above: Dave Curry

Web3’s music space is assuredly a subculture for now, but it won’t be like that for long. 

Subcultures eventually permeate the mainstream – think of the early hip-hop samplers and the first reggae artists to filter onto the radio. Once the streams converge, it’s the resilient early adopters and pathfinders we tend to revere. Still, piloting through the prevailing web3 uncertainty will take considerable pluck.

In their own ways, Dave Curry (aka Black Dave) and Adrien Stern are leading this charge into the unknown. Through blockchain technology like non-fungible tokens (NFT), they’re challenging music industry stasis and pioneering new community-building mechanisms that will pave the way for future musicians to come.

Curry is a rapper, streetwear savant, anime aficionado and web3 pioneer who aims to, in his own words, go from “OpenSea to MSG,” using his music to propel him from NFT marketplaces to illustrious venues like Madison Square Garden. 

“I have no traditional real world fan base – my fan base is all digital, all web3.”

— Dave Curry

Stern, co-founder and CEO of the revenue-sharing protocol Reveel, is helping to enable that rise. Stern and Black Dave met through Water & Music, a music tech-focused and research decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, where they discovered a shared belief in a more equitable music industry and a penchant for experimentation. Stern had long followed Black Dave’s musical rise, which led them to working together on the largest on-chain revenue split ever. 

Using Reveel, Curry split the proceeds from an NFT of a live rap performance across 154 unique digital wallets – nearly 10 times the number of Reveel’s previous record of 17. “One of the most exciting things about using NFTs as a creative is that I’m able to create unique scenarios for my fans and supporters,” Curry said in Reveel's announcement on Mirror.

The record wallet-split was a testament to the superpowers of blockchain technology. To identify wallets by a shared trait like fandom and then send the wallet owners money in real time is amazing. Not only can money be sent faster – attribution can be tracked more transparently, which has massive implications for today’s streaming environment.

By some estimations, billions of dollars are left unallocated to artists and songwriters because of improper metadata input. Metadata may seem trivial, but a lack of standards and information about song registration and royalty collection leads to a convoluted system where musicians don’t get paid. 

Adrien Stern

Reveel used its Collector Insights feature to find everyone who had collected Black Dave’s free mint drop on Sound.xyz, WTF. The platform isolated the current token holders and created customized revenue paths, where smart contracts automatically shared 30 percent of the revenue across his fans. 

Via the blockchain, Curry was able to reward his early collectors for their support and loyalty while also giving them a shared stake in his future success – the more celebrity he gains, the more likely his early NFTs will rise in value. And the more he pushes the technology’s limits through platforms like Reveel, the sooner he’ll get to MSG.

“Collaboration is leading to shared property – that has always been the case,” Stern said. “But now shared interest – and this is what Black Dave demonstrated with this drop – is leading to shared equity. So Black Dave's collectors now have equity in his success.”

It’s a vision of mutualism that aligns financial incentives with artist success, but there’s still an onboarding issue. Madison Square Garden’s capacity is a lot higher than 154. Reveel-style revenue splits are only possible for people who have digital wallets, which means that artists who have stadium aspirations have a tough task ahead. How can shared interest be propagated in what is still a very niche world of NFT collectors?

“That's the part of the journey that I think a lot of what we call web3-native artists haven't figured out – our only performances are attached to NFT events,” said Curry. “I have no traditional real world fan base – my fan base is all digital, all web3.”

“How do we open for big artists? How do we go on a tour ourselves?” he asked. “Even in my early stages, I'm trying to figure out how this becomes sustainable and viable for an artist who wants to do more than sell songs on the internet.”

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Curry grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. Originally a bass player, he cut his teeth with punk and hardcore bands before getting into production, forming an electronic hardcore duo with a friend at the height of the MySpace era.

He started rapping and formed a crew called Blood Tiger Crew This Will Destroy You, putting out his first tape in 2014. A lo-fi EP and a lot of “random shit” released over SoundCloud beats followed. While throwing parties and DJing, he was also growing clothing brands, “flipping” logos by swapping out the names of recognizable brand designs with “Charleston.”

In 2019 Curry quit his job and moved back home with his family. “I was working at Marshalls,” he told me before adding an aside: “This will be important for later probably, where someone's like, ‘Oh, I saw an interview with that black dude worker at Marshalls and now he's the biggest guy in the world.’”

