Keeping On-Chain Music Weird: Highlights from Music Ally's NEXT Event
Musicians continue to debate and explore what web3 can bring to their careers and the industry at large
Last August, Music Ally – the music business’s self-described “global leading knowledge and skills company” – hosted a web3-focused conference called the Sandbox Summit. This was three months into the current bear market and yet the tone was defiant, portrayed as a necessary correction to weed out “speculators who really have no interest in this space.”
Eight months later and still buried in the bear, Music Ally this week debuted NEXT, a new event focused on the intersection of music and tech. About 200 people came to London’s Shoreditch neighborhood, gathering at a modernized bingo parlor called Hijingo to talk web3, artificial intelligence (AI), data, virtual artists and fandom.
The event unfolded as the on-chain music world struggles with what web3 means for them. AI, industry veterans and the tempting pursuit of web2-style scale are forcing questions of identity, and of the true value the blockchain brings to music – beyond the hype and financialization. At its core, there’s an essence to the culture that buoys the community even during bear markets, but encroaching forces of the ‘same-old same-old’ threaten to snuff it out. The question that arises is: how can the essence be protected?
Music Ally CEO Paul Brindley kicked off the day by welcoming the myriad industry folk to a main room lined with long dim-lit tables surrounded by walls of mirrors. Web3 was less the focus this round, eclipsed in prominence by AI, but it made its mark on the day as key voices demonstrated the sublime weirdness that can make on-chain music culture so special.
The first person Brindley introduced was an AI avatar of himself, who welcomed the day’s first guest speaker, Scott Cohen. Cohen founded The Orchard – one of the earliest digital music distributors – and recently served as the chief innovation officer for Warner Music Group. Today he’s building JKBX, a forthcoming marketplace that will treat music as an asset class – imagine a streaming platform where instead of listening to songs, you can buy shares in them.
JKBX works by “packaging the investments in SEC-registered entities and creating a platform welcoming of investors confused by blockchain and NFT jargon,” Cohen said. It’s reminiscent of web3 platforms like Royal and Anotherblock that sell fractionalized shares of song royalties as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but Cohen is offering the approval of regulatory bodies – like the SEC – as a reason to use the platform.
NEXT attendees
“I love blockchain. I love NFTs. I love crypto, wallets, coins, tokens,” he said. “The SEC doesn’t.” JKBX’s platform isn’t explicitly powered by the blockchain, but when broached with the potential of leveraging the technology in the future, the industry vet was circumspect. “Maybe you could get a virtual version of a certificate – back when people bought stocks, you used to get a certificate,” he said. “But is it a token? Is it an NFT? We’re not telling you – it’s irrelevant to the customer.”
Alongside digital certificates of authenticity, Cohen also suggested JKBX’s share registry could be mirrored on the blockchain (as long as it's decoupled from the primary registry, thus remaining SEC-compliant), but he remained noncommittal – except to the way it would be conveyed to their customers.
“I am 100 percent sure we will never use that language – NFT – in our company, especially speaking with the end consumer,” he said. “Most people don’t know or care what file formats people are listening to on Spotify or YouTube.”
Cohen is right that representing web3 with technical jargon like NFT is misguided, and it’s true that most people probably don’t care which file formats their music comes in, but it’s reductive to limit web3 to simply being a format.
In the web3 panel that followed, Butter founder Vaughn McKenzie-Landel likened web3 to an entire emerging market, “a new land where artists are going and finding new alien fans – weird collector fans, investor fans, this whole new type of fan,” he said.
“I absolutely love that framing – of thinking about web3 as a new territory rather than a new format,” said panel moderator Dan Fowler, who authors The Liminal Space newsletter and is a core operator at web3 music indexer neume. “The format framing has always been troublesome to me.”
Just like web2’s history is not written in Ogg Vorbis files (the kind Spotify uses), the world of web3 shouldn’t be constrained to crypto, wallets, coins and tokens. It’s the world they make possible that’s worth minding – a permeable, ownable web that stretches beyond the confines of any single platform.
