The Beat

“Last summer the Spotify boss said that he wanted the company to have 50 million creators by 2030 (there were 11 million in 2021). Compare that to the social music creation platform BandLab,  which already has 60 million creators – a contrast Music Business Worldwide’s Tim Ingham just made. BandLab is kind of a GarageBand tool meets TikTok ethos where music-makers of all (or few) talents can “mess around.” 

The discrepancy suggests that social perhaps is the route to success at scale, and that Spotify’s streamlined hyper-focus on consumption – one that’s axed many social tools and left thousands of unmet demands for them – may have been short-sighted. 

The wilder stat, though, is that there are 17 million songs being released on BandLab per month, far outpacing the already ridiculous ‘100,000 songs uploaded per day’ reality of Spotify and Co. 

By my calculation, at three minutes per song, 17 million is about how many songs a person could listen to if they streamed music for 24 hours a day and 365 days a year for the next 100 years. Not that I’m trying to listen to them all, but how does one navigate such a monstrous amount of content? Where does one start? And how can we possibly conceive a world where even some small fraction of those creators are earning a meaningful revenue?”

“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.”

“A few weeks ago, I co-hosted a Twitter Spaces on an anti-scale approach to growing music communities…Anti-scale was conceived as a challenge to think about ways to grow and cultivate music communities in ways that work with the core tenets of community, which rely on transparent, non-extractive, intimate relationships…

There are natural tensions between venture capital and community, and I’ve spoken with many web3 community leaders – including some of those that were part of the anti-scale spaces – where growth isn’t a priority. They feel protective of their communities, which has made them averse to venture capital because the model demands sustained growth. It’s made them averse even to marketing, because they don’t want the grifters and the noise, or to grow toward the massive platforms that have flattened us into a blanket of sameness.

Music and people aren’t homogenous, so the qualities that make them distinct can’t be captured and authentically represented at scale. Variability and customization are essential for capturing nuance and niche, as are the motives that gather people in the first place.

How do we remind people that community is enough, sans economic incentives? How can we measure value with more holistic rubrics, ones in which vanity metrics and the value of a token are only partial performance indicators? And how can we champion communities that may be content to grow less like a virus and more like a tree?”

Last month, the world lost Ryuichi Sakamoto, a singular composer who won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes. He was also famously exploratory – unafraid to both speak against legacy paradigms and experiment with new technologies. His explorations included non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which “may have represented to Sakamoto the fruition of a dream he has harbored since the 1980s when the proliferation of CDs promised to usher in an era of digitization that would enable all artists to manage their own copyright, distribution, traceability, and finances in a more direct and fair way.” 

Sakamoto was keenly aware of the ways in which new technologies could affect coordination surrounding music and since 1998 he’s been regularly thinking about the Internet’s effect on human behavior. 

“In the old days people shared music, they didn't care who made it; a song would be owned by a village and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever,” he said in a 2009 feature in The Guardian. “That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now with the Internet we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.”

Today, on-chain music is creating opportunities to resurrect and reestablish more collective, folk-driven methodologies that can be more equitable to individual music-makers. In order to manifest that reality, though, we’ll have to reckon with a natural tension: an open source, permissionless ethos – this time across public blockchains – and the power and precedent of traditional copyright. 

How can we find ways to harness the superpowers of the blockchain – decentralization, immutability and provenance – without harming creators who still rely on copyright to earn money? How can we protect creators’ rights while also embracing the truth that everything is a remix, that genius is a fallacy, and that collective attribution of the folk is a much healthier way to share and celebrate art? 

As we wrestle with legacy concepts of ownership – as well as a memetic Internet culture that is increasingly at odds with them – and the legal murk web3, we have an opportunity to create new precedence through action – to embrace solutions that redistribute wealth from one folk to many.

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Creative Commons licenses were developed in response to the challenges and limitations of traditional copyright in the digital age. Varying attribution requirements across licenses, for instance, allowed creators to customize the distribution of their works. Ultimately, the goal was to strike a balance between protecting creators' rights and encouraging the spread of knowledge and creativity.

Conceivably the blockchain can complement the objectives of Creative Commons by providing a secure and transparent way to enforce and manage licensing agreements. For example, blockchain-based platforms can track the usage of Creative Commons-licensed content and automatically distribute royalties to creators. The art moves with ease, and value accrues via the art’s cultural impact. Provenance, enabled by the blockchain, ensures people know who created the art.

Back in 2005, a group of American online rights activists and scholars — one of whom was Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons non-profit — sat down with Gil in a living room in Rio de Janeiro. The then 62-year-old presiding Minister of Culture spoke about how “the fundamentalists of absolute property control” stood in the way of the digital world's promises of cultural democracy.

"A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property," he said. "No country, not the US, not Europe, can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world, of the postmodern world — and there's no use resisting it."

Gil summed up his team’s approach to intellectual property in the digital world with one word: “tropicalize.” The goal? "To make the digital world join in the samba.”

“AI is basically a neural network trained on the things we’ve done and made. But we must also recognize that the things we’ve done and made are inclusive of our deepest desires, our implicit biases – the things that we pour into our creations unawares.

How do we reckon with those subconscious secretions, ethically and legally? In 1976 George Harrison was found guilty of ‘subconsciously plagiarizing’ the 1962 John Mack tune, “He’s So Fine,” in his song “My Sweet Lord.” There have since been untold cases — from Led Zeppelin vs Taurus to Ed Sheeran vs Marvin Gaye — that tackle the issue, begging questions about the thresholds of infringement and the contours of our own waking mind. To what extent is our own subconscious off limits? To what extent is our own subconscious even our own?

If we cannot rightly say where John Mack starts and George Harrison begins, and we choose instead to build an attribution system that can litigate the space between, then perhaps we’re doing it wrong, and we should simply let it flow freely, and celebrate the whole lot of it as ours.”