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.

The People's Bid for TikTok

In 2017, technologist Mat Dryhurst penned a thought piece titled “SoundCrowd: Tokenizing & Collectivizing Soundcloud.” Tokenizing SoundCloud could happen in two ways, he said, by SoundCloud themselves tokenizing the company, or if “we, as artists, fans and organizations invested in independent music, collectively invest to buy out Soundcloud, and distribute ownership to everyone involved through token allocation, commensurate with each entity’s investment.”

This was at the height of crypto’s ICO (initial coin offering) craze, when folks were raising hundreds of millions of dollars via unregulated investment vehicles. In his piece, Dryhurst gives a detailed breakdown of how SoundCloud’s tokenization could work, and how it would be beneficial to all stakeholders.

His structure, Dryhurst said, drew heavily from Trent McConaghy’s speculative model for tokenizing Facebook. And even that wasn’t the first call to decentralize some of our beloved platforms. Prior to that, there were similar non-crypto proposals for collectivizing Twitter (well before Elon purchased the company).

And now, Project Liberty – an initiative dedicated to building a better Internet – is organizing a broad consortium of technologists, investors, community leaders and creators to purchase TikTok. It’s a response to President Biden’s April declaration, which decreed the social media platform would be banned in the US if its Chinese parent company, Bytedance, didn’t divest within the year. 

“The People’s Bid for TikTok is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Americans to reclaim their digital identities and have a voice, choice and stake in the future of the Internet,” the project writes. “We plan to migrate TikTok to new digital infrastructure that prioritizes privacy and gives users control over their data – along with more opportunities to share in the economic value they create online.

“A reimagined TikTok,” they continue, “can serve as the blueprint for tomorrow’s Internet.”

Can they succeed where past efforts have failed? And even if not, can the dream inspire other builders to imagine new worlds with better blueprints?

Merlin

A collectivized TikTok probably would engage in re-licensing discussions with Merlin – something its current centralized structure opted not to do. 

Founded in 2008, Merlin is a digital music licensing and membership organization that negotiates deals collectively on behalf of its independent label, distributor and other rightsholder members. They represent about 15 percent of the recorded music market.

TikTok, instead, is inviting individual Merlin members to negotiate direct deals with its team. They say the decision stems from streaming fraud by individual Merlin members. Direct relationships with indies, TikTok spokespeople said, would give them better control of their catalog.

Additionally, TikTok says they’ve “had operational challenges with Merlin in the past where music that is not quality controlled for copyright is delivered [to TikTok],” a spokesperson told Music Business Worldwide.

Merlin, however, claims that TikTok “walked away before negotiations even began” and with “no warning.” In a letter to its members – a group that represent tens of thousands of labels and distributors across the planet – Merlin wrote that TikTok’s decision is an attempt to “[fragment] the Merlin membership, in order, we believe, to minimize their pay out.”

“Given that TikTok refused to negotiate with us, our view is that they must see the obligation to pay fair royalties as a nuisance,” they said in the letter, adding: “They must view Merlin – with its mission to protect and maximize the value of our members’ music – as too strong a negotiating partner for their liking.”

In its letter, Merlin said that it has “worked productively and collaboratively with TikTok” on the streaming fraud issue, adding that “until now, no concerns have been raised about the approach Merlin is taking.”

They added: “We have implemented measures to address illegitimate activity and content; automated systems to detect suspicious activity; and a dedicated team to address issues and impose sanctions, including ultimately, termination of membership for bad actors.”

In order to remain on TikTok, individual Merlin members will need to review and sign new agreements with the platform before October 25, 2024.

As you consider your opinion on the matter, here’s some more important context:

• Streaming fraud — where artificial means like bots or “streaming farms” are used to inflate the number of plays, likes and followers for a song or album — is becoming a larger and larger issue. Last month, a North Carolina musician was indicted for streaming fraud, manipulating the system to pump out $10 million worth of streams. But the streaming model is what makes this possible. “You can pay yourself out more in royalties than it costs to generate them,” music thinker Rob Abelow writes in “The Streaming Model is Broken.” “Music’s primary business model encourages everything from money-laundering, arbitrage and stream bot armies.”

• Last year, there was so much clamor from Universal Music Group (UMG) about implementing an “artist-centric” model that scuppers fraud and pays real artists more, yet here we are. Ten percent of all streams are fraudulent – that’s $1.93 billion a year coming out of artists’ pockets.

• In January, UMG effectively removed its content from TikTok by refusing to renew their license under current terms. TikTok expressed disappointment, citing UMG’s “greed” and “self-serving actions,” while the the label hid behind its standard lip service: “TikTok’s tactics are obvious: use its platform power to hurt vulnerable artists and try to intimidate us into conceding to a bad deal that undervalues music and shortchanges artists and songwriters as well as their fans,” UMG said in an open letter. “We will never do that.”

