The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet.

On the culture-tech byway, things move at breakneck speeds. From web3 to AI, copyright to collective ownership, art to psychedelics, The Beat is an exercise in association. We all contain multitudes, and within them, vast differences. But there is some connective, fundamental essence to be found.

The Beat is dedicated to that essence, and to the people who seek it; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Black Mirrors

I love Black Mirror. Its deft portrayal of horrifying ‘what-ifs’ lie just beyond the horizon of reality – and that’s where they’re meant to stay. I haven’t watched the show since mid-2023, when the latest season arrived (Netflix recently announced 2025 will have another), but I’ve been waking up with various episode plots in my head. 

Remember the episode where autonomous weaponry goes haywire? Google just dropped their promise against weaponized AI (and ditched diversity goals). Remember the Salma Hayek AI didn’t-read-the-fine-print episode? We’re not quite there, but with generative AI spurring an existential crisis amongst creatives – and with corporate bottom lines, not human betterment, driving product decisions – it’s easy enough to imagine.

How about “Nosedive,” where social media scores serve as a pseudo meritocracy and appeasing the algorithm unlocks access to premium privileges? Sounds about right. Then there’s the one with the gaming system where players “can't tell where the hot game ends and reality begins.”

And that, of course, is precisely why I’m waking up each morning staring into a black mirror. “Is this – this moment we’re living in – real life?” is a common refrain. 

Another is: Can we learn from our pasts – and from foreboding potential futures – to stave off the dark reflections of our own worst instincts?

You Didn’t Buy the Badge to Get the Album.

I’m currently writing a retrospective on Ujo Music – the “crypto Bandcamp” developed within the Ethereum-based software company, ConsenSys. Ujo’s team worked with the artist Imogen Heap to sell a song with splits way back in 2015 – before the Ethereum Mainnet even went live. It’s often regarded as the first music NFT. 

As part of my research, I spoke with Ujo’s former CEO, Jesse Grushack. Grushack regularly hates on the term NFT, “We thought the name NFTs was really stupid,” he told me. And he’s extended disdain to the use case itself: “‘Music NFTs’ are dumb. They always have been,” he tweeted last January. “A poor attempt at democratizing an existing market.”

He laments that the ecosystem didn’t learn enough from Ujo’s experimentation. “My biggest frustration with the coming years of NFT platforms was – those aren't fans, right? Those are speculators. Those are patrons,” he told me. “It was frustrating to see that a lot of them weren't taking the lessons we had learned.”

“What always bothered me was that no one was looking at the fan,” he continued. “What we did with the badges was earned. You bought the album, you got the badge. You didn't buy the badge to get the album.” 

That hasn’t stopped him from staying involved with the ecosystem, though. Since the project shuttered, he's invested – via the Six Agency, where he’s a founding partner – in various on-chain music projects, from Royal to Audius to Catalog. When I asked him why, he said:

Indeed. But that reality is predicated on purposeful automation – engineered to generate creative freedom, not to funnel wealth to the “shysters.”

“There’s never been a better time in history to be an intermediary, a middleman, a hanger-on, an aggregator, a shyster,” wrote Ted Gioia in a recent edition of the Honest Broker. “For a guitarist or keyboardist or singer, not so much.”

In theory, and as Grushack alludes, the pursuit of automation should be grounded in a vision of more leisure, social connection, personal growth and caretaking. Instead, the money flows to the shysters, who effectively shutter that future from the 99 percent. 

Still, millions of creators continue to chase that future for themselves, braving broken non-zero sum systems, pouring in time, energy and cash in hopes of carving out a sustainable creative life. 

And the creator economy is bigger than ever. It’s even growing, quickly. That's why the shysters are circling, and look where the money’s going.

Gratefully, some are pursuing that other kind of future. There’s the music NFT platform Catalog, which dimmed its lights to seek a more sustainable business model after championing 1-of-1 NFTs and their innovative Catalog Radio. They’re beginning to re-emerge. 

There’s Subvert, the collectively-owned Bandcamp successor, which has now reached 4,000 member-owners (disclaimer: I’m one of them), with about 50 more joining daily.

There’s Freq, a “a purpose-built place to talk about, listen to, and spread knowledge about music.” It leverages what its originator, Mike Sugarman, calls “very small online platforms” (VSOPs). The project is growing out of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst, and it’s now accepting invite requests for the private beta.

These folks know the game is rigged, and they're working to unrig it, but for now, it’s still the only game in town: promote yourself using those “tech aggregators,” and do it over and over and over again until something happens, you burnout or go broke, because as Ben Folds’ reminds us: “If you don’t want anything to do with [self promotion], stay in your fucking basement.”

Alas, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the way out.

Ben Folds Folds While Others Live Forever

For the past eight years, Folds has been the artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO). Last week, he resigned. The NSO’s home base is John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts, the national cultural center of the United States. And like many government-affiliated organizations, it was purged by the new administration. Trump dismissed the presiding board and planted his own, who promptly appointed him its chairman.

