Bandcamp, Patreon, Discord, Endlesss, Gumroad and, perhaps most comparable, Drip – a paid membership platform through which indie labels once ran their own direct-to-fan membership programs. 

Drip was acquired by Kickstarter in 2016, but folded three years later because the team struggled with creator engagement. (In a quick example of how circular and confusing “innovation” can look, Old Vault showcases drops on an NFT marketplace that’s also called Drip and intended to “support creators.”) Hu also referenced Drip, alongside other projects – like Taylor Swift’s own mobile app – that collapsed for much the same reason: lacking creator engagement.

“Long-term success requires a lot more effort than Blake is suggesting on his socials,” Hu wrote, citing Water & Music’s research into online music communities. The study’s data revealed three key ingredients for said long-term success: “consistency, intimacy, and governance.” 

“Consistency is the lifeblood of any subscription business,” Hu added. And as you’ll recall from above, it’s one of the pain points Old Vault is attempting to alleviate. The Patreon model and its woes are well-known to artists, which makes New Vault’s purported ‘disruption’ all the more confounding:

In response to Vérité, Trevor McFedries – Spotify OG and co-founder of the popular social DAO, FWB – applauded the intention, pointing to the idea that form and user experience are “more important than the technology,” and added, “I want to encourage experiments or we'll go [nowhere].”

By and large, after digesting hundreds of threads and comments, I found that folks generally agreed with that sentiment. And fair enough – embracing default mode means genuflecting to a technocracy that gives few shits about the plight of the artist. Having this conversation – and Blake’s voice in it – is good, but angling New Vault as, well, ‘new,’ can be dangerous.

As Hu said, it can “represent a failure to learn from the past.” And from that past, we’ve already learned that this model doesn’t work for most artists. Steph Guerrero and Serenade’s Josh Dalton were among the artist champions that expressed frustration that more attention isn’t being given to the fact that what works for the 0.1 percent of artists (where Blake – who’s collaborated with Kanye West and Beyoncé – is certainly situated) won’t work for the majority of folks.

And the data confirms that: “Based on recent market data and the current competitive landscape of music and fan platforms,” Hu wrote, “it seems that artist-specific subscription platforms can be a sustainable business for a small niche of select artists who are willing to put in the work.”

So here’s where we’re at in this story: New Vault, it seems, has assumed a competitor’s name and goals, secured the support of Blake and leveraged a well-worn model that doesn’t seem to work for the vast majority of artists (or even Taylor Swift). And, if it’s not on-chain, it’s another new platform on which artists will have to risk hard-earned resources, hoping that it sticks and doesn’t join the vast graveyard of similar attempts.

Are we missing something here? Could there be something more to this? Stay tuned, dear readers, for there is indeed a wrinkle to the tale.

The Wrinkle

In the last Blake-focused Beat, I pointed out that the artist responded to many Twitter reactionaries but, notably, none of the web3 advocates that were inviting him to find solace – and solutions – in the blockchain.

At the time, there was little reason to think there was a web3 component to this story. Blake isn’t anti-web3 – he played FWB Fest in 2022 – but like most bigger artists wary of crypto stigma, he’s never embraced it either.

Then rumors started to float that New Vault might be “covertly on-chain,” or even “tacitly built” by Sound, one of the premier music NFT platforms. Blake has said New Vault isn’t “focussed on web3 stuff,” but indeed, New Vault and Sound share the parent company, Out the Mud Ventures – an org co-founded in 2021 by Sound Founder, David Greenstein.

Some great reporting from music journalist Kristoffer Cornils (h/t Peter Kirn) uncovered that, on March 3 – the same date Blake first took to Twitter – a certain Andre Willis made an entry in the British commercial registrar for Out the Mud, Ltd.

Was Blake’s outrage, then, a pre-arranged marketing campaign for the yet-to-be-launched platform? Artists are, of course, entitled to corporate partnerships, but if that’s what it is – and the aforementioned coincidence makes it tough to think otherwise – the ulterior motive somewhat deflates his ethical diatribe on label shares and TikTok’s inadequacy.

Still, maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Perhaps, now backed by venture capital, Blake has become willing to “declare war on the major [labels]” and “bite the hand that feeds,” Cornil wondered. But then he points out that Blake released music via one of those majors – Universal Music Group (UMG) – just four months ago, and label contracts often prohibit – or require authorization for – unofficial releases on a platform like Vault.

Cornil also observes that much of Blake’s vitriol is directed specifically at TikTok (when there are many offenders in the broader “music devaluation machine”), with whom UMG recently declared war, removing all of its music (including Blake’s) from the platform, and that UMG’s boss Lucian Grainge recently stated that “superfan experiences and products” are priority.

It’s also worth noting that one of UMG’s biggest competitors, Warner Music Group, announced it’s building its own Superfan app a few weeks ago. Given all of the above, Cornil says, it feels unlikely that UMG was not at least aware of – if not an active participant in – New Vault.

Whatever the truth, there’s certainly a lot of missing information here. We still don’t know anything about revenue splits – how much of a fan’s $5 goes to Blake and how much goes to New Vault, for instance. And Sound continues to avoid connection with the new project, perhaps most conspicuously demonstrated when Cooper Turley – founder of Coop Records and an investor in Sound – redacted a tweet that credited Sound as the builders of New Vault:

Turley replaced it with a tweet that removed mention of Sound altogether, to which Kara Burney, CEO of Old Vault, responded:

And meanwhile, we’re all left wondering: where indeed should our eyes be looking?

This conversation matters, and it’s good that we’re having it, and that Blake’s presence will ostensibly educate more folks and rally them to the cause. But it also feels like part of the same game, just more corporate machinations.

And if that’s not what it is, then why all the smoke and mirrors? It’s tough to see an on-chain community that values transparency buying into this, and it’s hard to see the masses getting excited about a project that, from the outside, looks marginally different from so many other products.

McFedries is right that form and user experience matter, and that we should continue to encourage experimentation, but in Kirn’s words, do “we need another VC-backed platform solution that lacks any community governance?”

Coda

To answer that question, I’ll follow the lead of Alex Roth, who posted a thoughtful take on this ordeal on Lens under his artist moniker, Supersigil, ending with sage words from Austin Robey – co-founder of Metalabel and Ampled, a defunct cooperative that also relied on a subscription model to support artists: 

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.