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.

Anti-scale

A few weeks ago, I co-hosted a Twitter Spaces on an anti-scale approach to growing music communities. The conversation featured Lani Trock, who helped build out Leaving Records-grown Genre DAO, Maarten Walraven, co-captain of Wild Awake and MusicX, Mike Sugarman, the conceiver of Freq, a platform tuned for music community that leverages something he calls “very small online platforms” (VSOPs), and Black Dave, an artist who has always been at the vanguard of community building in web3.

Anti-scale was conceived as a challenge to think about ways to grow and cultivate music communities in ways that work with the core tenets of community, which rely on transparent, non-extractive, intimate relationships.

I invited these particular people because I’ve witnessed their commitments to caretaking. Their interests in web3, first and foremost, is rooted in a deep care for music and the people it connects.

In a digital world of scale, where it can be difficult to find one another, I count myself lucky to have stumbled upon such benevolent thought leaders. The strong communities that surround them are a testament to their visions. And what’s especially noteworthy is their vulnerability – their willingness to be exposed amidst their experimentation, even when others might not show up the same way, or even find resonance in what they’re building.

Black Dave has been particularly good at communicating those disconnects. Earlier this week, he shared this tweet:

Black Dave’s observation is rooted in the fact that, as money in on-chain music has slowed to a trickle, so too has participation and support for on-chain music artists — even while money and participation are funneled into platforms like friend.tech. Over time, as the bear market barrels on, that’s feeling more and more like a causal relationship – hence his comment in the tweet that “people don’t really care about community unless it makes them money.”

On friend.tech, there is little differentiation between people and money. It’s a new app where people buy and sell shares of individuals. These shares can be volatile, offering potential for both gains and losses. Essentially, it’s a stock market for human beings.

I guess it’s not a surprising development — it’s not a huge departure from betting on fantasy sports or investing in musicians based on how many TikTok followers they have — but it’s not a development in the right direction. None of this is natural behavior, and it doesn’t reflect the ways in which we interact in healthy cultural settings. People shouldn’t be quantifiable.

It seems to me that market forces should be embedded within society and culture. They should reflect natural behavior, not dictate it. As economist Herman Daly once said, “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.”

When society and our tools are subordinated to the logic of the market, we abstract ourselves from our environment. Scarcity becomes more pronounced, and the chasm between unbridled human wants and the reality of limited resources becomes untenable. See: climate crisis.

Optimism?

In the face of Black Dave's sentiments, another bout of recent tweets was intriguing – this one from the investor Li Jin:

It’s an interesting comparison. It raises the question – will blockchain follow a similar growth graph to the Internet? And in order to be useful, does it need to? Jin advances the conversation by discussing what happened after 1999:

Is Jin's mention of the entrance of “major companies” a portent of web3’s future – similarly massive and dependent on venture capital? Or is it pointing to a normalization of concepts like “social tokens” and “TCRs” (token-curated registries) when the infrastructure is mature? Or have we simply not built the right apps yet?

As a co-founder of Variant Fund, an “early-stage crypto venture capital firm investing in an internet that turns users into owners,” Jin has a vested interest in sowing optimism for widespread adoption. But she also has a track record of demonstrating the economic potential of platforms that empower niche, arguing for the 100 True Fans theory and the creation of a creator middle class.

When “various segments of users have different preferences and opinions on quality, there’s a greater opportunity for a diverse array of creators to succeed,” wrote Jin for the Harvard Business Review.

Over the summer, Variant Fund orchestrated an accelerator for 24 projects in their Variant Founder Fellowship — many of which are consumer-facing. Consumer crypto, as Jin alludes to in her tweets, is where many respected crypto funds are spending their time and hedging their bets.

“Crypto is fundamentally a consumer technology,” penned the token accelerator Seed Club in a blog post a few months back. “Value flows to the social layers in this world, not the technological ones.” Today, Seed Club is hosting a demo day for their own inaugural cohort of consumer crypto companies.

What does success look like for these participating companies? To become the next Facebook or to become a VSOP? And how does that vision differ from the perspectives of the fund and the organization?

There are natural tensions between venture capital and community, and I’ve spoken with many web3 community leaders – including some of those that were part of the anti-scale spaces – where growth isn’t a priority. They feel protective of their communities, which has made them averse to venture capital because the model demands sustained growth. It’s made them averse even to marketing, because they don’t want the grifters and the noise, or to grow toward the massive platforms that have flattened us into a blanket of sameness.

Music and people aren’t homogenous, so the qualities that make them distinct can’t be captured and authentically represented at scale. Variability and customization are essential for capturing nuance and niche, as are the motives that gather people in the first place.

How do we remind people that community is enough, sans economic incentives? How can we measure value with more holistic rubrics, ones in which vanity metrics and the value of a token are only partial performance indicators? And how can we champion communities that may be content to grow less like a virus and more like a tree?

In a 1972 essay collection titled Who is the Chairman of This Meeting?, Alanis Obomsawin, “an Abenaki from the Odanak reserve, seventy odd miles northeast of Montreal,” expressed comments that have only — and will only — become more important to heed (no shade to Canada, they’re hardly the worst offender):

Coda

When I was the music director of my college radio station (shoutout to Carleton College’s KRLX), NPR’s Bob Boilen – longtime director of All Things Considered and co-creator of All Songs Considered – had just started a new series called Tiny Desk Concerts (named after Boilen’s long defunct band, Tiny Desk Unit). The show was co-manifested with Stephen Thompson after the pair attended South by Southwest and weren’t able to hear the music above the crowd noise.

For college radio kids, Boilen was tantamount to God. And his was a job we all wanted: to listen to music, talk about it and invite musicians to play intimate live gigs in small rooms that you got to be in. Boilen just retired after 35 years at NPR, and in an impish ode to the host and creator, Thompson recalls a quip from Robin Hilton, Boilen’s All Songs Considered producer and co-host: “His bite is gentle, but he never lets go” — words to consider as we continue to pursue visions for healthier music communities.

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.