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.

Patreon Rising

You’ve all heard of it – this mighty buzzword “creator economy” that encompasses the platforms and tools that enable creators to make money online. Bandcamp, Twitch, Substack and Patreon are some of the powerful agents behind the emergence of this economy, but I’ve always had a major qualm with this space: patronage lacks a dedicated discoverability layer, or at least, the through line between them is not nearly strong enough. I can only support you, for instance, if I know you exist, and the siloed reality of centralized platforms makes those threads difficult to connect.

In music, for example, it’s a travesty that discovery-focused platforms like Spotify and TikTok don’t have seamless integrations with a patronage layer. Acts of discovery become under leveraged and undervalued. If I discover a song on Spotify that I love, I can’t do much about it aside from adding it to a playlist. I have to look elsewhere to get context or engage with people — the artist, other people who like that song, or others who might want to hear that song. That context is essential entrée to a platform like Patreon, where visitors, in short order, are asked to go from zero to subscribe.

Patreon, though, just eased some of that friction, announcing free membership plans so that creators “can grow their communities by welcoming even more of their fans, whether they’re ready to pay or not.”

And they’re positioning the platform in direct competition with major social media platforms – “Share what you want directly to your fans. No algorithms. No ads. When you share it, they see it.” – by ameliorating the pay-to-play BS normalized by Facebook et al – that is: organic, unpaid content makes it to about about 2% of creators’ followers, so creators need to pay the platform to get their content to the people that already follow them.

Patreon is alleging to ditch that toxic precedent. Now, in essence, would-be patrons can try before they buy. I found myself wondering what an on-chain version of this might look like – enabling provenance that transcends the confines of Patreon’s centralized walls – and then the creator-centric non-fungible token (NFT) platform Zora dropped their own blockchain.

The Zora Network

The Zora Network is secured by Ethereum and constructed on Optimism’s tech stack, which means the layer two (L2) blockchain will make transactions much more affordable. Internal documentation claims it will cost less than fifty cents to mint an NFT. And Zora’s co-founder and CEO, Jacob Horne said they’ll be able to "experiment with economic mechanisms" to subsidize fees for creators.

Whereas many L2s are DeFi-centric, the Zora Network is focused on NFTs – "built, launched and designed by a team with deep expertise of NFTs.” “Deep expertise” is a claim that’s difficult to measure, but with Latasha — the successful music artist, on-chain music champion and staunch artist rights advocate — at Zora’s community helm for the past two years, I’ve gotta say I believe it, especially when COLORSXSTUDIO, the beautiful, music-focused brand whose motto is “all colors, no genres” (with 6.7 million YouTube subscribers, no less) immediately jumps on-board with a COLORS COLLECT project that enables fans to collect live music sessions.

The music NFT platform Sound is another of 35+ organizations that already supports the Zora Network, and the effects of L2s are already palpable. To commemorate the integration with Optimism mainnet, Sound featured the drop of “V Buterin” by Optimism Collective – a duo composed of Optimism Co-founder Ben Jones (AKA weird ETH Yankovic) and Sound Co-founder Gigamesh – a silly, Weird Al-esque track about the inventor of Ethereum. With heavily reduced gas fees, it garnered more than 700,000 free collects, making it the biggest music NFT drop of all-time.

Sound also just shipped their Artist Community Page, a hub that allows artists to view their Sound collectors and – for those who have subscribed – their social handles and email addresses. “Artists should own the relationship with their audience,” the announcement reads, “without the threat of middlemen limiting or concealing information from the creator.”

Suddenly the picture of what an on-chain Patreon might look like gains some clarity.

Are we there yet?

But there are still major hurdles to topple. It’s one thing to earn 700,000 collects on a novelty item – it’s another to create meaningful, direct revenue streams for artists on a consistent basis. And although L2s make transactions easier and cheaper, it’s not as convenient as Spotify – not even close. Nor does it hold a candle to the size of Spotify’s catalog (for better but — when considering widespread adoption — mostly for worse).

If we really want people to buy into the vision of a more disintermediated, decentralized and equitable reality – and we should! We should leave behind a top-heavy world where the economic impact of Taylor Swift’s concert tour is “more than the gross domestic product of 50 countries” — we’re going to have to close the gap.

And here’s food for thought: the total economic impact – according to Ted Gioia – of Swift’s tour could reach $4.6 billion, which is about 50 percent more than Spotify’s global revenues last quarter. What does that say about the relationship between digital and physical music experiences and the roles they play in our lives? And for pocketbooks of artists? Has recorded music simply become part of the marketing campaign, a means of generating ticket and merch sales?

I remain in the camp that thinks recorded music has a much larger role to play than that. Recorded music’s current, top-heavy reality is a byproduct of systems rife with misaligned incentives and disconnected pieces, the likes of which everyone — from on-chain music platforms to colleges to Universal Music Group’s CEO — is trying to change. Little by little, perhaps we’ll find some connective common ground.

Coda

A man named Steve Knutson has committed much of his life to saving Arthur Russell’s unreleased music. The adventurous composer and cellist known for transiting between New York City’s vaunted avant-garde community and the burgeoning disco scene — perhaps a singular balancing act — died too young, at 40 years old. During his life, Russell released only two solo studio albums, but since the early 2000s Knutson — alongside Russell’s partner Tom Lee — has released seven posthumous Arthur Russell records.

The most recent of those, Picture of Bunny Rabbit, arrived last week, which had me fishing out my Arthur Russell faves. Here’s one below.

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

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