Chris Reed has been on a natural progression from creating his own music label to crowdfunding projects to diving full on into music NFTs with his work with Autonomies

In the early aughts, a new sound was emerging in South London. The crew at the Big Apple record shop in Croydon were making UK garage and techno when Benny Ill, a DJ and reggae fiend, reportedly put the snare on the “wrong” beat. The shop’s co-owner, DJ Hatcha, loved the dubby vibe, and soon people were dancing to dubstep the whole world round.

Chris Reed was one of those paying attention. While studying art and design at college he found himself getting bored of commercial radio stations so he scanned the dial for pirate radio, recording shows and then playing back the music on his walkman.

Wanting to get closer to the music, Reed borrowed – and later bought – his friend’s decks and learned how to spin. The Croydon native started calling himself Plasticman, and later Plastician, catching the attention of East London Grime pioneer DJ Slimzee. 

In short order he formed his own label, Terrorhythm Recordings (which turns 20 this year), and earned residencies at BBC Radio 1 and the legendary pirate station, Rinse.fm, establishing a unique legacy as a pioneer of both the dubstep and grime genres. He’d eventually work with Hatcha and other trailblazing artists like Skepta, who featured on his debut LP, Beg to Differ. 

Early last year, Reed used Bandcamp to crowdfund a vinyl pressing of the LP, calling the music platform “an absolute god-send to me and the label” because the crowdfunding platform allowed him to raise $12,585 – more than twice his goal.

Web3, whose community-driven mentality riffs on that same spirit, was a natural next step. Reed had his hands in Bitcoin and Ethereum and various alt coins for years, but he didn’t truly dive in until joining the social decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) Friends With Benefits (FWB). He would eventually help lead the FWB London sub-DAO, captaining local initiatives and hosting in-person events like Sunday Roasts. 

For the past year and a half, he’s also been one of a few core builders of Autonomies, an on-chain marketplace that allows artists to mint, release, and sell music to fans and collectors. Originally focused on electronic music, the platform has recently opened its doors to all artists, creating a path toward becoming the “Bandcamp of NFTs (non-fungible tokens).”

We talked about all this, as well as awkward crypto conferences, ramen NFTs and collecting football players on the gamified NFT platform Sorare. 

DeCential: How did you get involved with FWB – and web3 generally?

Chris Reed: Back in 2016, the only use case I saw for crypto was as an alternative payment method. I thought Bitcoin was interesting, but it was so expensive to send it – someone's got to figure out how to do this on a grander scale.

In 2017, I met a few people who were working in the music web3 crossover. One of those was Jesse Grushak, who was working at ConsenSys at the time and became one of the founders of FWB. And I knew Trevor [McFedries], who started FWB, when he was a DJ, so I've been in group chats with him for years. 

I joined FWB in the summer of 2021. I'm constantly on the lookout for who is innovating in that gap between music and web3, and FWB and the kind of events and the kinds of people that attended those events.

Those things are not like crypto conferences. When I went to crypto events before I’d meet really reclusive people who were really awkward to talk to, or VC types who don't really listen to you – they talk at you. I just didn't get anything from attending those events. It was like attending a real life version of a Twitter thread.

And when I got into FWB’s group chats, I realized that I had access to people who could answer questions that I couldn't find the answers to. They didn’t need [the] context I'd have to give to some random developer who I found on Upwork because they're into the music as well. 

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DC: What were some of the music questions you were thinking about?

CR: When I got involved with Sorare I started realizing the utility side of it and I started understanding why things are going up and down in value. It reignited my interest in how music could fit into this technology. 

Maybe you could buy a collectible NFT of an artist that you got in on early to prove that you were there first. Everyone likes to say they were on someone before it was cool. And you could do that by buying someone's early releases. I also collect vinyl, and I catalog my vinyl collection on Discogs, but I can't prove I own any of that stuff. So an NFT will prove that you bought it at least, right?

I'm not really here to find out what the next money making scheme is. I'm trying to figure out how these things work – why someone might buy an NFT instead of buying a record. But there have been a couple things I found interesting, like a 24-hour ramen shop that's opening in Oxford that created an NFT, and if you hold it you get unlimited free ramen for life. I'll get 100 quid’s worth of ramen over the course of my lifetime, so no brainer. And if it helps them get the project off the ground then it's not broken the bank.

And I did this with a football club called Crawley Town. They sold the club to a cooperative of people in the crypto space, like Gary Vaynerchuk, and then they did an NFT raise to bring funds in to buy players and invest in training facilities. 

And I thought, I'm a football fan. Crawley Town is not a million miles from where I live. I can travel to the games, I can go and watch. And I bought one of them, and I think it cost me 200 to 300 quid. And I'm taking my son this weekend to go watch for free. So even though that is not worth 300 quid, I feel like I'm an investor, right? Even at the lowest level, I feel like I invested in something that was a pretty cool idea, will get me a football shirt and make me feel like I helped a lower division club, hopefully, take a step forward.

