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.

French Dispatch

Hello from Paris for a special French dispatch. For the past week I’ve been wandering around EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference) playing chess and trying to find people talking about things other than DeFi and account abstraction. For four days shillers and thinkers have fronted various stages and booths, exerting an evangelizing “wagmi” (we’re all gonna make it) spirit around their projects and the projects of others.

One word I’ve heard thrown around a lot is “unlock,” describing a key development that might break the wall that stands between we web3 folk and the billions on the other side. Mass onboarding is touted as an objectively positive pursuit, and a decentralized world is a tantalizing prospect, but in the case of music and other community-driven realms, we should consider some nuance in our approach.

Alex Roth, the founder of the metalabel, Zyla, recently started a Twitter thread under his Supersigil artist moniker, riffing on on-chain music’s buzzy, vague directionality toward deeper fan engagement.

Roth acknowledges there’s a place for the Beliebers and the Swifties — i.e. the superfans of Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift — of the world, but questions whether just listening to music isn’t already sufficient for the majority. Moreover, “fan” isn’t an archetype. It’s rather a loose-fitting umbrella term for people directing their attention toward someone, and the someones who make music at the margins don’t generally get too much of it.

“To those of us outside the pop ecosystem, even the idea of having ‘fans’ is kinda awkward,” he writes. “If we're lucky, we have a few hundred/thousand listeners who check out new releases / come to gigs, but they're not clamouring to take selfies with us or join token-gated chat rooms 🤣.”

Various on-chain music thinkers weighed in, turning the thread into a serpentine – and thoughtful! – conversation, exploring everything from the purpose of music to optimism for an on-chain ecosystem that promises more transparency and equity.

The Dark Ages

In a talk today at EthCC, Shannon Wells, Head of Ecosystems at Livepeer, likened web2 technology to the dark ages, defined by siloed internet services and digital monopolies that have generated trillions of dollars of wealth on the backs of creators.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) ostensibly provide a means of escaping that extractive creator economy, and of cultivating niche in ways that aren’t possible on broad social and streaming platforms that reward people for appealing to the widest possible audience.

Last year, through that lens, I wrote about the importance of projects like Zyla, which can champion experimental scenes largely uncatered to in today’s creator economy. Algorithms skew toward the mainstream, which makes social traction difficult. And traditional labels hedge risk by prioritizing creators with high social followings, which tend to elude the avant-garde. Artists like Roth are nearly forced to perform outsized effort – and do so without conventional support systems. There’s where NFTs come in.

But NFTs are also infinitely programmable, as are the methods of building personality and worlds around them. And the ways in which they’re most effectively used is contingent on tons of variables — what kind of music is it? How established is the artist? What are the artist’s goals with their music? And are the tools and platforms the artists use to work toward those goals fully aligned with said goals?

In the thread, Roth shared some additional context that invokes some familiar pains (emphases are my own).

Web3 companies funded by ROI (return on investment)-driven capital are going to build faster and wider, but to generate returns for their funders, those builders may have to consider business models that aren’t as innovative as the technology itself, which is where the misalignment starts to occur. The marginalized, like in Roth’s example, get pushed back to the margins.

As we continue to pursue an on-chain reality of agency and transparency, it feels odd to retrofit web2 business models that incentivize platforms to act as intermediaries or require the support of major players that don’t need new tools. It also feels off to prioritize scale as a north star metric when cultivating scenes is such a potent web3 superpower.

In this tweet responding to Roth, MusicX founder and COLORs DAO web3 head Bas Grasmayer alludes to an idea that I beat to death pretty regularly: “scene engagement > individual artist fanbase communities.” It’s the metalabel approach. If the creator economy is single player mode, “a metalabel is creativity in multiplayer mode,” and “a model for collaboration, collective world-building, and mutual support.” It’s the Wild Awake ethos. It’s Brian Eno’s “scenius,” the companion term to “genius” — where genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community.

Cooperative intelligence that emerges from community is imperative, especially today, when AI companies like Mubert casually double the number of songs in the world in a day. It’s getting easier and easier to replicate the things a person can do, but communities are significantly more elaborate — there’s a diversity of individuals, contextual understanding and dynamic interactions that create infinite complexity.

"Communities converse and interact bidirectionally, thriving on a flywheel of interaction which drives intimacy,” wrote Tim Exile, Chief Executive Officer of music-creation startup Endlesss. “In communities, relationships win. Audiences receive and transmit messages, thriving on a flywheel of action which drives amplification. In audiences, messages win.”

We should demand more than Threads and other shallow attempts by digital monopolies to reduce us to monetizeable audiences. “[Threads] feels more like an arrest than an invitation to join a cool new community,” wrote music and systems thinker Ted Gioia when he joined the platform, referencing the incredibly rigid privacy terms and conditions he had to abide by. “The only thing missing was a reminder of my right to an attorney.”

It’s nice to see Threads usage already starting to fade, and to know that there are people building alternatives. "We’re at the beginning of a shift away from internet business models that favour audiences, messages and reach, towards ones that favour communities, relationships and depth," Exile writes. "Creative tools will be at the forefront of this revolution as creativity is the lifeblood of a community’s health.”

But we’ll have to remain vigilant. Community doesn’t scale like audiences do, and for good reason, so we have to prioritize the sustained alignment between our creative tools and the people that use them. If that alignment isn’t there, we should demand more.

As Jon Tanners writes as his ultimate point in a list of 39 thoughtful suggestions stemming from his variegated experience in the music industry: “The only leverage you truly have is saying no and meaning it.”

Coda

Artists being undervalued has been a recurring theme in music rhetoric for far too long, and that’ll be a shitty and important recurring theme until it’s no longer shitty. But sometimes it’s nice to take a step back and acknowledge the things we can hold on to, despite the shit. In fact there’s arguably no better way to spite that shit than just being thankful for what we’ve got and continuing to make beautiful music about the stuff that “nobody can take away.”

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.