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.

Leaving the Matrix

I recently interviewed Latasha Alcindor – who most folks in web3 know simply as Latashá. Two weeks ago, Alcindor premiered her new track, “A Ten.” In the song’s music video, Alcindor appears in a nondescript cubicle. She answers a call on a desk phone. “Hello?” Cut to noise.

It echoes the famous scene from The Matrix where Morpheus calls Neo, instructing him to duck and weave through an office of cubicles to, eventually, leave the matrix. That nod is intentional.

“A Ten” exists within Alcindor’s new TASH55 “storytelling container.” “Latashá has been between two worlds and needs you to help her get out of the matrix and into her (r)evolution,” reads the song’s drop page.

I’ve quoted her in here before. She has great takes on web3 “healing money wounds,” as well as on-chain social as gardening – “It’s really nice to have a new world and new soil, where I can garden the way I want to garden.” 

She’s also pragmatic about what web3 is and what it isn’t, what’s innovative and what’s the same wine in a new bottle – and what it means to be “between two worlds” of real-world utility and delusional grandeur. 

“The delusion is what’s going to allow us to think bigger and beyond,” she told me. “But [we need to] reel it in a little bit."

These past couple weeks, there’s been a spate of launches and releases from on-chain builders. But how many are truly innovative? How many can maintain that delicate dance between delusion and the real world?

Let’s go down the rabbit hole…

Zora

Until last year, Alcindor was the Head of Community at the NFT protocol and community, Zora. Zora’s mission is to make creating on the Internet free and valuable. And they’ve just announced an upgrade that works toward that end.

At the center of the upgrade is the launch of on-chain secondary markets. What’s that mean? Well, Zora's ERC1155 tokens – an efficient smart contract that can manage multiple types of tokens (including non-fungible tokens, NFTs) – can be wrapped in fungible ERC20s. That means they can be sold on the popular crypto exchange, Uniswap, and take advantage of a much more robust liquidity pool.

Additionally, creators will now earn on all secondary sales, and Zora’s mint fee drops from 777 sparks (i.e. 0.000777 ETH, or about $2) to 111. These are all good things:

That’s a recast by Nick Smith (who’s building Fam Club) of a post by Matthew Chaim, the founder of Songcamp, who’s broken down the benefits of the protocol upgrade in nice detail here.

Songcamp have been active themselves. They recently launched Audiato, a front-end client built on Zora that’s dedicated to posting, sharing and minting music. There are profile pages and everything. It’s a simple, feed-based interface for music – and though they haven’t yet integrated the upgraded protocol, they’re definitely thinking about it.

Could this be that “right experience” Smith is talking about?

Coops and Co-ops

In the comments of Smith’s post, you’ll find crypto music man Cooper Turley, shilling his newly launched Coop Records Platform (which is not built on Zora). 

The platform’s interface, unlike Zora or Audiato, is a standard ledger of songs. It highlights three “key” metrics: “mints, rewards and new mints.”

“In the same way that platforms like Soundcloud and Spotify measured plays – Coop Records measures mints,” Turley writes in a blog post. “A mint today costs 0.000777 ETH (or ~$2.50) – but we are actively looking to bring this price down in an attempt to make collecting more social and accessible without breaking the bank.”

If you mint songs on the platform, you earn rewards that are then “distributed in various tokens that [Coop Records] are bullish on – namely emerging tokens on Base.”

In the same way that plays are inadequate measures on platforms like SoundCloud and Spotify, mints are inadequate measures in web3. They’re metrics of attention, not quality – especially when there’s so little room for context about the music itself. These are memecoin casino mechanics, which Turley continues to promote as “new meta:”

Lack of interest may be because the “new meta” subverts culture by emphasizing the financialization of everything. It abstracts the cultural and artistic context that gives a piece of art its inherent value.

Just because it’s crypto doesn’t mean it’s innovative.

Speaking of, Austin Robey – longtime champion of cooperative governance and founder of Subvert, the “collectively owned Bandcamp” (highlighted in this recent Beat) – challenged the crypto logic of Variant Fund, one of the preeminent crypto VCs:

Prior to starting Subvert, Robey built the music co-op Ampled and co-founded Metalabel, which was built on crypto rails but then vocally removed crypto from its stack.

Robey has also said that Subvert will not be on-chain, and asserts that the innovation comes from the organizational structure itself:

Innovation Outside of Crypto

Elsewhere in non-crypto land, SoundCloud just launched Artist Stores.

"SoundCloud knows that streaming isn’t enough – for artists or for fans,” reads the company’s statement. “We also know the power of fandom, which is why we’re constantly working on improving how artists and fans connect and share through music."

Music tech pundit Rob Abelow broke the news down in his typical concision:

Sounds great – finally a means of engaging the fan with deeper media from the place the music actually lives. Could they, too, be “coming for Bandcamp?” he wonders. 

But could it also be “too little too late?” muses Jack Spallone, who co-founded the on-chain music project Oscillator with the artist, RAC. 

Time will tell.

Oscillator, too – despite boasting co-founders who have been at the vanguard of on-chain music since 2016 – is building something that’s not really crypto.

Factory.fm is an off-chain social music app (in beta) for logging your favorite music. They’re touting it as the Letterboxd of music. It follows other Oscillator apps like Fan Score and Poke, which were featured in the Beat back in May.

In time, the plan is for Factory.fm to interact with “a music social graph – where artists and fans have control over their data and identity.” That on-chain element remains their “north star,” and illuminates a vision of data portability, where other developers can build a suite of additional apps atop the Oscillator protocol. From app to app, you’ll be able to bring your data with you – akin to Lens’s approach to on-chain social. It’s a kind of “data backpack,” as Oscillator writer Ben James wrote.

My favorite thoughts from the Oscillator builders, though, come from their May essay, “Building An Open Music Ecosystem, Together.” Central to the piece is one line, emboldened twice: “Our ability to coordinate on shared infrastructure will be our defensibility against incumbents.”

After the second instance of the phrase, the post concludes: “Collectively, we can’t be disrupted or acquired or turned off.”

Coda

"There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path."

Thus spake Morpheus. More of us know the path than walk the path, surely. Ignorance is bliss. It’s simpler just to look after our own interests – to putter along and pretend like nothing’s wrong. But if I learned anything from The Matrix, it’s that it’s a lot easier to “reshape the world” if you keep your eyes open.

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.