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.

You Are What You Eat

Welcome to April, Beat readers. How time flies.

Today I’m considering the old adage “you are what you eat.” It’s a phrase often used metaphorically, but within a new discipline called nutrigenomics – which studies how food directly influences DNA activity – it’s taken on more literal meaning. While our genes are set at birth, our behavior – like what we eat – can actually activate or silence certain genes. We aren’t as static as we might have thought.

“What we eat is busy determining what we are to become,” writes Dr. Lisa Mosconi in her book Brain Food, which centers the importance of food on brain health (and I’ve been readily consuming).

That statement’s equally true, of course, for our minds. Our perspectives and thinking patterns are shaped by what – and to whom – we lend our eyes and ears. Our worldview is molded by the content we consume and the company we keep. We are what we listen to.

Yet the crux lies in how we listen to these people and ideas. It’s a crucial distinction, as it underscores our agency in self-construction. We can decide what we activate and what we silence. And recognizing the profound impact of our listening highlights the active role we play in “what we are to become.”

Stasis

Those who are listening may have seen that three major, nutrient-dense 2023 music reports just arrived: RIAA US Music Report, Luminate Global Report and the IFPI Global State of the Industry.

In Where Music’s Going, Rob Abelow “cross-referenced and compiled multi-year data” to – as per usual – present his major takeaways in cogent, accessible sound bites:

• Global recorded music grew 10.2% to a record $28B

• US recorded music grew 7.7% to a record $17.1B

• Streaming remains dominant

The incumbents will undoubtedly tout these takeaways as proof that the steaming paradigm works, and yet Spotify, Soundcloud and all three major labels had mass layoffs last year. That math doesn’t add up. And indeed, beneath these headlines, Abelow says, there are winds of change. He points to three signals in particular:

1. Streaming is maxing out

2. The time is ripe for new formats

3. Direct fan relationships are the new gold

Data supports these insights (more context in his newsletter linked above), and he emphasized them to galvanize our agency:

State of the Union

So the need, as Abelow demonstrates, plainly exists, and blockchain can ostensibly fill that need. Across the on-chain music world, “get out of the machine” and build a “new era of the music industry” have been guiding principles for years. Many of us are already practicing agents. Alas, our efforts have not yet manifested that new era. 

In a recent 14-minute “visionary stream of consciousness,” Black Dave – “the apparent President of Music NFTs,” in his words, and he’s got my vote – delivered a state of the union address that explores the gulf between what is and what could have been.

“We spent a lot of time trying to get NFTs into the wallets of people by any means necessary, and that put us in a position where we were re-creating the traditional music industry by allowing people to have access to the music for as little as possible,” he said. “That goes against why many of us went into web3 to make music. We knew that the system was terrible so we tried to enter a new realm where we could create a new one.”

He lists some meaningful experiments and shouts out some pioneering spirits in the space, as well as projects that do push industry envelopes. But ultimately, he noted, there’s been little love for music NFTs in this bull market, and perhaps “music isn’t the thing that has value on the blockchain.”

“It makes me wonder if we have failed and need to start back over,” he continued. “I don’t think that’s a question people want to consider – have we failed?”

Cypherpunk + Starting Over

Perhaps failure feels like a viable conclusion because what was once a “cypherpunk” crypto culture is now “a large ideological rift,” as wrote Vitalik Buterin in an end-of-2023 treatise titled “Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again,” “where significant parts of the non-blockchain decentralization community see the crypto world as a distraction, and not as a kindred spirit and a powerful ally.”

The main culprit, he said, is money. “When transaction fees go to over $100, as they have during the peak of the bull markets, there is exactly one audience that remains willing to play: degen gamblers,” he wrote. “When they are the largest group using the chain on a large scale, this adjusts the public perception and the crypto space's internal culture.”

It’s that cultural shift that prompted Metalabel to recently “climb out of the crypto rabbit hole,” and what prompted JUICE to critique their leave of the space: “If traders dominate the collective, then crypto will produce goods for them,” wrote JUICE co-heads Dan Fowler and Vaughn McKenzie-Landell. “If crypto doesn't represent our interests, we must redesign the system or introduce more like-minded people. Taking leave leaves us all worse off.”

So how do we redesign the system so that the Metalabels stick around? Can “our interests” transcend the financial clout of the degen gamblers and venture capitalists who see crypto as a playground?

If we do indeed admit failure to date, what might starting over look like? How can we re-center the “permissionless, decentralized, censorship resistant, open source ecosystem that we originally came to build,” as Buterin wrote. How can we resurrect a philosophy that “build[s] tools, not empires?”

If the time is now, as Abelow says, then it’s time to learn from our failures and champion the cooperative principles that first gathered us here. Without doubt, we can do more to cultivate an inclusive culture built around systems of care, but that will require listening with more intention – and not just to the loudest voices in the room.

“Listening is the basis of all culture,” wrote the composer Pauline Oliveros in her beautiful book, Quantum Listening. “Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.”

Oliveros defines quantum listening as “listening to our listening,” and describes it as the “foundation for a radically transformed social matrix in which compassion and love are the core motivating principles guiding creative decision making and our actions in the world.”

It acknowledges “a reciprocity of energy flow,” where we not only decide what to ingest, but what to leave on the table. And if there’s no reciprocity, maybe that’s food better left untouched.

Oliveros’s book has come up in multiple conversations of late, which leads me to believe folks might actually be ready to listen. And if this is indeed an inflection point, then we should start by listening to those that have done – or are doing – ‘the thing’ with compassion and love.

What’s at stake is nothing less than “what we are to become.” And this is music after all, the greatest thing in the world. If we cannot care for our primordial, universal language that breaks through our outer shells and connects us nonpareil to each other and the world around us, then what hope do we have?

In the words of Maarten Walraven, recently a guest on Grey Matter’s weekly podcast series, For the Record: “Listening centers you in the world. If you look at the world, you stand on the edge of it. If you listen to the world, you hear everything around you.”

Coda

For the 40-year anniversary of Mute Records, founder Daniel Miller put out an open call to the label's artists asking them to submit a cover of John Cage’s 1952 concept piece, 4'33". The three-movement composition, which calls for any instrument or combination of instruments, instructs the player(s) to spend the entire piece not playing. Embodied in the piece are the accidental sounds – raindrops on the roof, people shuffling about, chairs creaking – that accompany those four minutes and 33 seconds of intent listening to “nothing.”

I covered the project for Vice in 2019 and wrote:

Only five years later the number of pieces of music has doubled (at least), but we can still revel in that act. "I think the context is even more pertinent today than it was back then because there's so much more noise in the world," Miller told me then. "I'm not saying that's always a negative thing, but with all the accessibility to everything, there's even less time to explore. People hear things, but they don't really listen to what's going on."

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.