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.

Reflections

This time of the year is ripe for reflection – it’s a natural threshold for us to take stock of what was and imagine how we can be better. Idealism tends to get the best of us, and the quest for outsized improvement can lead to impractical goals. Inevitably ‘same as it ever was’ fatalism kicks in, year in and year out. We show up hard for about a week before keeling over, exhausted, falling back on old habits to counteract the tolls of self-improvement.

Still, it’s a beautiful notion, this exercise in betterment. The fact that we each hope to build a better version of ourselves is admirable. To find the paths that lead to truly meaningful change, though, requires space and time.

I’ve been taking some time to reflect in a cabin outside of Bordeaux. The Isle River is just outside my window, and a corrugated metal dock juts out into it from the yard. Each day I’ve spent time sitting on the dock, thinking of Otis Redding and Courtney Barnett and many other things, waiting for meaning and direction to bubble up from my subconscious.

Music and writing are, of course, central areas of thought. The tech world, mostly out of necessity, sits nearby. I left 2023 feeling fairly jaded by the state of technology – by the ways it informs, confines and fleeces endeavors like music-making and writing.

This feeling’s not a new one, but each day I become more tired of feeling it. Reading “Is 2024 the Year When Writers Fight Back?” by Ted Gioia – which details big tech’s “pathological” suppression of journalism and other forms of writing – only deepened the depression.

Still, the headline was vitalizing, as were signals elsewhere.

Championing context

One such sign is the recent resurgence in financial support for projects that seek to challenge the prevailing models of exploitation. Just in the past few weeks, Sona, Formless and Medallion all announced substantial fundraises, indicating a revived interest in new solutions.

In the last Beat, I digested 2023’s 39 Beats to seek overarching narrative across events like these. The goal – the hope – was to find some measure of foresight as we head into 2024. Tangential to the pursuit were December conversations with on-chain music leaders Matthew Chaim, Steph Guerrero and Black Dave, in which I asked them to make their own predictions for the coming year. 

For Black Dave, a return to context was a prominent augury. The hope is we’ll refurnish music with the context that’s been abstracted by lean-back steaming platforms that only care that something is getting consumed – the ‘who’ no longer enters the calculus. (Blame shitty platform incentives for that one.)

The music NFT platform Sound’s recently announced Protocol Rewards was a welcome reminder of web3’s potential to challenge that structure. The company is reducing its own mint fee to increase curator rewards by 10x and ensure artists earn on all mints. “Most traditional platforms are built on the back of artists and curators that grow the platform,” Sound tweeted. “This is our chance to create new models that reward them instead.”

The new capital injections seem to demonstrate some buy-in for that sentiment – perhaps 2023 was the “pragmatic correction” and 2024 is the year we see something sustainable take root.

Where we call home

Spurred by Black Dave, Iman Europe – artist, founder of the Homies DAO and erstwhile Head of Artist Relations at Sound – made 20 music NFT predictions of her own for 2024:

“The most successful artists will build and mint from their own website” is my favorite, and a projection I’ll double down on. It’s the rationale behind venture-funded operations like Medallion, the “home base” for musicians like Santigold and Sigur Ros.

Medallion is “using [on-chain] technology to create an identity layer around a fan and allow artists to be able to understand who their fans are,” co-founder Stephen Vallimarescu told me last year. “Artists are expected to have these thriving businesses, yet literally do not know who their fans are because there are so many intermediaries that are incentivized to not share that information with them.”

Closing that gap is akin to the cozy Internet – it’s the digital equivalent of selling CDs at your own show, buoyed by the context of your music and your presence. As big tech continues to limit how creators can share their work, the allure of autonomy looms large. People are getting wise to the fact that ownership – of your art, of your community, of your story – is paramount. It’s that all-important context that elevates the ‘who,’ and that’s a cause worth championing. May 2024 be the year we fight back.

Coda

Later this January, Kernel returns. The cohort-based learning community is an incubator for ideals, and it’s successfully cultivated many of them into real-life, meaning-filled projects. Especially in jaded moments, I spend time with Kernel’s beautiful Signature Economies, an interactive essay that explores what it means to ‘own’:

The whole thing is well worth reading – this is technology at its best. Stay tuned to the community during KB8 (the upcoming cohort) to see new world-bettering projects emerge.

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.