The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway. (There may be unexpected stops along the way.)

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.

Basilica Soundscape

This weekend, Basilica Soundscape is happening in Hudson, New York. Every September the experimental arts festival takes over the town’s basilica, an 1880s industrial factory reclaimed as a multidisciplinary arts space.

The town is two hours by train from Manhattan’s Penn Station. The tracks sit just feet from the basilica, the resounding whistle of the bi-hourly Amtraks serving as something of a timepiece for the festival’s music lineup.

Sometimes dubbed the “anti-festival,” Soundscape is an intimate affair. Acts tend to be heavy and brooding, evoking a timeworn melancholia that’s in keeping with the venue’s industrial aesthetic. Most visitors from the city stay at a campsite about nine miles outside of town. Regular buses schlep campers back and forth.

I won’t be there this year, but I was there in 2015 and 2016. The first year, I missed the last bus to the campsite and ended up hitchhiking with an Olympic sprinter at 4am.

In 2016, to avoid a second mishap, a friend and I camped in the copse of trees just across the road. We were ill-prepared, though, for the forecasted nor'easter. We didn’t even have a tent, so we spent half the day looking for a tarp, eventually settling for plastic trash bags that we spent the other half of the day stretching over a large bush. 

But we didn’t care. Partly because we were young, sure, but mostly we didn’t care because we were sharing a dedicated space with a few hundred folks who showed up to be moved in a certain way.

Sustain-Release – an electronic music festival known for its open-minded ethos, deep sense of community and superlative DJ lineups – has a similar spirit. Two weeks ago, they hosted their tenth edition.

In many ways, Sustain is the underground New York scene gone camping. It’s three days of beautiful, varicolored weirdos – as a fellow weirdo I say that endearingly – who form a community through a shared love of electronic music. It’s like watching years’ worth of pheromonal resonance built in Brooklyn warehouses and sweaty clubs rematerialize in the woods. It’s folks there to be moved in a certain way.

(I missed this year’s Sustain, too, but I attended in 2021 and 2022, and camped more successfully than at Soundscape.)

And then there’s FEST, the annual festival by the cultural DAO, FWB. The third rendition happened at the end of August. I’ve still not attended, but by most accounts, it seems to be of the same ilk as Soundscape and Sustain: connective and intimate, confident in its distinct brand of weirdness that moves people in a certain way.

This, in my mind, is what web3 is trying to accomplish in digital spaces. It hasn’t so far. But in the face of the wild web2 shake-ups and shenanigans these past few weeks, could this be – as Black Dave suggested in a recent Yards video, “the time to make that record label DAO you were talking about?”

TikTok Music

In the Beat last July, I posed this question: 

“Is TikTok Music the game-changing music meets social handshake we’ve long been clamoring for?”

A year and change later, while embroiled in an existential battle with the United States, TikTok announced that it would be sunsetting its short-lived music app.

Why? Publicly, to focus on partnerships with other streaming services. “We will be closing TikTok Music at the end of November in order to focus on our goal of furthering TikTok’s role in driving even greater music listening and value on music streaming services, for the benefit of artists, songwriters and the industry,” its global head of music business development Ole Obermann said in a statement sent to Music Ally.

That sounds nice, but I’m going to stick with my answer to the question I posed last July: “Color me doubtful. TikTok has a terrible track record paying artists, and the core tenets of community rely on non-extractive, intimate relationships that are virtually impossible to achieve at scale.”

More reason to start that record label DAO.

Ride of the Valkyries

One of the first two countries to test TikTok Music – alongside Indonesia – was Brazil. The South American country is fertile ground for new social media tech, known for a culture of early adoption – and a wariness of dictatorial loons.

Last month, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered Twitter to take down accounts that “threatened Brazil’s democracy,” enraging Elon Musk, who cried “illegal censorship.”

Musk fired local employees and refused to pay fines. Brazil responded by blocking the social network, prompting the country’s 20 million users to seek refuge at competitors like Bluesky and Threads.

Over the weekend, unexpectedly, Musk capitulated. Twitter’s lawyers announced they were complying with court orders, a defeat for the billionaire whose tenure has been visibly turbulent – and even more unstable behind closed doors.

In a new book, New York Times tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac give readers a behind-the-scenes tour of Musk’s Twitter takeover, delivering some truly sumptuous bites of insanity. Rolling Stone published a list of some of them, including a drug habit that nearly led to an intervention, concurrent Musk pregnancies with two women (one of them Grimes) who each independently wanted to name their baby Valkyrie, and his conviction “that not all of Twitter’s employees were real.”

