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.

Irrelevant instruments

In the fall of 2019, I went to an office in New York to pitch a still very conceptual Grey Matter – a music startup I co-founded – to Bob Moczydlowsky, Managing Director of Techstars Music. We hoped to get a spot in the accelerator’s upcoming cohort.

Grey Matter still lacked direction – and in retrospect, its founders were very naive of the music industry’s machinations. We brought passion and good intentions and some semblance of the typical “we can save the artists” fare, but that’s about it. We weren’t accepted.

This week, Techstars Music announced it will shutter, citing an outdated accelerator model. “We want to invest in companies solving problems for music, not music tech companies,” said Moczydlowsky, “but the reality is that founders see ‘Techstars Music’ on the door and they bring us their startup to help kids learn to play a violin.”

“We actually believe instruments will become irrelevant and software will mainly replace them. Our thesis now is we want to fund the future of entertainment, self-expression and live events.”

That emphasis is my own, because the emphasized sentiment is important to highlight. Predictions like this have influence, and man just imagine the costs of this being a self-fulfilling prophecy… Regular readers will know my feelings about music played and shared in-person – the social acoustics, the pheromonal handshakes, the vibrating strings.

Later, Moczydlowsky did clarify the context of statement in a Twitter comment, reacting to the raised eyebrows.

That’s a more sensible take within the logic of the venture model, but alas, few are going to see this Twitter comment. And even those who do will continue to believe that venture-size outcomes are how “companies solving problems for music” should orient their cause.

Losing control of Bandcamp and NTS

All that’s an ideal precursor for this recent tweet by The Creative Independent co-founder Brandon Stosuy:

Stosuy wasn’t talking about Techstars Music here. Presumably, considering the timing, he was referring to Bandcamp, which just lost half its employees in a round of layoffs induced by its new owner, Songtradr. The customer support and editorial teams – the latter crucial for its coverage of global independent music scenes – were hit hardest.

404 Media also reports that, amongst those laid off, was Bandcamp’s entire collective bargaining team – the eight union members democratically elected by their peers to negotiate their first union contract (Songtradr claims it didn’t have union membership information when they made layoff decisions, but that seems questionable at best). Bandcamp is an incredibly important income stream for independent artists — and more than that, a bastion of cultural depth. But all signs are pointing to it being sucked into the corporate stream of platform capitalism.

There’s a similar clear and present danger at NTS. The revered online radio platform quietly accepted money from Universal Music Group (UMG) back in July. In a thoughtfully researched essay, First Floor captain Shawn Reynaldo just reminded everyone of that news, presenting August filings at Companies House – the UK’s registrar of companies – to add context to the story.

It seems UMG paid about $5 million for approximately 25 percent of the organization, making it NTS’s largest shareholder. NTS has gone out of its way to reassure the community that nothing internally has changed – and it seems at least that UMG did not gain any control of the NTS board – but the rhetoric is similar to Songtradr’s initial conviction when it bought Bandcamp: “There’s not a need to change [Bandcamp] into anything other than what it is.”

And yet here we are, with half of Bandcamp now gone and its cultural essence on the brink. As Reynaldo points out, organizations are not static – there’s turnover in personnel, shifting priorities and evolving technologies. Trends change and revenue sources change with them. A few years down the road, UMG’s business will probably look different than it does today, and it will still be the majority shareholder of NTS, who will still be at the mercy of Universal’s P&L (profit and loss) sheets.

The question at large is: What is UMG getting out of the deal today? There’s not altruism at play here – this is the organization guided by a man who receives $100M bonuses. Surely there are profit motives at play, so be vigilant. Watch out for payola and other insidious mechanics that give UMG leverage over NTS curation. Hopefully, NTS stays its course, but I hoped the same when Epic Games bought Bandcamp last year. Grassroots culture is easily corrupted when there are commercial incentives at play.

The Ampled legacy

Elsewhere, Ampled, a “Patreon-like platform for musicians structured as an artist and worker-owned cooperative,” has made the decision to close.

There were some great tributes to the platform, one by co-founder Austin Robey, who shared a litany of the co-op’s accomplishments – all done with less than $100 thousand in cash (mostly from grants and friends). The list includes a functional multi-sided marketplace, a widely respected decision-making matrix, an open-sourced code base and published zines. Some artists, according to Robey, were even making “life changing money through the platform.”

The most impressive bit, though, was that they accomplished all of this without any investor ownership, balancing a cooperative of worker- and artist-owners. I attended an Ampled town hall back in 2021 and the collectivist energy was palpable. It’s still one of the best models of digital decentralization I’ve seen (and it wasn’t even on the blockchain).

Ampled maintained a group of 40+ regular contributors whose contributions were indexed in a timebank. Eventually, their plan was for the “cooperative to repurchase these hours as ‘time buybacks’ (like stock buybacks).”

Even though Ampled is closing operations at the end of the year, the project still feels like a triumph. Why? The key is in Robey’s words: “Ampled wasn't a runaway financial success. But we considered cultural bottom lines to be most important.”

Therein lies the struggle – marrying cultural bottom lines with their financial counterparts. Look around you – not just at Bandcamp or NTS or the graveyard of VC-funded music tech startups – and you’ll find that tension everywhere.

Coda

In researching my recent This Machine Kills Copyright piece, I stumbled upon some words from Vaughn McKenzie-Landell – then the Chief Executive Officer of JAAK. “We can’t really extricate the commercial incentive from owning that database from the utility of that database.”

I’m not even going to contextualize what he was referring to because it doesn’t matter – the point is: we can’t extricate the commercial incentive from the utility. If those aren’t aligned, it’s already over.

In a nice piece by Philip Sherburne for Pitchfork – titled “Is Bandcamp as We Know It Over?” – he references the concept enshittification, a neologism coined by journalist and culture theorist Cory Doctorow in a recent piece for Wired.

“Here is how platforms die,” Doctorow writes in the piece. “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

It’s a “seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value,” he continues, “combined with the nature of a ‘two-sided market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”

You have to track enshittification back to the corporate structure level. Cooperatives that define success as the elevation of cultural bottom lines, for instance, aren’t going to vote for a volte face at the first sign of economic opportunity. And the nature of the cooperative means that founders can’t be tempted by million-dollar buyouts that endanger the cooperative’s mission.

That’s all to say, be intentional about how you orient your ship. It might not be the fastest one on the sea, but at least it won’t be piled with shit. Ultimately, most of us would rather be on that boat.

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.