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.

‘The Decayed, Digital Colossus’

Despite having long been a music journalist, I’ve rarely written about music journalism. I’m biased of course, but I think it plays an essential role in this world, generating the “curiosity and context building” that surrounds the music. The practice explores, celebrates and critiques that most beautiful art form, pondering its effects, tracing its lineages, elevating its cultural impact. 

Across the on-chain music space, my biggest criticism is that coverage – and many of the space's champions – don't generally concern themselves with the music itself. In its absence, ‘web3 music’ became a perfunctory genre type, a catch-all for any artists who opted to release their songs as NFTs, providing little commentary on the music and establishing a dangerous precedent in which music gets folded into the crypto narrative of being a speculative asset class.

It’s a far cry from the artist- and scene-driven journalism that contextualizes music elsewhere. But even elsewhere, the democratizing force of the Internet and the embrace of short form, easily consumable snippets have drowned us in content and devalued its creation. We've veered from thoughtful curation toward thoughtless consumption, and music journalism has not escaped.

It too has been pushed aside for snippets, muddied by the maelstrom of digital noise – and not the amplified 100-guitar Glenn Branca symphony kind of noise, but the consume-at-all-costs technocratic-corporate-shithole kind of noise.

It’s no secret the trade has long been a crumbling pursuit. “The good old days were long before I was born,” Ted Gioia wrote about freelance journalism at large. “Freelance rates haven’t gone up during my lifetime. Magazine pay rates from the 1950s were often higher than today—even without adjusting for inflation.”

It’s depressing, and familiar. About a decade ago, I got into tech to buoy my keep because my earnings as a freelance journo could barely pay my Brooklyn rent. And that was when I was writing consistently for Vice, a major brand that could afford to pay better than most. (The "decayed, digital colossus" has since declared bankruptcy). And now there are even fewer sources of income for the music journalist – and fewer places for curiosity and context building. 

On Wednesday one of the balustrades of music’s Internet era – and one of the last of its kind – was felled. Pitchfork, the review-driven blog that emerged (from Minnesota) in 1996, was folded into GQ by their parent company, Conde Nast.

In the merger, many writers were lost, and longtime contributors and consumers – new and old – took little time to express their anger, sadness and nostalgia.

In more than one tweet, there were calls for a writer-owned zine. “I have unwavering faith that a worker-owned music publication that publishes fearless criticism, savvy reporting, and smart features people actually want to read could be made sustainable,” wrote Eli Enis, Editor at Revolver Mag.

The sentiment echoes the recent response to other industry darlings (i.e. the rare projects that have not yet been sullied by “corporate philistines,” as Enis named them) demonstrably changing form. Bandcamp was one such darling, and then it was sold twice, axed its celebrated editorial and had its own round of soulless “it’s just business” layoffs. People called for change then and they continue to now.

In response to Enis, commenters mentioned The Wire – which has been independently owned since 2001, when the six permanent staff members purchased it from previous owner Naim Attallah – the employee-owned blog Defector Media – “the last good website” – and New Feeling Coop, a “cooperative of music journalists and community enthusiastically covering the sounds across so-called Canada.”

These organizations understand that companies are not static – there’s turnover in personnel, shifting priorities and evolving technologies. Trends change and revenue sources change with them. So if they sell themselves, a few years down the road, a Conde Nast-type’s business will probably look different than it does today, and it will still be the owner of that indie darling, who will still be at the mercy of the Conde Nast-type’s P&L (profit and loss) sheets.

It's obvious why some companies sell out – it takes a lot of goddamn work to operate an independent organization that has to hustle 24/7 to make ends meet, and I’m sure the buyers gild the purchase in hope and continued agency. Those tired hustlers can rest with a clear conscience, they say, and they believe that this time, their org is going to be the one to transcend the ruthless reality of corporate machinations.

Exit to Community

Clearly, there’s an appetite for collectively owned creative ventures that can be shielded from the whims of founders. You can sense the collective angst bubbling, in the hyperlinked tweets above, in the swift embrace of DAOs, in the ideals etched into the ethos of web3 – even if they're not always practiced – and in the emerging alternatives to merger and acquisition.

In 2019, the scholar Nathan Schneider argued for one such option for startups – he called it “exit to community.” The idea is that a startup shouldn’t position itself to be sold to a bigger company or offer an Initial Public Offering (IPO) – as is often the path.

Instead, the company sells itself to the people who care about it most – e.g. users, workers, customers, participant organizations, or a combination thereof. Everyone who owns it has an emotional stake – not just a financial one – in its success. The company can mature into ownership alongside its community, now all aligned stakeholders.

The initiative grew out of the University of Colorado Boulder (a reminder that important models can and do arise from academia – keep an eye on Freq and the VSOPs growing out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst). At the top of the year, Schneider announced E2C.how, a library of case studies with organizations that have taken novel approaches to community ownership. He mentions Gitcoin and SongADAO, which have “tried to make good on a new technology’s often-betrayed promises for making a more inclusive economy,” as well as larger projects like Python.

In compiling the case studies, Schneider honed in on two key lessons:

• “There is widespread craving for a better kind of exit – and the creativity to back it up. 

• Better exits need to be easier – and this will require structural change.”

He stresses the second point, and references the ongoing dissonance between that ostensible appetite for new models – especially in web3 – and a reality in which they succumb to the same old venture capital structure.

For all the builders out there – innovation is fun, disruption is cool, ideals are good. But truly sustainable, “structural change” means banging on your ideals for years, refusing to take the easy way out. In the case of Pitchfork, it sounds like they’re going to continue publishing for the time being, but the “future seems unclear medium/long term,” and that’s a sad thing indeed.

What are we going to lose next?

Coda

A shout to Todd L. Burns, who for the past four years operated Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter dedicated to music journalism. It's another valued resource lost – for different reasons of course – but lost nonetheless.

Don’t give up on writing. Don’t give up on music.

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.