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.

Palestine

This week it feels difficult to write about anything other than the ongoing atrocities in Palestine. They don’t fall within the purview of this newsletter, but at what point should genocide break through the walls of anything’s purview and become the world’s primary focus? More children have been killed in Gaza in the last three weeks (more than 3,300) than in the world’s combined conflict areas in each of the past four years. 

I’ll leave it there for now, while encouraging everyone to read “No Human Being Can Exist” by Saree Makdisi, and to consider the fraught “social media tightrope” – as Shawn Reynaldo calls it in a recent edition of First Floor – and subsequent expectations to which we hold artists in moments like these.

Spotify’s new rules

Let’s stick with the theme of oppression. For 15 years, Spotify has leveraged the pro rata model, in which everyone’s subscription money goes into a big pot and money is paid out based on a percentage of overall streams. The platform just announced three adjustments to its royalty structure, largely motivated by fraud deterrence. 

If a song is deemed to be connected to fraud, it’s taken down and the associated label and distributor are punished – which could pose a problem for the DIY distros that allow anyone to upload music through them. There are also now higher play-time requirements for non-artist noise tracks. To date, all tracks trigger royalties when they’re streamed for at least 30 seconds. Now, the white noise soundtracks and their ilk will require higher thresholds (upwards of four minutes). 

These changes make sense. But the third adjustment – a minimum annual stream threshold – is more perilous. Any track that doesn’t hit the minimum number – TBD, but probably about 200 – earns no royalties. It targets tracks that earn less than $0.05 per month, which may seem low, but at scale, it’s projected to total about $40 million per year, which is put back into the pot and reallocated normally across all royalty-bearing tracks.

The edict is cut from the same cloth as the Universal Music Group and Deezer “artist-centric” boost to so-called professional artists, which halved the royalty weight of artists with less than 1,000 monthly streams and 500 unique monthly listeners.

As MIDiA Research founder Mark Mulligan noted in his examination of the UMG-Deezer initiative, artists with under 1,000 streams represent about 80% of all artists. “It is redistribution of wealth in reverse,” he wrote, “taking income from struggling, emerging artists and sharing it among those who have already found success.” 

It’s a reverse-Robin Hood that benefits labels because it benefits their artists – those who have already established a fanbase and easily surpass those thresholds. 

Both initiatives cut out emerging artists and “siphon” money from independent music, and we must remember that the major labels enjoy ownership stakes in Spotify. The conflicts of interest are plain – it’s “mafia behavior.”

Artist-centric spaces

The move is evocative of the steady decline that prompted Rob Abelow’s “bold prediction” that “music streamers will become increasingly pay-to-play as they look to drive revenue & realize creators are willing to spend far more money than consumers ever will for mass consumption.”

It will deteriorate the listener's experience, he says, and prompt a slow exodus from “mega-platforms to artist-centric spaces.”

But where will those artist-centric spaces exist? We have the Discords and Telegrams and Reddits of the world, but those aren’t tailored for music community. Mike Sugarman, quoted above, is one of the people working on the issue. He’s building Freq around VSOPs (very small online platforms) to bring us closer to that reality – “subreddit-like groups” for talking about music. 

In web3, the music non-fungible token (NFT) platform Sound just shipped their own social feed, rallying around rhetoric for human-motivated discovery and shifting from single player to multiplayer mode, borrowing language first used (I think) in on-chain context by Metalabel (who just released a great collaborative cookbook and online collection of recipes for creative projects — check it out).

Sound’s social feed is part of the whispered lineage of “my god, have you heard this yet?” rendered in digital form. And I’m all for it. That said, though Sound assuredly intends to grow, it’s currently got an infinitesimal portion of the world’s available music. It’s a nice niche environment to develop, and it more closely integrates the worlds of artists, curators and listeners, but unless on-chain music tips some massive adoption threshold, it’s hard to see this becoming the artist-centric “community” hub that fills the Spotify-sized hole.

Free 2 Play

“Community” is one of the “four ‘C’s of fun in music” that Dan Fowler conceived in his recent Liminal Space essay, “Designing F2P music with a focus on ‘fun.’" Fowler has recently given a lot of space to “F2P,” or “free to play,” exploring how gaming’s dominant business model might be applied to music.

The focus on fun references Nicole Lazzaro’s “4 keys to fun.” In part, it challenges the recent startup trend to build businesses around superfans, which focus on the 1% of high-spend users because they account for 90% of the revenue. The issue lies in neglecting the experience of the remaining 99% populating your world.

Fowler recommends that each of the “four Cs” – community fun, alongside competitive, casual and creative fun – be implemented with a path toward mastery, and each should have fun at its center. The entire essay (and the two that precede it in the F2P series) are well worth the read, and the conclusion – that there “is a lack of common substrate to connect platforms, to bring it all together, and allow for overarching sense and monetization mechanisms” – is worthy of your inspiration. 

But don’t just go build something – spend some time learning how the music industry works (I learned this the hard way). These essays are a good place to start.  

Coda

“Databases are imagination layers. They’re records of decisions or interpretations. And the most important ones are owned by corporations, rather than by the people whose imaginations populate these worlds.”

When I read Bas Grasmeyer’s “Databases as worlds: democratizing our digital existence” for Music X, I couldn’t help but think of it in the context of Palestine, and neo-colonialism at large.

“The internet is such a big part of our existence; it’s ridiculous to leave it solely in the hands of megacorporations. It belongs in the hands of everyone contributing to it,” Grasmeyer concludes. “The world is ours.”

Our digital spaces tend to mirror the physical world’s power dynamics, with much of the power centralized in the global north. Digital colonialism is a thing — it’s been studied and exploited for 50 years.

Palestinian connectivity is largely reliant on Israeli infrastructure to connect to the outside world, and since the Hamas attack on October 7, Palestine has experienced near total Internet blackouts. The implications of a war that no one can see are scary indeed.

And more broadly, we need databases to be filled with the dreams and imaginations of the Palestinians as much as any other group of people on the planet. In fact we need them more, so we can more effectively empathize with the people for whom “fun” is a luxury that is rarely affordable — we shouldn’t neglect the experience of all these other people who populate our world.

The Internet is such a big part of our existence, and we can use it to better see through the veils, because nation states change the rules and obfuscate real intentions (sometimes they don’t even do that) just as much as mega corporations do.

Dweller, the electronic music festival centering black perspectives, has a great accompanying blog – that also centers black perspectives – that’s recently focused on compiling Afro-Palestinian literature (shoutout to James Beck for making me aware of them). Spend some time with them this week.

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.