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.

Format-ion

Format is a malleable word. A couple months ago I “reformatted” a memory card so it could shoot in video, unaware that in this context, that meant “delete” and that all my photos would be forever erased from the earth. C'est la vie.

In music’s case, format invokes something else, typically the way in which music is delivered to our ears. There are myriad music formats, spanning analog and digital, from vinyl to CDs to MP3s to Ogg Vorbis – the format that Spotify uses. And there are many others still, but do we give them mind anymore? Are they still important in the streaming era?

“Most people don’t know or care what file formats people are listening to on Spotify or YouTube,” said JKBX Chief Executive Officer Scott Cohen back in April at Music Ally’s NEXT event in London. “I am 100 percent sure we will never use that language – NFT – in our company, especially speaking with the end consumer,” he continued.

Nine months prior, I’d been in the same events space for Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit, where finding common ground and easy-to-understand terminology was already becoming a central theme in web3 communications. One recurring tactic was moving away from the term NFT altogether. It connoted too much fervor as a scammy, needlessly energy-intensive collectible for crypto bros – at least to the layperson.

“We need to remove the tech from this,” said Goran Andersson, Head of International at Global Rockstar, a music platform formed in 2014 to support independent artists that has since incorporated NFTs as the core vehicle of their product offerings. “Early adopters of tech are not the customers.”

I generally abided by that sentiment, as did many on-chain music platforms. Royal calls NFTs “limited digital assets.” Serenade calls them “digital pressings.” Nina Protocol just calls them “releases.” But when I spoke with Simon de la Rouviere last week, I realized there might be more value in the term NFT than I thought.

In-format-ion

Simon de la Rouviere co-designed the ERC20 Ethereum standard, invented bonding curves and introduced one of the first music NFTs in 2017 with the artist RAC. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

Like NFTs, MP3s were stigmatized – for piracy concerns – and faced regulatory battles, but we used the word because it did mean something. We needed a name not only to articulate what it was, but to differentiate its value from that which came before. So where does that leave us with NFTs?

Trans-format-ion

Today, there are calls to move on from the term ‘music NFTs,’ rebranding them as ‘on-chain music.’ “I don’t care what we call it tbh, this renaming feels like a desperate flailing for relevance,” tweeted Legato Chief Marketing Officer Steph Guerrero. “Just build experiences and worlds around the NFTs and keep moving.”

So what is the right approach? How do we ensure relevance – lean in or lean back? Warner Music Group (WMG) and Polygon just announced a blockchain music accelerator, and the statement from Oana Ruxandra – WMG’s Chief Digital Officer and EVP of Business Development – conspicuously elides any mention of web3, NFTs or on-chain music:

The key qualifiers here are more general: boundary pushing and the reimagining of the ways in which we use technology to relate to music. And with an infinitely programmable technology like an NFT, we can push boundaries until we can no longer see any edges at all. So perhaps, as Guerrero alludes, what we call this new thing doesn’t matter as much as the fact that – unlike that which came before – we can use it to build worlds.

Formats, then, are important because they change us. As Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in 1943, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” And later, in a similar sentiment sometimes attributed to communications guru Marshall McLuhan and sometimes to media theorist John Culkin: “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

There are pros and cons to using the term ‘NFT’ as the torchbearer for this new tool, but as de la Rouviere said, the name was emergent, dubbed by the community that found value in the qualities that made it new. And as Guerrero suggests, let’s leave it at that and move on. C'est la vie. Because the technology is merely a means to an end — a bridge to worlds not yet built, worlds that weren’t possible to build with that which came before.

Coda

38 million tracks had zero plays in 2022 – according to data from Luminate. That’s incredible, but when contextualized in a reality where 120,000 songs get uploaded to streaming services every day, maybe it’s not so crazy.

SoundCloud is testing a new feature called First Fans where their autoplay algorithm analyzes a newly uploaded track and suggests it to about 100 listeners with relevant music taste. It’s a positive development for all the latent catalogs out there, buried in some server heap.

In that spirit, here are a few tracks that have fewer Spotify streams than they should (in this case, less than 100,000).

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

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