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.

Jesus Christ (AI) Superstar

Jesus enthusiasts regularly take up posts on the high street near my home, generally finger wagging about “sin.” On Tuesday, on my way back from the train, I was greeted by familiar shouts from a preacher, but these were different. "I am AI. I see you. I hear you," a man said, before adding with a grandiose gesture, "Welcome, AI.”

Here, it seemed, was an early missionary for the AI religion, girded on both sides by various Jesus enthusiasts handing out pamphlets, all of whom eyed the man warily as he repeated many times, "You cannot deny AI."

Indeed, AI could leave a Jesus-sized footprint on the world. To the extent faith plays a role is up for discussion, but when AI experts sign an open letter to slow development due to “risk of extinction,” and when 42% of surveyed CEOs at Yale’s CEO Summit – which included a cross-section of 119 CEOs from places like Walmart, Xerox and Coca Cola – say AI could “destroy humanity” in 5-10 years, it’s hard not to invoke some biblical phantasm of apocalypse. 

Recently, the Berkman Klein Center (BKC) at Harvard – a faction of online researchers and stewards looking after our cyberspace – celebrated its 25th anniversary with a conference that focused largely on AI’s impact on society.

In his reflection on the conference, BKC affiliate Jad Esber cautioned about the frenetic pace with which we're treading into unknown waters. “To some, academia seems slow and completely disconnected from the reality of building for users and markets,” he writes. “While there’s some truth to that and there’s a very strong need for builders and scholars to meet, it’s precisely the unhurried pace of scholarship, steeped in thought, that grounds us. It’s the time to theorize, discuss, tear down and build again.”

I write about VSOPs and Freq a lot, but they’re worth emphasizing again because they too are being grown out of academia, gradually and intentionally. Undoubtedly, the graveyard of aspiring tech projects would be much lighter if not subjected to the grueling pace of startup environments and the scalar expectations of venture capital.

Surely, there’s some middle ground – a “pragmatic idealism,” as Esber calls it –that tech leaders and scholars (and policymakers) can find to ensure we move forward not just quickly, but responsibly.

Creative Commons

Middle ground solutions have arisen from BKC before. Lawrence Lessig, one of the co-founders of Creative Commons, was a professor at Harvard Law School and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at the time of the non-profit’s founding in 2001. 

Creative Commons introduced a series of licenses that carved a middle ground between the extremes of strict copyright and public domain – because, by themselves, the extremes weren’t working.

On one side, “all rights reserved” copyright protected the economic interests of rightsholders, but access to information was walled off. On the other, piracy and illegal downloading eased access to that information, but failed to direct economic value back to creators (though there are some indirect success stories in music, like an online community in the early aughts that pirated the Arctic Monkeys – and other indie rock darlings – in droves. On the surface it was burglary, yes – “you wouldn’t download a car” – but the far-reaching connectivity of the Internet helped elevate the band to A-listers that could sell out stadiums).

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. 

The blockchain was also built in that same spirit, oriented toward the decentralization and democratization of information. The music industry, though, was built atop traditional “all rights reserved” copyright, which means the potential reach of that art is inhibited, and that new formats like web3 and AI don’t fit neatly into its scaffolding. Perhaps, though, there are “pragmatic ideals” we can explore to make them work together.

CC0 🤝 blockchain

Last June, I connected with a few members of CC0lab, an Internet collective spun off from Songcamp. 20 musicians, developers and visual artists from Songcamp’s third songwriting camp, Chaos, formed CC0lab, creating 17 songs in a two-week minicamp. Importantly, all the songs were released into the public domain, utilizing CC0, the most liberal Creative Commons license, which allows creators to waive all copyright and related rights. 

On Monday, CC0Lab released a mixtape of remixes using stems (the modules of a song, like the individual vocal track) from that first minicamp. The music is stellar, firstly, and by releasing the project on-chain (via Zora), the collective is able to empower the memetic behavior that naturally occurs online and track the value back to the original creator(s).

Lens, the on-chain social protocol, is also now dabbling in Creative Commons, introducing a CC licensing layer in the just finished upgrade to their protocol.

Both are important examples of how the blockchain complements the objectives of Creative Commons by providing a secure and transparent way to enforce and manage licensing agreements. Blockchain-based platforms, for instance, 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 – and that it was created by a human.

Double standards

The US Copyright Office is taking public comments on adjusting copyright law around the use of generative AI. The Verge just collated the statements from the world’s largest AI companies – Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft et al – who all constructed different defenses, but effectively argued that they shouldn't have to pay for access to copyrighted material. 

The arguments vary from fair use claims to sunk cost rationales, where the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz contends that paying rights holders would jeopardize the billions in private equity already invested, thereby stifling innovation and endangering “national security.” 

It’s clear that big tech and its benefactors are eager to keep moving as swiftly as possible, jockeying for position in the AI race – often while touting the myriad societal benefits AI will have on the world. 

Believe what you will, but at the very least we should acknowledge this double standard. These corporations have accumulated massive wealth by building and exploiting proprietary technology – and now, suddenly, they’re advocating to open source information because it’s “good for society.”

It’s a dissonance summed up perfectly by CC0lab’s Lucas Nicoll – who goes by the artist name Shamanic – when we connected in June. “It's kind of mad actually, that we exist in this dichotomy where if you want to release music, you have to individualize it to the point where you say this is a hundred percent mine – I created it from nothing,” he said. “But then these same corporations go around and take an AI model that has the same process and say ‘no, it belongs to everyone – we can create whatever we want out of it.’ What a strange juxtaposition – on the one hand we are forced into individualizing ourselves, but on the other hand, corporations can completely collectivize us.”

Coda

To what extent does faith play a role in our non-religious social structures, like that copyright is a well-suited system for protecting creator rights? Or that so and so corporation will 100x our investment in five years? Or that AI won’t lead to our extinction?

The point is, we don’t need to rely only on faith. We can take our time, ground ourselves in experience, actually open source our vast stores of knowledge, encourage the spread of knowledge and creativity. And we can tend to the things impeding the confidence in our continued existence – that seems like a good place to start.

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.