The artist’s levity is matched by a fierce work ethic that’s getting him closer to that goal. Coming into 2020 he began taking music more seriously. He started streaming on Twitch and releasing constantly, putting out a beat every day for the entire year, and a three-song EP at the end of every month.

In March of 2021, less than a month after Jacques Green and 3LAU marked the arrival of music NFTs with lucrative and widely publicized drops, Curry minted his first music NFT, a 25-piece edition series called blackdave.io 001 that contained the song “black Dave, black comet.” 

“I was like, ‘Okay cool, this is a way to distribute art and music,” he said. “And I was inadvertently focusing on utility before I understood the concept of utility, but I feel like that was always my base point.”

Curry started experimenting with mechanics in his second release, blackdave.io 002, which contained two songs – “Kaioken 10” and “Appreciate It” – and allowed the buyer of a verse token to redeem it for a customized rap verse.

“The unlockable content for the NFT is a link to a Google Form,” he told NFT Now. “In the Google Form, you can type in what you want me to rap about. You can upload a beat in the Google Form that uploads to Google Drive for me to rap to, and then I send it back.” 

Through each new release, Curry’s innovations bring his community closer to his story – to the point where they’re now playing important supporting roles in his success. “I think a bit of my notoriety in the space is around experimentation of different ideas – governance, fractionalization, service through NFT ownership,” he said. 

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Adrien Stern grew up in Geneva, Switzerland and started making music with friends at an early age. “I remember being 11 in the back of my mom's car with my friend who was the drummer of the band,” he told me. “I don't know how he even got that CD, but he made me listen to a CD for Max Romeo. And that's when we discovered reggae and we were like, ‘Oh shit, this is really cool. Let's try to play some reggae with the band.’”

Stern’s band, Najavibes, gained a local following. When he got to university, he studied business and took on the management of the band to see how far they could take it. During the 2008 financial crisis, festivals had less money to fly reggae bands to Europe from Jamaica, so Najavibes offered to be the backing band to Jamaican singers like Chezidek, Tippa Irie and Mad Professor. By leveraging the singers’ influence, they were able to start touring around Europe and build an international following.

“What if we could put attribution and ownership data of a song into a smart contract? We could pay out artists much, much quicker.”

— Adrien Stern

In time, Stern started producing and managing other artists and eventually founded a record label, which brought him closer to the myriad pain points of the everyday musician. 

“One of them that really struck me was how messed up it was that as a songwriter you would have to wait anywhere from 6-18 – sometimes even more – months to get paid out your royalties,” he said. “In no other industry would anyone work and agree to be paid two years later, you know? Why is that okay for artists?”

In 2013, Stern went to the U.S. to start working for a bank in digital transformation, which was his first introduction to crypto. At first he thought it was just “funny digital money,” but while he was getting an MBA at UC Berkeley in 2016 he dove deeper into the technology, realizing there was potential to disrupt the entire digital supply chain.

After finishing his MBA, he reached out to developer friends with an idea: “What if we could put attribution and ownership data of a song into a smart contract?” he proposed. “We could pay out artists much, much quicker.”

Some immediate hurdles emerged, with streaming platforms like Spotify balking at the idea of paying out artists in crypto, which was then an even more volatile asset than it is today. While the idea had legs, the timing just wasn’t right, so the idea went on the shelf until Stern saw 3LAU make nearly $12 million in cryptocurrency from his NFT drop in early 2021.

3LAU’s drop brought a new light to Stern’s project, as he realized he wouldn’t need to convince anyone to pay out artists in crypto – the revenue for the music was already generated in crypto. With Reveel, he honed in on that newfound shift en route to a pre-seed fundraise of $1.3M last month and the successful boundary-pushing experiment with Black Dave.

The prospect of a transparent on-chain solution where not only the artists get their fair share, but their fans can get in on the fun too is worth getting excited about.

Many artists are content to write songs for TV shows and films and live in relative anonymity as long as they can make money. “That's what a lot of web3 is turning into, where people are just like, ‘Nah, I'm cool – I'm good with making money, da da da,’” Curry said. “And you're like, ‘Okay, I get it. You can do what you love for money, but there are artists whose goals are Coachella, whose goals are Madison Square Garden. I'm one of those artists.” 

“All the artists in this space, we're all trying to figure it out together,” Curry said. “How can we go from, you know, OpenSea to Madison Square Garden – OpenSea to MSG?” 

Someone’s going to figure it out, and it may very well be Black Dave. See you at the Garden.