• The move befuddled artists, who have long been told by UMG and other labels to lean heavily into TikTok. And TikTok is not without value to UMG – it plays an enormous role in both discovery and marketing for the label’s artists. UMG knows that, but they also understand their leverage, and UMB CEO Lucian Grainge saw another opportunity to win.

• In May, as Dan Fowler predicted, a new deal emerged. The two companies put out a joint statement that’s heavy on rhetoric and light on details. In a memo to staff, Grainge said “greater compensation” for creators is coming via investment in “artist-centric” tools. As I wrote at the time:

  • “It sounds great. And time will tell how these new rules actually manifest, but rest assured they will buoy label artists – and UMG’s bottom line – and give little consideration to emerging artists or independents.”

In order to exert any kind of power in negotiations, “emerging artists or independents” need a collective like Merlin. TikTok knows that. Now here we are.

Those “befuddled artists,” meanwhile, are at the mercy of these platforms. This is all part of a timeworn game that many are tired of playing – and some are pushing back.

Rob Abelow writes:

Abelow concludes: “Build your own damn platform. Build your own world.”

Choose Your Own Adventure

Black Dave’s been getting a lot of (well-deserved) love in the Beat these past few weeks. He’s one of the better world-builders, drawing from both traditional platforms and web3 tools to guide people to his world.

As part of a new release on Supercollector – the Bandcamp-like platform championing a ‘new value’ for on-chain music – he wrote an essay called, “Music is a Choose Your Own Adventure Game.”

“For music artists, your job is to create paths in the choose your own adventure game that is your fandom,” he wrote. “I challenge artists to look at all of the different pathways you can create new paths for your fans depending on what they may be looking for.”

Dave references various tools and platforms that can be part of a given adventure, from Spotify to Bandcamp to Supercollector.

In tandem with the release, Supercollector shared a thoughtful post about how the blockchain can reorient artists’ paths and help them to take back “the keys to their audience.”

I’ll push back slightly to note that it’s still about access. But instead of music being the end of the adventure, it’s now the first door.

Listen here and enter, one might say. Verify yourself as a lover, a steward, a caretaker, a fan, and then we’ll give you a key to this new world.

Now imagine if platforms operated the same way. Imagine if interested community members could purchase shares or tokens, and in doing so, dive deeper into its world, contribute to its success, help hold community leaders accountable and “share in the economic value they create.”

Why settle for a few worlds that make a few assholes rich when we can build galaxies? Where a rich diversity of ecologies and beings share a blueprint of a world that we all own.

Coda

There’s a recent edition of Rave New World – a newsletter of “field notes from the frontiers of drugs and raving” by journalist, Michelle Lhooq – that deals in “the art of acid.”

In the piece, she chats with countercultural scholar Erik Davis. It’s all fascinating, but I was taken especially by the conversation about “blotter,” the “highly-absorbent pieces of square paper that liquid acid is dropped on.”

Blotter is also the name of Davis’s new book, which “charts the under-reported history of LSD blotter art.” Blotter paper is usually decorated with iconography that does nothing to the psychedelic impact, but gives the drug some cultural character. It can, subtly, also inform the “set and setting” – the mindset and environment in which one partakes in a psychedelic experience. (I once received blotter paper plastered with an image of Game of Thrones’ evil King Joffrey – god knows why.)

“This is where acid culture really converges with New Age woo-woo,” Lhooq writes. “But when it comes to that kind of magical thinking, I do actually buy the idea that the art on the blotter is part of set and setting, and that our mindsets can be shifted by the images we look at before tripping.”

Davis responded: “Well, if I'm at a ritual, and I'm going to drink ayahuasca out of a styrofoam coffee cup versus a beautiful carved chalice with a dragon on it, that's a different experience.”

This past weekend I was in Portugal, halfway between Lisbon and Faro. It was a birthday party turned festival – a kind of “festreat,” as someone called it, balancing festival-like experiences (music and DJ sets) with retreat-like sessions (yoga, well-being discussions, intention-setting, etc).

It was a no-alcohol, “substance-forward” gathering (in 2001, Portugal became the first country to decriminalize the consumption of all drugs). Each psychedelic experience was preceded by a ceremony of intention-setting, which may sound “New Age woo-woo,” but was incredibly impactful. It set tones and expectations. And that helped make the acid journey bright and connective.

“Rave New World,” of course, references Aldous Huxley’s seminal novel, Brave New World. Huxley also wrote The Doors of Perception, whose name derives from a William Blake quote:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Intention is fundamental. If we want to see new doors and create “a different experience,” all we need to do is look. Once you peek out from the narrow chinks of your cavern, the possibilities become infinite, and a world of few paths begins to feel laughably small.

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.