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.

Everything belongs to everyone

For the past several months, I’ve been working on a project that pokes at the system of copyright and imagines how to resurrect lost folk methodologies – that “everything belongs to everyone” mentality, as Bob Dylan put it in his 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year speech.

I argue that the power of copyright helped enable a transformation from music of the folk into music of a folk, incentivizing artists like Dylan to use the folk canon to elevate his own mythos as an icon. Our cherished bard built a career atop the hearts and stories of those who came before him, and that’s important to recognize.

Here’s Dylan’s sentiment in context:

Outside the folk tradition, though, everything does not belong to everyone, and Dylan recently sold his songwriting catalog to Universal Music Group for an estimated $300 million, and his recorded music rights to Sony Music Group for an undisclosed amount estimated to be between $150-200 million.

Without question, Dylan is a superlative songwriter, but in the context of a transmissive music and an “everything belongs to everyone” spirit, it makes no sense for one folk to have all that wealth.

Alongside FOLK, a new collective focused on tracing ancient folk relationships and methodologies in order to embed them into a new commons infrastructure, I’m going to poke at the system by minting a cover of a Bob Dylan song as a non-fungible token (NFT). The idea is to reckon with a natural tension: an open source, permissionless ethos – this time across public blockchains – and the power and precedent of traditional copyright.

Reach vs Resonance

When digging into the particulars of minting the NFT, we (FOLK) wanted to accommodate people of various means and not establish a single price point. We could make it free, of course, but the goal is to redistribute wealth from a folk to the folk, so we need to set some kind of pricing guardrails. A “pay-what-you-can” model seemed the most suitable option, so we set out to find a mission-aligned minting platform that offered the feature. But we couldn’t find one.

To their credit, the music NFT platform Sound just released Tiers, a feature to “combine reach and scarcity,” blending the exclusivity of limited editions and the access of open editions and free mints – inspired by an essay from Songcamp’s Matthew Chaim, rooted in the gulf in measurability between reach and resonance.

Essentially, the new feature is a supplementary “Forever edition,” which enables people to choose between purchasing the exclusive music NFT or minting a free edition (that contains no audio) with a small mint fee that goes to the artist. It’s a low-friction way for people to show interest in an artist and for an artist to build community. In time, the hope is that those forever edition holders transition into high intent fans.

Still, it’s not exactly a pay-what-you-can model – it’s a pay or don’t pay model. We’re after that In Rainbows color, i.e. that infamous 2007 moment when Radiohead – preparing for their first release in four years that didn’t have major label representation – dropped their album on their website as a digital download on a “pay what you wish” basis.

“Music fans were thrilled — as we are always thrilled — with great music that comes free, or cheap, and directly from the band, instead of through corporate filters,” wrote Eric Garland for NPR. “In Rainbows was an important milestone on the path to fans having more avenues to obtain music and feeling more connected with the artist.”

The experiment is still regarded as a groundbreaking disruption of the release paradigm, a direct-to-fan success story that spawned myriad experiments – and it was financially successful, too. Music Ally reported that “Radiohead made more money before In Rainbows was physically released than they made in total on the previous album Hail To the Thief.”

Bandcamp vs Spotify

Also in 2007, Bandcamp was founded – one of those experiments that, perhaps, drew some inspiration from the In Rainbows release. The direct music sales service quickly gained prominence, rallying around a model that let artists and labels decide their own pricing.

“Part of what makes Bandcamp Bandcamp is that you, not some corporate behemoth, set your own pricing,” reads Bandcamp’s FAQ. “And that’s really as it should be, since the most effective price just isn’t the same for every artist, and you know your fans better than anyone.”

Bandcamp reigned as a safe haven for artists and fans wary and weary of the corporate behemoths like Spotify and other major streaming platforms. And it, like Radiohead’s model, was financially successful – Bandcamp is a demonstrably more profitable platform than Spotify, despite the latter’s vastly greater reach.

Spotify and the Radiohead/Bandcamp framework represent two possible futures for music, as Andrew Thompson describes in a new piece in Fast Company. “The first [Spotify] is a fundamental asymmetry in the way people spend on each platform. While Spotify’s customers are capped at paying a maximum of $10.99 per month, the spending of any given Bandcamp customer is theoretically limitless – and affected by nearly endless variables.”

The Bandcamp model’s heterogeneity invites subculture and customization, which feels integral if you want to successfully apply economics to an art form as varied as music. And Thompson’s analyses captured that breadth, noting that jazz listeners preferred to buy CDs, for instance, and people were more likely to pay more for releases from their own country.

But now, for the second time in 18 months, Bandcamp was acquired. Epic Games, who bought the company back in March 2022, divested the organization as part of a larger downsizing. The acquirer now is Songtradr, a B2B sync licensing platform, and Bandcamp artists can now take advantage of those tools (but they also could do that before).

The bigger point is ‘same as it ever was.’ The Chinese conglomerate Tencent, which owns about 40% of Epic Games, also has invested an undisclosed amount of capital in Songtradr, which just means that it’s all the same. It’s the music industry ouroboros that keeps on eating its tail, and Bandcamp is the latest hot potato in the M&A aisle of music’s corporate infrastructure.

Still, Bandcamp seems to have largely maintained its autonomy, and earlier this year its employees voted to unionize, writing in a statement:

Hopefully that union will safeguard Bandcamp from the bland monolith of “fundamental asymmetry.” And somewhere in this string of tales is a lesson to be learned about building toward resonance, about why people feel a certain way toward the In Rainbows experiment and Bandcamp — and why they feel the near-opposite toward Spotify. Boiling it down, it seems to be advisable to give more agency to the folk.

Coda

Kernel is back. Maybe that doesn’t mean a lot to many people, but Kernel is one of the most resonant communities in the web3 space. It’s both community and curriculum, and it strikes an intentional balance between structured learning and unfettered exploration.

It’s one of those great communities that doesn’t build to be big, but to be better — specifically to build “a better web, together.” And one part of that is its beautiful Signature Economies, an interactive essay that asks: “How can we use technology to cultivate more reciprocal relationships?” The best part of the interaction is that it’s customizable. You can sign it for free, or pay what you can for a colorful NFT that signifies your tacit support of the community.

The FOLK collective, which grew out of Kernel, is molded from that same spirit. Stay tuned for more on the Bob Dylan copyright experiment as the final pieces come together. In the meantime, I’ll share my latest Bandcamp purchase, a grandiose track by Oneohtrix Point Never off his new album, Again.

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.