“The difficulty in web3 is there’s no Facebook-controlled algorithm or Spotify streams or Google SEO that you can try to game,” McKenzie-Landell said. “There’s this open and expansive universe where you can do anything – NFTs are infinite and programmable. That can be quite daunting.”
Tabula rasa means that artists – not platforms – determine the rules of engagement and build boundless new worlds in which they find and gather their communities. It’s a terrifying, compelling and incredibly powerful shift.
“You do get to be your weirdest self,” said panelist Charlotte Caleb, artist manager and co-founder of Elleven. “You’re not fighting with an algorithm for exposure. This is a sure-fire way to get feedback from your fans and get them involved. You’re not looking at other people, like ‘that person’s got X amount of followers and they did this’ [and asking] ‘how can I emulate that?’ You can find your people.”
Kat Bassett, community manager at the music research community Water & Music described these relationships as a near continuous exchange between artist and fan. The removal of platform intermediaries allows for more creative, real-time connections. “Collectors who invest in web3 music do generally care about the mechanics of an artist’s career,” Bassett said.
Water & Music recently released a study on the psychology of the music NFT collector. One heartening takeaway was the primary incentive for purchasing an NFT: the music, the artists’ stories and early proof of fandom. The pleasure derived from supporting an artist appeared as a motivator, too, and return on investment was reportedly less a factor than one might have thought.
“On-chain ownership of the music is of more value to [the collectors],” the study said, “as it represents proof of their identity as a fan and allows them to stay connected to the artist’s community.”
According to McKenzie-Landel, that’s the essence. “I have this weird sense that NFTs are really about digital identity and lowering the cost of being able to coordinate your fan-base across the web,” he said. And with the progression of AI, coordinating around those identities will be crucial.
“Artists won’t be able to rest on their laurels – they’ll have to move into a world of flow, like building community,” he said, referring to AI’s evolving capability of replicating art. “It isn’t static – artists are going to have to do more things and be more active. To combat [this reality], web3 gives you more opportunity to capture more nuanced value.”
To truly capture that value and create the connective tissue between artist and fan, separating innovative music from copycats will need to play a key role. “We see curation as a public good. We want every artist to have that moment where the spotlight is on them, where they’re not fighting to be heard,” said panelist Jeremy Stern, co-founder of the music NFT platform Catalog, which puts web3 music curation at the core of its business. “Eventually, that’s going to become a problem.”
Indeed, scale is likely inevitable, and there are already early warning signs of web3 trending toward web2 habits. “The number of collector wallets is becoming a success metric – almost a complete replication of web2 success metrics,” said Bassett. “I don’t think it’s natural for web3. I think it’s something artists and platforms should challenge. Focusing on volume as a success metric would be a step away.”
“One of the most attractive things about this world is that it is new – it is nascent,” Fowler said. He then asked the panel, “How do we stop them from getting railroaded, as has happened on the Internet historically? How do we maintain that weirdness moving forward?”
The weirdness is in the nuance and in the malleability. It’s in the potential to build worlds outside of Facebook and Google and Spotify, and to invite people in without pretense or apology – to be your weirdest self.
Metalabel’s Yancey Strickler recently wrote an essay that likens worldbuilding to creative resilience. “Without the grounding of a place of origin for your work, holding onto your distinct voice and way of seeing is more difficult,” he wrote. “It’s logical to be swayed by the overpowering rationality of the wider world.”
He differentiated between the motivations of that wider world and this new one that’s being built in bingo parlors and Discord servers:
“Wider world: Creative people who pursue similar visions or goals compete against each other for attention and status.
“Our world: Creative people pursuing similar visions or goals cooperate with each other to grow the attention and status of what they care about.”
Perhaps the key to maintaining the weirdness is to build as many worlds as possible – in every shape and form imaginable – to grant creative license to other weirdos and prospective world builders. Worlds where success is measured in the resonance of a vision and how distinct voices create new pathways and bridges, so that a world of overpowering rationality isn’t the only option we have.