The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway. (There may be unexpected stops along the way.)

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.

Bijoux

This is a personal dispatch from Paris. My wife has a work event this week at La Gaîté Lyrique, a former theater-turned-digital experience center in the 3rd arrondissement.

She and I first visited Paris together in January 2020, just before the pandemic. We’d found cheap flights from New York to visit friends and see the Erased Tapes showcase at the same Gaîté Lyrique.

Highlights were Anne Müller and Penguin Cafe – as well as the incomparable Lubomyr Melnyk, the world’s fastest pianist (I’ve written about him here before).

In the venue’s atrium, an official Erased Tapes booth sold vinyl of the participating artists, and right next to it, Melnyk had his own booth – in protest – to sell his own. He’d been duped, he told me, and had found interactions with the label to be misleading and inauthentic.

I think about that whenever I’m in Paris, especially passing by “bijoux” stores in Le Marais, walking distance from La Gaîté Lyrique. In French, “bijoux” means jewelry, and the same word – “bijou” – exists in Portuguese. But the Portuguese version, my wife (who is Brazilian) tells me, translates to “fake jewelry,” and is used to differentiate from real jewelry (which is called “joia,” and commonly used in the popular expression “tudo joia,” which means “all good”).

It’s a nuance I appreciate, to help us name that which is real and that which isn’t. Because increasingly, I’m becoming less sure of how to differentiate between the two.

The Streaming Fraud Boom(y)

Last week, a North Carolina musician was indicted for streaming fraud. Alongside co-conspirators – including the CEO of generative AI music company Boomy – he: 

1. Created 100,000+ songs with AI

2. Released them under fake artist names

3. Created 10,000+ fake family-plan accounts

4. Streamed his songs billions of times with bots

In doing so, he earned $10 million. And while we should blame the players a bit here – that money’s coming out of artists’ share – we should mostly hate the game. “You can pay yourself out more in royalties than it costs to generate them,” music thinker Rob Abelow writes in “The Streaming Model is Broken.” “Music’s primary business model encourages everything from money-laundering, arbitrage and stream bot armies.”

Last year, there was so much clamor from the big boys about implementing an “artist-centric” model that scuppers fraud and pays real artists more, yet here we are. Ten percent of all streams are fraudulent – that’s $1.93 billion a year coming out of artists’ pockets. 

The thing is, though, AI’s getting more advanced every day and the streaming platforms still get paid, so this is reality for the time being. Don’t hold your breath for swift change. 

Cat World

Speaking of… Last month, after a planned ISIS attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna was foiled, right-wing media latched on to the news, declaring that this could never happen under a Trump presidency.

“If Trump was in office, this wouldn’t have ever, ever happened,” an impassioned Swiftie apologist said in a video that Trump reshared to his social media platform, Truth Social. “She would be safe. There wouldn’t be terrorism or wars going on because we had world peace before and he’ll do it again.”

Swift was safe, for one, but I’m grateful for the reminder of those halcyon “world peace” days of the Trump presidency, back when Vienna was part of the US and Paris was part of Germany.

What followed was a bunch of AI-generated images of Swift fans wearing tees that read “Swifties for Trump.” Trump reshared the images under the caption, “I accept!”

On Tuesday, after Kamala Harris deftly shitrolled DT in their debate, Swift endorsed the Vice President on Instagram, signing her post “Childless Cat Lady.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in cat world, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan posted an AI-generated photo of Trump with a cat and duck amidst unfounded rumors that Haitian migrants are stealing and eating animals in public in Springfield, Ohio (a topic that also found its way into the debate). “Kamala Harris laughs while illegal aliens eat your pets,” Jordan wrote. Elon Musk and Ted Cruz tweeted their own conspiratorial commentary. 

I guess this is real life?

Stonkotron

Much has been said of the Musk-era Twitter cesspool, which is increasingly drenched in swill and drivel and “bot armies.” 

In the face of that reality, I’ve written extensively about decentralized social alternatives like Lens and Farcaster, which are built on the premise of interoperability.

Imagine your data – in aggregate, the pieces of your identity – seamlessly following you around the Internet. As I wrote in a recent feature on Oscillator, an open data protocol for music, “You could ‘like’ an artist on one app, listen to their music on another, buy their merch on a third and have all that value accrual represented in a single profile.”

I still believe in that vision. But the platforms on these social protocols are beset by bots and fraud, too. Yesterday, I found this post by someone named Thanh Jen on Warpcast, the popular client built by the Farcaster team.

It’s something I posted to Lens – never to Farcaster – last month. But readers who don’t know me won’t know that. And “Thanh’s” post got more engagement than mine!

That’s assuming, I guess, that it was real engagement. We post Grey Matter’s “For the Record” series to Lens, and the last episode had 194 likes and 62 comments, which looks great on paper, but most of it is pure bot nonsense.

Meanwhile, for the humans, some 25-year-old who’s “​​built a dozen apps, totaling 300+ million downloads” is making an app called Bags, a “financial messenger where you can chat with friends, see what they’re buying, and trade together, all-in-one place.”

“Bags is built on the insight that retail trading is becoming a fundamentally social experience, and memecoins and other cultural crypto assets are only accelerating this changing consumer behavior,” writes Seed Club, bullishly, sharing a screengrab that features a user called “Stonkotron.”

I’m going to leave alone all the problems I have with this (e.g. scale-obsessed growth, shitcoin perpetuation, intimately tying together finance and social interactions, etc. etc.) and focus on Stonkotron, because nothing better encapsulates the dissolution of the real/not real boundary. I don’t know if Stonkotron is supposed to be a Bags user, a Bags bot, a Bags mascot, or really, if that even matters anymore.

We are all Stonkotron. We are all not Stonkotron. Tudo joia.

Coda

Today, I stopped by La Gaîté Lyrique. My wife – who works at Lego – and her crew have been preparing Lego’s first “Superpower Studios” exhibition.

It features three contemporary artists who use Legos as their primary medium. One is Chinese artist Chen Fenwan, who builds structures that mimic her paper-cut artwork. Another is Aurélia Durand, an illustrator and animator who prepared a digital installation that riffs on Lego interactions. And the third is Ekow Nimako, a Ghanaian-Canadian artist who built a “mythical maze” where visitors get to build winged creatures out of black Legos.

“Play doesn’t have rules, really,” Nimako told Wallpaper, “it’s such a perfect material.”

Being there made me feel like a kid again, entrenched in the spirit of play – and in the sweet embrace of the tactile world.

When I left, grinning ear to ear, I could hear the ghost notes of a whole pandemic ago, where I first experienced Lubomyr Melnyk’s real hands playing piano, and Anne Müller’s bow, strummed across the strings of her cello, resonating through my body, leaving behind the drifting circles of something felt, something real.

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.