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.

Life is But a Dream

Last Friday I interviewed Matt Sanders, better known as M. Shadows, the vocalist for metal band Avenged Sevenfold. Sanders and Co. are among web3 music’s biggest champions, utilizing the technology to gather community and work toward ameliorating some of the music industry’s myriad woes.

Back in March, the band partnered with Ticketmaster to provide token-gated priority access to its fan club, Death Bats Club. A few weeks later, Avenged Sevenfold launched TicketPass, their own blockchain-based verification and rewards system, which allows the band to honor their community for various acts of support.

These moves preceded the release of Life is But a Dream…, their first record since 2016. The album, released on June 2, is a wild amalgam of sound – imagine the nexus of a Soundgarden, Meatloaf and Dream Theater love triangle during a heavy-dose mushroom trip. It’s pretty rad.

The band has affixed every piece of physical merchandise around the release with a near-field communication (NFC) chip – i.e. the same communications protocol that powers Apple Pay and Google Pay. Scanning the chip grants access to exclusive footage, offers authenticity and rarity information about the item and can be used to redeem a non-fungible token (NFT).

Coupled with TicketPass, this is a powerful combination, as the band can connect purchases to an on-chain token that evolves as each fan engages. Sanders likened it to an airline rewards program, and he says that 40-70 fans have been redeeming NFTs every hour for the past couple weeks.

This exemplifies how the blockchain can be used to level up existing experiences without the heavily financialized approach that’s used in various other places across on-chain music. Avenged Sevenfold are rewarding prevailing behavior rather than inciting artificial scarcity to encourage new behavior. It’s an organic on-ramp to web3 that fortifies the ties between artist and fan and enhances the creative potential of the community.

Relatedly, Snoop Dogg announced his Passport Series NFT collectible, which will grant token holders access to behind-the-scenes footage and other exclusive content from his upcoming tour.

“With the Passport Series, I can give my fans the opportunity to travel the world with me — no one’s ever done that,” Snoop Dogg said in a statement. “I’ve always been a pioneer, and digital merch is part of the future. I’m hoping other artists can see what I’m doing and continue to innovate on their own.”

Merch – digital and otherwise – often accounts for the majority of an artist’s total revenue, writes journalist Kat Bassett for Resident Advisor. “Buying a T-shirt after a great show allows fans to take a little of the magic of the night home,” she wrote, “allowing them to connect to the artist in a way that lasts far beyond the show.”

In all of these examples, artists are giving would-be and already ardent fans a connective thread to their universe. And considering the oversaturation of music and the inevitability of AI, these kinds of gathering mechanisms are growing ever more important.

Broad Appeal

In a recent interview between Water & Music’s Cherie Hu and Lex Dromgoole, CEO of Bronze, “a new technology format that allows music creators to use AI and machine learning as creative tools for dynamic composition and arrangement,” the former prompts the latter to address the role of AI – near infinite in its ability to create content – in a world that’s already drowning in it.

“There’s a discussion to be had about whether automatic content creation via AI is a better solution than the existing kind of library music that is made by humans…I would use the term ‘contextless,’” he said, referencing music that has, by design, “an almost inert quality” for broad appeal. “It’s music that we want made. We don’t want to make it.”

It’s a nice sentiment, that AI is doing work that musicians don’t want to do, and there’s probably some truth to that, but there aren’t that many ways for artists to profit from anything – shouldn’t they get first dibs at creating the few things that people want made and are willing to pay for? And what are we missing by creating more “inert” music for broad appeal – why does inert appeal, broadly?

Unfortunately we live in a world driven by broad appeal. It’s the great flattening, where algorithms across mainstream social platforms and streaming services reward broad appeal. Music has not been immune to it. The pro rata payout model is literally a popularity contest, where artists are paid based on the overall percentage of streams they garnered from all listeners.

Even the much touted user-centric – or “fan-powered royalties” – model, explored by platforms like SoundCloud and Deezer, is not the panacea it might seem to be on the surface. In this approach, if you spend 80 percent of your month listening to Flying Lotus, FlyLo would get eight bucks of your ten-dollar subscription.

Logically, that feels more equitable, and that it has the potential to significantly redistribute wealth in the system, but as this new massive report from Pro Musik suggests, it – like everything else in the music industry – is more complex than that. Yes, the report says that 29.3% of artists would see their royalties increase by 40% or more in such a switch, but the report also estimates that 38.8% of artists would see their royalties decrease by more than 40%. And it’s not as simple as big artists lose and small artists win. Onwards.

Who Cares?

Elsewhere, 17 entities – including prominent independent publishers and the publishing arms of the three major labels – are suing Twitter (technically Twitter’s parent company, Elon Musk’s X Corp) for $250 million in damages for infringement across approximately 1,700 different works.

Unlike its rivals Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, Twitter does not have licensing agreements in place with the major music companies. The complaint reads “both before and after the [Elon Musk] sale, Twitter has engaged in, knowingly facilitated, and profited from copyright infringement, at the expense of music creators, to whom Twitter pays nothing.”

When the platforms we rely upon to socialize and consume content demonstrably don’t give a shit, how can we blame people for categorically undervaluing music? It’s great to see the Avenged Sevenfolds and Snoops of the world out there trailblazing, but innovation is a privilege. Fan tokens aren’t valuable if people can’t find one another. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to sideline the search for the perfect streaming payout model and revisit the design and intent of the streaming machine itself.

99.6 percent of artists aren’t making a living through streaming income, so what if platforms over-indexed on facilitating connection instead of consumption? Empower artists to build worlds around their music – constellations of connective and economic possibility. Because once people care, people spend money. It doesn’t make sense to pay platforms a flat fee for a celestial jukebox and just stop there. People want to care, and to connect – not with everyone, but with artists that move them.

“The good musicians touch our lives in ways that are beyond words,” wrote the great Cormac McCarthy, who died last week, in his novel No Country for Old Men.

Who doesn’t want to be struck down by the scintillating apotheosis of a new song, rendered speechless? Is not music the ideal medium for cutting through our outer shells and inviting us in, to join the galaxy of the music-makers and the fellow listeners reveling in some shared magic, moved beyond words?

Coda

Nick Drake would have been 75 years old this past Monday. On this day after the solstice, let’s revel in the simple profundity of “Saturday Sun,” straight on through the weekend.

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

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