“Given the developments at the Kennedy Center, effective today I am resigning as artistic advisor to the NSO,” Folds wrote on social media. “Not for me.”

Superstar soprano Renée Fleming, an artistic advisor to the center, also resigned. And the contract of the center’s president, Deborah F. Rutter was terminated.

In her stead, Trump appointed Richard Grenell – his former ambassador to Germany and acting Director of National Intelligence – as the center’s interim executive director. Grenell “shares my Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture,” Trump wrote, promising that the center would no longer be a conduit for “ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”

It’s rhetoric that more resembles Goebbels than Black Mirror. (Although cultural institutions transformed into propaganda machines by a reality TV star-turned-president would make for a decent premise.) There’s solace knowing these appointments are temporary. Even if Trump and Co. ramrod the constitution, emulate dictatorial regimes and skew term limit conventions, death comes for us all, right? 

But now we've got billionaires buying bunkers in South Dakota to “survive virtually any catastrophe.” And others injecting themselves with their son’s plasma to try and live forever. 

Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos – all these guys have invested heavily in anti-aging, “don’t die” organizations. And if anyone is going to ensure they live forever, it’s them. 

This is “peak narcissism,” Gioia writes, where “other people are, for them, literally just a source of fresh blood.” If we haven’t crossed that Black Mirror “horizon of reality,” surely we must be close. 

“Today you attain immortality by getting blood transfusions from teenagers, and freezing your body for later revival,” Gioia wrote. “In ancient times, you attained immortality by doing great deeds.”

The Coltranes

Last year, I interviewed Yancey Strickler (Kickstarter, Metalabel) on Grey Matter’s For the Record podcast. We discussed immortality through the lens of eons, not decades. “ History shrinks with time,” he said. “In a hundred years, how many bands are known from the 1960s? The Faces no longer exist. The Kinks, probably not. A hundred years from now, I think like 9/11, Trump and Brexit might be all the same event – that's the way people look at history.”

I mentioned a Gioia piece called “All Bad Music Will Eventually Disappear,” where the author contends that history is the ultimate curator. As an example, he listed the top 20 songs at the end of 1952 – I only recognized three of the artists, and I consider myself a music head.

“ Don't try to be the star – be part of a constellation,” Strickler replied. “Hot, hot, hot take: I think Alice Coltrane will go down in history as more important than John Coltrane.”

It's fun making prophecies like these. For the folks of the 22nd century, who will persist? Who will be the main characters of our time on this earth? And, will any of us be here to validate Strickler’s prediction?

In another recent essay, Gioia honored the 60-year anniversary of (John) Coltrane’s album, A Love Supreme, illuminating it with the origin story that has, indeed, survived:

How different would our world be if we imagined ourselves as vessels for creativity, not the points of origin? As part of a constellation, satisfied to simply have temporary access to this world? Individually, our unique outputs are worth honoring, but we are aggregates of stimuli and resonance, just like everyone else, and we should be humble enough to know nothing is ours alone.

It is as a collective that we have agency in how our story will be told. We are the archivers, the creators, the curators – the receivers and the remembers. We can still hold the black mirror at arm’s length and pursue that different path. 

But if we're not building a system that supports creativity and that kind of future, then we're fucked.

Coda

A few years ago, my partner and I were wandering around New Paltz, a quaint town in upstate New York. It was late spring and we were keen to get out of the city – alas, everyone else had the same idea. The hiking trails felt like Fifth Avenue. But the sun was out and it was beautiful all the same.

My partner stopped by a bookshop to use their restroom. I stayed in the sun, perusing the books on the tables outside. The physicist Stephon Alexander’s The Jazz of Physics jumped out at me. It was subtitled “The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe.” Say less, I thought. I barely scanned the back before I bought it.

Alexander begins with an anecdote about the so-called Coltrane Circle – an extension of the traditional circle of fifths, incorporating the musician’s own innovations and theoretical insights. As the story goes, Coltrane gave the circle to fellow jazz luminary Yusef Lateef, who later included it in his book, The Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns.

After studying the circle, Alexander called the office of Lateef, who had just retired from the music department of UMass Amherst (the same institution, coincidentally (?) growing Freq):

What Alexander had realized was that the same geometric theory that had motivated Einstein’s theory of general relativity was reflected in Coltrane’s diagram. And the book unfolds by drawing parallels between these worlds, in both directions.

“Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful,” Alexander wrote, quoting Einstein, “that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.” 

But what both sides were doing wasn’t new, Alexander said. “They were both reenacting the connection between music and physics, which had been established thousands of years earlier when Pythagoras – the Coltrane of his time – first worked out the mathematics of music.”

Truth resonates across centuries – through those who seek to understand the universe's beauty, who improvise when answers are elusive, trying to grasp why 'music is a universal language.' These are great deeds, indeed. Time well spent. That's who we hope we see when we wake up and look in the mirror.

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.