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.

My favorite problem

Recently, Ted Gioia published a piece called “My 12 Favorite Problems,” an exercise he borrowed from the physicist Richard Feynman, who regularly maintained a dozen open-ended questions to help guide his life’s work.

Gioia is a great thinker, and his brand of writing – using personal experience and observation as a lens into broader culture – may feel familiar to readers of the Beat.

The first problem on his list is: “How can music change people’s lives?”

“This question changed how I pursue my vocation. I might even say it defined my vocation,” Gioia writes. “I started asking what music does. And not just what it is. It took a long time before I could even formulate it correctly in words. But once I managed to do that, it transformed everything.”

The extreme example of “how” music changes lives can be seen in our artists, who have been so changed by music that they sacrifice many of life’s comforts – a reliable income, for instance – to stay tethered to it.

The ways in which music can change the rest of us are contingent upon how it arrives from instrument to eardrum. Technology, typically, sits somewhere in-between – be it through a subwoofer in an arena or a streaming platform like Spotify.

In the world of technology, there have been some builders so changed by music that they commit their lives to battling incumbent systems and creating new tools so that music can more profoundly – and more directly – change people’s lives.

In fact, perhaps we should measure the viability of a project by the answer to Gioia’s question: to what degree does a tool – or doesn’t it – enable music to change people’s lives?

Nina Protocol v2

Last year I chatted with the founders of Nina Protocol, an on-chain music project that’s largely circumvented the hype machine of other music non-fungible token (NFT) platforms (thanks in no small part to their omission of the term NFT). Nina just released an updated version of its protocol – the benefits of which can be seen below from another great music thinker and technologist, Mat Dryhurst (one of Nina’s investors that now collectively own 18% of the organization). 

As Dryhurst alludes, Nina could functionally replace the Bandcamp-sized void of independent platforms that champion independent musicians – especially when, like Gioia, they’re committed to finding the right problems that guide them to asking the right questions:

Nina is the unsung hero of the on-chain music space, sitting comfortably at the periphery of “mainstream” crypto awareness, just like Bandcamp did next to the Spotifys of the world (before they sold out). The New York-based founders “formed more like a band who found they could make music together than a startup that saw a monetizable opportunity,” and that’s kept them close to the music. Nina feels like an extension of the various DIY scenes its founders hail from, making it refreshingly underground – and earning it a high score on the freshly coined “Ted Gioia scale of musical transformation.”

Unter

Where there’s life, there must also be death. As Nina rises, New York waves goodbye to another institution from its music underground. For 8 years – about half a century in New York City time – Unter was a roving electronic music party that catered to the queer community. It also welcomed all judgment-free folk who sought aphotic dancefloors. 

The party collective was my tunnel into the underground when I first moved to Brooklyn in 2015 – the year Unter starting throwing shows. We grew up together, and across dozens of venues, hundreds of new characters, thousands of club mates, and every drop of sweat left behind, it changed my life.

RIP.

Maintaining fidelity

Across Nina and Unter and beyond, the New York underground is fecund. The source code for culture often gets written in New York, from downtown music to hip hop. It’s not by accident that Nina and Unter rank high on our “Ted Gioia scale of musical transformation” – they both grew out of fiercely connective scenes, and they’re both tethered to the music itself.

Nina is an unobstructed conduit between artist and listener – a resilient, blockchain-powered protocol that values context and doesn’t rent-seek. And the Unter crew gathered around an obscure website and no-frills email communication, expending most of its energy on creating safe physical spaces for changing people’s lives – straight from turntable to tympani.

When paths are direct, there’s more resonance. Just as each subsequent copy of a piece of recorded music reduces fidelity, every intermediary in the communication chain introduces the potential for misinterpretation, distortion or omission of details. Ticketing and distributors and streaming platforms and other intermediaries emerge and play their own games, abstracting important context, storing and exploiting personal information via private databases, and making decisions about artists’ music that inevitably benefits their platform at the expense of the artist.

Many of these intermediaries likely set out with good intentions, but without direct lines and transparency, we lose part of the essence. To borrow Nina’s tagline: we need “100% music.” Otherwise the song remains the same: the more space between the listener and the artist, the more the connection – and the question of how music can change our lives – lose fidelity.

Coda

“This question came to the forefront of my thinking around 1990, almost exactly the midpoint of my life to date,” Gioia wrote of his transformation. “I was 33 years old, and that’s a good age for defining your mature work.”

I’m not sure why he thinks 33 is a good age for that – although it is when hobbits come of age – but today happens to be my last day on earth as a 33-year-old, so I’m suddenly scrambling to identify something that resembles “mature work.”

Reflecting on how music has changed my life seems an appropriate place to start. And truly, in retrospect, music has guided everything – from the moment my toddler self flopped around to “LA Woman” in my family’s living room in Brownsdale, Minnesota. Then piano at 4. Guitar at 14. In college, an explosion: playing in bands, running live sound for the campus venue, preparing Mozart and Britten scores for the orchestra, music director for the radio station.

Then a gig at Chicago’s WXRT. A quick stint in retail at a headphones store in Boston. On to Brooklyn and music journalism, riding my bike around New York to cover five shows a week and scrounging enough change together to buy a beer at one of them. Then a music startup, and onwards to London for more music journalism, and now to recording my first album (an ongoing affair).

Whether it’s the fact that we’re all made of strings, or the pheromonal handshakes at live shows, or the voice that singing gave me when my stutter took it away, music seems to have got me good.

I’m grateful that I’ve gotten to spend my life thus far so close to music, and I’m sure that however (and if) my “mature work” manifests, music will be central.

The Beat will be taking a beat next week for Thanksgiving. To hold you over, I’ll leave you with one last line from Gioia’s revelation:

“From that moment on, songs weren’t just songs for me. They were change agents in human life and a source of enchantment.”

For all those reading, consider me curious to know how music has been a change agent in your lives. I’d love to hear from you.

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.