Another was a proposed messaging feature, which would allow users to pay a fee to DM celebrities. “Mock-ups presented to Musk’s entourage showed a user paying a few dollars to message the musician Post Malone, with Twitter taking a cut of the proceeds,” writes Rolling Stone. “Perhaps someone pointed out that this was a good way to drive celebrities off the site, because the project didn’t move forward from there.”

Still, private messaging features remain some of the commonest fodder for direct-to-fan product rollouts.

During its recent “Made on YouTube” event, YouTube announced a number of new features – one of them called Communities, “a space where, for the first time ever, subscribers can chat with each other and the creator directly.” It’s a Discord-like hub for conversation within a creator’s channel.

The major labels, too, continue to tout tools that foster superfandom. At Capital Markets Day, Lucian Grainge – the recurring Beat villain and Universal Music Group boss – delivered a presentation that centers the mythic superfan. And it reads about as rosy as rosy can be. 

Meanwhile, major label land isn’t all sunshine. The longtime head of Universal Music UK, David Joseph, stepped down this week, which came two months after UMG announced a layoff-filled reorganization of its UK division.

And over at Warner Music Group, Atlantic is going through its own reorg. One hundred and fifty people were laid off last week, and new leadership was announced – notably headed by Grainge’s son, Elliott. At least everything is rosy at the Grainge household.

It’s these layoffs that prompted Black Dave’s Yards video. “There’s an opportunity for the independent artist to win,” he said, suggesting that those losing jobs in the major label world might find success starting their own thing – maybe boutique agencies that operate with smaller artist communities in more direct ways. “I wonder if now is [the time] for the A24 or HBO of music.”

Could it be the moment’s arrived for that record label DAO? Web3 was once hailed as the ideal technology for direct-to-fan, and its inherent qualities – interoperability, transparency and platform independence – lend themselves well to superfandom. But today crypto is so stigmatized that people do everything they can to avoid association with it.  

Take James Blake’s Vault, an app where fans can subscribe to access artists’ unreleased music and message them directly. It was presented as an “innovative” solution, which led to frustration amongst fellow innovators.

My favorite take was from Black Dave:

“Imagine being like ‘the industry is so fucked these platforms give us no data at all about our fans, the labels gives us no data even though we’re signed and we need a solution’ and then a couple 3 weeks later you’re like ‘now announcing the James Blake mailing list and discord.’” 

Built by the music NFT platform Sound, Vault sought to capitalize on the ongoing superfan craze. But Blake went out of his way to emphasize it was not a crypto product. Sound themselves seemed to intentionally obfuscate their participation in the project, which doesn’t instill much confidence in the web3 ecosystem. (I wrote about it in depth here.)

So where are we at? As the YouTubes and TikToks of the world explore superfan tools with behemoth budgets and userbases, and as the major labels’ maintain their vice grip on music rights, and as on-chain music platforms play games of smoke and mirrors, we have to ask ourselves: what is the blockchain’s place in this conversation?

Here’s one take: “If it’s not uniquely possible w crypto it won’t matter,” the artist Dav tweeted recently.

It’s a fair sentiment, and it invokes an oft heard crypto question: what's the point? What is the tech actually adding to my experience?

And for the many people who take crypto to mean scams and degens, you can’t blame them for asking. And there have been builders who have tried to cram a square peg into a round hole just to take advantage of blockchain hype.

But this is still powerful technology, which can elevate existing infrastructure and consumer behavior – when wielded by the right people.

“I'm of the position that 'new behaviors enabled by crypto' will not be top of funnel conversions for new crypto adopters,” Jack Spallone, co-founder of Oscillator and Factory, wrote on Twitter. “Instead, it will be common behaviors that leverage crypto tooling because it is superior payment infra for app builders. Then, once onboard, the weird stuff – the reason I think we're all here – will happen.”

That’s a big reason why I’m here. But it’s important to note that the weird stuff is already happening. It’s out there in the woods, where caretakers and curators are gathering their weirdos to go camping. Because most people haven’t heard of it doesn’t make it any less real or powerful. In fact, maybe that’s its best quality.

And while we can’t fully recreate these spaces in the digital world, we can amplify them, and build for them, until each weirdo becomes confident in their ability to move people in their certain way.

Coda

Recently, Brandon Stosuy was a guest on Grey Matter’s For the Record podcast. Stosuy is an author, a longtime Pitchfork contributor and a co-founder of both The Creative Independent and Basilica Soundscape. 

In our conversation, he reminded us that what’s important – where the magic happens, and indeed, where the superfans actually show up – are spaces that aren’t trying to trick you into being anything more than they are.

I’ll leave you with some of his words:

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.