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.

Power and Money

During the social media era, vanity metrics have reigned supreme. Follower counts and impression numbers have become tantalizing goals for would-be influencers – they represent platform specific feature-unlocks, lucrative sponsorship opportunities and perceived influence.

In pursuit of that power and money, people build strategies and frameworks to game the system and exploit it for personal gain. And in that game, depthless content often wins, because the ad-driven monetization model rewards that which appeals to the largest possible audience.

As we game and re-game the system with our valuable attention, we ensure that flywheel keeps spinning, reinforcing the platform’s power, padding its war chest and gradually eroding the value of context.

When we devalue context, we also devalue those that make it for a living. “Where there's power and money, critics can have influence and get paid,” wrote Yancey Strickler through the lens of Pitchfork’s effective closure and the loss of myriad editorial gigs. “When the money and power dry up, the beat does too.” 

That pattern also follows the volatile arc of crypto. During the bear market, as money and power moved elsewhere, so did attention. And in an attempt to cling to that dwindling attention, strategies began to emulate web2’s models of scale.

When collectors stopped paying top dollar for music NFTs, for instance, platforms embraced free editions that – like the vanity metrics mentioned above – look better than the value they actually generate. Needing to show progress to their own investors, web3 projects explored pricing mechanics that created an ecosystem bearing a striking resemblance to streaming — i.e. big numbers, very little revenue for artists.

But perhaps the real reason behind music NFTs’ slowdown is that its true value has long been misplaced – or at least understated.

“‘Music NFTs’” are dumb. They always have been,” writes Jesse Grushak, one of the pioneers of on-chain music. “A poor attempt at democratizing an existing market.” 

Where “PFPs are signaling tools that instantly convey something,” he says, “music is deeper and harder to show off.” 

Grushak’s team at Ujo Music – the defunct “crypto Bandcamp” – sold an Imogen Heap song with splits way back in 2015, and even then it was clear where crypto’s role in the music industry would be most valuable.

“Identity is the only problem that matters in crypto+music,” he writes. “Once you can identify an artist and connect them to a known fan. That’s when the power becomes real.” 

That connective power has long been wielded – at least in part – by writers, who round out artists’ stories to give them depth and distinction – in a word, identity. And what becomes of that power as context is abandoned and as values shift from “prestige” to “metrics?”

The fact, Strickler wrote, that “TikToks dwarf all over [sic] forms of consumption and a video that someone spent a day making will get more attention than something a studio spent years and millions of dollars to make,” is proof that the power has shifted from the context creators to the content consumers.

That power hasn’t shifted to individual consumers, though — just the heaving mass. Elevating a “consumer’s” identity to “fan with real feelings that contains multitudes” isn’t as easy to monetize. Consumer data tends to get presented in broad swathes of general demographics, because “the generic human is the ideal consumer,” as Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer, said on a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show focused on honing in on your own taste. 

Chayka just published a book called Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, a eulogy of sorts to distinction, and a commentary on an Instagram-colored world. On the podcast he uses cafes as an example, where across the globe he’s noted “minimalist boxes” with “white subway tiles” that have independently decided to dress in “mid-century Scandinavian furniture” and “handmade ceramic mugs.”

There’s comfort in venturing into the unknown and discovering the familiar, but we are becoming more generic humans and the cost is our edges – the incredible singularity of our taste-guided identities. Ultimately, we risk devolving into a dull fatalism of “good enough.” As Chayka said, “It’s so easy to be passively fed whatever you’re looking for.”

The Algorithm Canon

The more algorithms tell us who we are, the more we need to seek the things that make us feel – not because a person or algorithm told us it will, but because it resonates, ineffably. The more corporations deprioritize human curators at the Pitchforks of the world, the more power shifts even further toward the algorithm and “good enough.”

Writing for Dirt in his essay “The Death of Canon,” Ghostly International founder Sam Valenti IV wrote: “There will always be a hand spun alternative to the algorithmic hand, in that we seem to come back to storytelling, flawed (or AI-driven) as it may become. There is also the sense that the algo is actually democratic in that it gives us what we think we want and is enabling individualized discovery without mass media.

“One can imagine future canon-making as two decks of cards being shuffled,” he continued. “One hand being algorithmic and one hand driven by fan demand or user-generated content, and of course, the whims of chance in between.”

Should we genuflect to data and chance and allow them to dictate what we like? And who we are? With the context creators out of the way, will the machines be responsible for crowning our canon – that “agreed-upon consensus of what’s important historically?”

Chance will always be a variable in our taste journey, and there may be value and democracy in enabling individualized discovery sans the influence of mass media — or even biased music critics, but only if the algorithms fully disregard the economic incentives of the platforms that build them. Without transparency, we have no way of truly knowing the extent to which the algorithm is working in the best interest of our taste.

The promise of the music-crypto handshake is that that relationship between artist and fan can be reignited — even amplified — as the music-maker theoretically gets unprecedented visibility into the people they make feel. Conceivably, we can rally around the “identity” potential of an on-chain token and wrest back some control from the enigmatic black boxes of social and streaming algorithms. 

“Streaming services need to do better but NFTs [are] not getting rid of any of these because they never focused on the fan,” writes Grushak. “How do we build new systems so that early fans are never priced out of shows? How can we continue to reward super fans instead of selling them?” 

Expanding the contexts of identity is a good place to start answering those questions. To begin, we need to acknowledge that there are multitude-containing human beings on both sides of every music exchange. The less that stands between them, the better.

Coda

Grushak’s tweets were partially inspired by comments from Black Dave, and the 2024 predictions he made about music NFTs when we prophesized together at the end of 2023. Near the top of Black Dave’s list was the hunch that “context platforms [are] on the way.”

Let’s cheers to that future.

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.