“The music industry is going to ignore this for as long as possible, because they're so burnt from technology and they're so scared of the unknown.”

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Last November, just after Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter, MIT Technology Review reported that “around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between Oct. 27 and Nov. 1.” That’s an astounding statistic, especially considering all the accrued value these people forfeited – willingly or otherwise.

Social graphs are one of our most valuable digital assets. They support the connective threads of our online communities, and ostensibly, they represent our reputation and reach. It’s quantifiable influence, which can have profound economic implications – just look at the way Musk’s tweets about Bitcoin or Doge affected their prices.

But because Twitter and other web2 social networks use centralized servers (i.e. servers the platforms own and control), we’re perpetually at the mercy of their rules and resolutions. We don’t actually own any of the content or connections we make on the platform. So if Musk has a meltdown and pulls the plug, our Twitter social graphs are gone. 

But what if we could circumvent these capricious bouts of megalomania and ensure our data persists? All power to the people who took a moral stance and deactivated, but what if we could reject Musk and turn to a viable alternative that ensured a more enduring future for our thoughts, ideas and connections? 

Lens Protocol, a composable and decentralized social graph, is one of the projects building a foundation for that future. Lens is named after lens culinaris, or the lentil plant, which has a symbiotic relationship with certain types of soil bacteria – where roots left in the ground provide sources of nitrogen for their neighbors. 

The analogy speaks to the open source nature of the protocol, which means anyone can build applications on top of it. Dozens have been created so far, from Lenster – an on-chain riposte to Twitter – to Lenstube, a YouTube-like video sharing platform. Each app leverages a single Lens profile, so that “wherever [creators] go in the digital garden of the decentralized internet,” their social graph will follow.

Ahead of writing this piece, I created a Lenster profile, building out a page and exploring the ecosystem. It’s Twitter-esque in that it riffs on published content organized in feeds while orienting around follower graphs. Instead of ‘retweets,’ there are ‘mirrors,’ and instead of ‘tweets,’ there are simply ‘posts.’ The main differentiator is “collects,” a type of interaction that allows people to mint published content as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Creators can dictate the terms of collection, making them free or adding a price, or even making them contingent upon following the creator. 

For musicians, it’s a mechanism that allows them to bypass the disintermediation between music and social that has long plagued their efforts to build community and monetize their music. Today, for example, streaming platforms offer very little social functionality, forcing us to gather on exploitative social platforms detached from the music itself. Lens removes those intermediaries. 

I recently chatted about all of this with Christina Beltramini, the Head of Growth and Partnerships at Aave, the web3 company – best known for its valuable DeFi protocol – that released Lens. We dove into Beltramini’s background across music and social – she’s held business development and strategic partnership roles at Tidal and TikTok – and worked our way forward, discussing how her intimate understanding of the ecosystem has led her to building a creator-first future at Lens.

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Decential: I’d love to hear about your background across music and social.

Christina Beltramini: I worked in music for a number of years, and recently at TikTok. And I saw a lot of things that are wrong with the [music] industry. There are definitely two gatekeepers. It's not only the labels – now the labels are actually beholden to social media companies.

Artists have never had that power. They've never had direct to fan and they've never had direct distribution control. I view Lens as a social layer, and it's particularly important for musicians.

When you get into how much a musician relies on social media to build their brand and to eventually sell their music and go through to the streaming services, that time they spend on there – they can't monetize it, and it was equally as important, right?

So on the Lens front we're seeing a lot of traction with musicians. And for us it's ‘how do we tell the story about these emerging musicians that are popping up?’ Web3-native musicians are a new class, and I think that's gonna be an interesting narrative. We're still waiting for the right story to really bring them to light. Even if it's not about reach and it's about monetization – we have one guy called internetfaze and he mints one song a week, and he's made $2,000 and he's only been doing this for seven weeks. 

Read more: Getty Images Enters Web3 With Digital Collectibles of Music Legends

And it's not minting, right? You're just sharing on Lens, but people can collect. And you can monetize very organically. So these stories I'm finding very interesting, especially when you think of an independent artist who will get no views on any digital platform.

Because the labels control the real estate on Spotify and, and now on TikTok, even those artists that do get those views – they're stuck in these dead end label deals. And so what's the net dollar they make? It's probably not for five years. So this guy, internetfaze is outshining all those alternatives in web2.

Decential: That’s cool, yeah one of the biggest points of frustration in web2 is that disintermediation between the music and the social layer – there's no way to connect the two, and it's really hard to derive value from either one of them when they're not connected. I'd love to hear more about how working at places like TikTok and Tidal informs your approach with solving those problems at Lens.

CB: There are two areas I think. When I was at Tidal, Tidal wanted to do a lot but they weren't able to product-wise because of the labels, right? TikTok ended up having to stave off lawsuits, but they would've never gotten there in the first place if they'd played with the labels.

But then I saw TikTok go from rebel to ultimately ending up on the same path as Spotify, where they hire label people because you have to, and the labels end up taking control through their label deals, and you sit behind the scenes on those deals and you're like, ‘wait, where's the money actually going?’ At the end of the day, considering that lack of transparency – I view the music industry the same way. 

The blockchain is a very easy narrative where everything's transparent, where people have more control. Where you don't need these intermediaries in the same way. The financial system is eventually going to probably reach a similar place where everything can be automated and we can have control over our financial assets, and also now our digital assets. And for a creator, digital assets and IP and items of real value that can happen on social media end up becoming very valuable, too.

Decential: Definitely, it’s very interesting. What do you think the role of more traditional legacy organizations is? I read your piece on [user-generated content] UGC 2.0 [about how it’s evolving]. Assuming more significant adoption in web3, what do you think the future looks like for these UGC 1.0 organizations across both streaming and social?

CB: UGC 1.0 or like the music industry? 

Decential: I think it's two different but connected questions – UGC 1.0, do they adapt? And in that same vein how does the legacy music industry adapt? Because it’s this disintermediation that you've been talking about that’s coalescing in web3 through something like Lens Protocol. If that blows up, that sort of negates the need for these other silos that exist – how do they adapt? There's still a ton of power and a ton of money there. 

CB: I think the music industry is going to ignore this for as long as possible, because they're so burnt from technology and they're so scared of the unknown. And I saw this with the TikTok deals – it was very hard to get those deals across the line until they were really forced to, because the A&R departments saw new artists blowing up on TikTok, and they need to be at the forefront of what is like the new radio, right? And they don’t control it, but they need to be able to or else they lose relevancy. 

So my hope is that they'll ignore it. They won't plan it properly. Unfortunately, it's gonna mean that the artists that they work with can't benefit from it. But you're gonna see a completely new class of artists emerge. And then they're gonna have to start paying attention and start thinking about ‘what does a web3 label look like?’ How do we adapt our business model to play in this space?

And then when it comes to social platforms, it's all gonna come to creator monetization – can they provide better monetization than what these web3 tools can? And can they do it in a way where creators stick around? Or do they really start understanding the value by seeing examples of people monetizing – and not via like PFP (profile picture) NFT drops in a bull market, but in a sticky way because of what web3 can enable.