Now I know I didn't need an NFT to do that. A local football club could take donations, and I see that’s not dissimilar. Except I have proof in my wallet that I did it. And I can now use that to claim tickets for the games. 

And that's what I'm trying to prove on the music side with Autonomies – trying to make utility straightaway, but not make it any more expensive than buying a normal download. Just to show people what owning an entity could do versus just buying the download, like if you buy the NFT you still get the files that you've got buying on Bandcamp, but you also get this token in a wallet that we can verify you. And you can listen to this mix, or you can download this unreleased track, or you can get in early on this piece of merch that we're designing. I think people will start to realize, ‘oh, that's what an NFT is? It’s not a picture of an ape?’ 

Plastician

DC: Yeah the composability of NFTs and the fact that you have provenance so that you can sell them on a secondary market – that in and of itself is huge, and that doesn't exist right now, to be able to do that and continue to earn money for your music as it's passed to other people

CR: Yeah you can see it firsthand on Discogs. Say I release a record now, someone buys it, and then they decide that they're going to flip it for 3x what they bought it from me for. I don't see any of that 3x and now they've now made more money from that record than I did, and I created it! 

DC: To me that’s the bit that really hits home. I'm curious to hear what the response has been from other [electronic] artists – it feels like most are a bit scared to touch anything that's got the term NFT attached to it.

CR: When we first started the Autonomies project [a year and a half ago], there were people buzzing to get involved and quickly get something out and jump on the hype train. And then when people started losing money on NFTs, it was like – well, my fans are gonna think this is a scam, so a lot of people got cold feet on it.

I think that some other people dropped out because the potential to earn a quick $20,000 started to fizzle away. Now, on the other side of it, you've got the people who understand the tech and it's like, ‘I do want to do this – I just need to do it in a way that feels right.’ That was me trying to figure out – from a label perspective – what feels like the morally correct way to enter this space. Because, for me, the big draw is how to create a new revenue stream and an ongoing potential for your early NFTs to become super valuable to someone in the future. If you want to become the next Beyonce, and you're minting NFTs now, and in 20 to 30 years, you're the most important musician on the planet, those NFTs are going to be worth a shitload more than you're probably showing them for today. 

DC: Absolutely. So where are things at with Autonomies today?

CR: There are five or six of us working together through our soft launch to get a few artists on board – work out the kinks in the quiet, in the shadows, before we start kicking into gear to bring in some big investment and go into full-blown marketing mode.

I think we all understand that the timing’s not ideal, but you know, from a lightweight perspective, the fact that we have a working product is actually quite unique. A lot of people do a big NFT raise and build an enormous Discord community to keep people buzzing and then you’ve got a setback and now you've got just disgruntled people shouting at you about what's happening to the price of the tokens. So we had all of those arguments and discussions amongst ourselves about what the v1 of the product needs to look like, then allow people to come in and engage with feedback. 

And we’ve actually opened up the mint app. I don't know how many people know that, but you can actually use it now. It’s not closed off like other music NFT platforms. 

DC: So basically any artist could come onto the platform and mint?

CR: Yep. We had a discussion about it because initially we wanted to semi-curate it – we weren't going to be super strict about the kind of artists, but because of the route that we took, not many people even know that the product’s there just yet, so we are going to rely on getting a few well-known artists or labels to have a go and see. 

DC: Nice, but are you still focusing on electronic artists?

CR: I think it literally is like, do whatever – there's nothing to stop rock from going on. It was just that the team that developed it and our little black book was mostly DJs and labels, but there's absolutely no reason that a bluegrass band couldn't go and mint on there now. And that would be interesting to see, it would open us up to a user base that up to this point we haven't had access to, which was part of the discussion we had about lifting the whitelist. If we do that, we don't know who might turn up. Someone who we never would have been able to get in touch with otherwise and now we can reach out to them and ask if there's any help they need, or what we can do to reach more of their audience with them.

DC: Yeah, I've had this conversation with a few different people – between exclusivity and inclusivity, curation versus completely open source. And it's tricky, because the role of curation is really important so you don't get to a Spotify point where 60,000 songs are getting uploaded every day.

CR: We were kind of looking at it as – could we be like the Bandcamp of NFTs where it's like, you land in a genre, but in a way that it's open to all, and we can curate [the front page] to have some control over the 10 main squares on what we call the wall, right? If we have an in-house team of curators who are into different genres and go, ‘Hey, I'd like to put forward this as one of the cool things that has come out of our genre this month’ – it’s a bit like walking into a record store, right? And that's kind of what we'd like it to eventually be – like landing in a digital record shop. Our staff recommended this but there's also all this as well. Now go dig!