In 2020, TikTok launched a massive $200 million creator fund. Artists celebrated, but it was a “too good to be true” ploy filled with muddled mechanics. Many of the onboarded users actually saw view counts drop and payouts decrease, and some left the fund just months after its arrival. 

Maybe it was pandemic-induced lip service – an opportunity to co-opt the goodwill moment that was defined by government-fueled stimulus packages. Likely, it was a thinly veiled ruse to cajole all ‘could-be would-be’ creators to use their forced at-home time on TikTok and not on Instagram, Snapchat or YouTube.

Around the same time, web3 advocate Andrew Yang was engineering a presidential campaign – and later a bid to be New York City mayor – around basic income programs. It was an affront to the “don’t be lazy” conservatives, but not the same kind of “too good to be true” scheme as TikTok’s creator fund. 

Basic income programs are unconditional allocations of money to human beings, and evidence shows that such programs result in less impoverished, better educated and healthier communities – and to the chagrin of the don’t be lazy contingent, even an uptick in productivity. Not to mention more free time to participate in the culture around us.

At the end of 2020, an experiment started that pushed the bounds of that kind of participation. The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) Friends With Benefits (FWB) was born. Since its inception, FWB has been an evolving sandbox that’s brought together thousands of artists, builders and thinkers, all oriented around a vision for a better, more equitable Internet.

Listen: Big Brother and the Hodling Company With Kaitlyn Davies of FWB and Refraction

One of the community’s most recent projects is List3n, an FWB-adjacent DAO focused on supporting emerging artists in the web3 music space. List3n, the brainchild of Canadian musician Tyler Bancroft, has been described as “an opportunity to signal FWB's commitment to nurturing talent and our belief in web3 as a tool which can be used to build a more equitable music industry.”

Bancroft saw an opportunity to experiment with government-like funding structures, taking inspiration from Canada’s famously generous arts contributions. Perhaps, he thought, we can supplement them with localized, cooperative music communities that bypass the red tape of governments and lay bare the inefficiencies of centralized, extractive social platforms. The core idea was simple: empower a web3 community to give unconditional grant funds to artists.

---

Bancroft was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s been steeped in music since high school. “When I was 16, I took out a loan from the Business Development Bank of Canada for $3,000 to make my high school punk band's first record and start a record label – that was my ‘business’ for the application,” he told me recently. “So they loaned me this $3,000 and at the time it was like, ‘yeah, cool, let's do it – we're gonna make all the money back.’ And then we didn't make all the money back.” 

The band ended up getting bailed out by the drummer’s dad, who worked in advertising and secured them a sync license that, in Bancroft’s words, they “absolutely did not deserve to get.”

“So we paid back the whole lump sum, but at the time it was a little bit frightening to have this $3,000 debt looming over me,” he said. “I started thinking about what kinds of cool things young people could do with a chunk of change, so we established this grant and gave out several rounds to young artists in Canada and beyond. It was one of the most fulfilling things that I had ever done.”

For the past 16 years, Bancroft’s music career has mostly revolved around his band, Said the Whale, a Juno Award-winning indie rock outfit that’s also benefited from government-funded grants programs.

“I would often meet artists from the U.S. or abroad and I'd say, ‘oh yeah, the Canadian government paid for like 75 percent of our record’ and they’re like ‘what the fuck? That's insane,’” Bancroft said. “Meanwhile they're working three jobs and sleeping on couches and we just, you know, got a check and made a record.”

The mandate for Canada’s grant system, according to Bancroft, is to empower artists to “transcend little old Canada” and reach an international stage that in turn brings revenue back to the Canadian music industry. When he discovered web3, he saw a way to combine that general economic structure with a grant-like sense of community fulfillment.

“The experiment with List3n is: can you replace the government body with a cooperative group of people who have each put a very small amount of their money into a token – which then funds these artists and, in theory, would bring value back to those people who have made those decisions.”

Bancroft first found web3 when Canadian blogs Before the Data and Hillydilly started posting music from the record label Dreams Never Die.

“I started paying attention to Dreams Never Die. They're like ‘we have a Discord’ so I hopped in the Discord. And I remember like two days after I hopped in the Discord, [they said] ‘we're having a town hall meeting to discuss how our record label’s turning into a DAO.’” What on earth is a DAO? he thought. “So I joined the town hall, got my first POAP (proof of attendance protocol), set up a Metamask…my mind was expanding in real time.“

Bancroft found his way to FWB soon after that, and after a year in the DAO, he realized the community might be interested in putting its name on List3n, so he shipped a proposal and it passed with about 70 percent of the vote, officially earmarking four ETH (about $6,084 as of this writing) for the project. After seeing the proposal, the NFT marketplace and protocol Zora pitched in another 4 ETH, and Bancroft invested 4 ETH of his own.

Here’s how List3n works: around mid-April, the community will mint and sell 444 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) whose owners will comprise a DAO. NFT holders are granted access to the backend of a custom-built website, where they can listen to artist-submitted songs. If they like what they hear, they can give the song a heart, and at the end of a two-week voting period, the artist who made the song with the most hearts gets one ETH – no strings attached.

At the same time, the community will have a budget to acquire music NFTs that buttress the DAO’s treasury. And Bancroft is playing around with other on-chain mechanics, too, like airdropping supporters a commemorative token that serves as evidence of their backing. If that artist ever takes off, that token could increase in value, and for the artist, it’s a signal of fandom around which they can cultivate community – it’s a win-win example of the mutual benefit communities can build in DAO-like environments.

“I think the whole idea is really, honestly, an experiment,” he said. And if the project succeeds, he sees myriad ways it could evolve – from turning it into a record label to creating additional funding routes that support more musicians to SXSW-like showcases featuring only List3n artists. 

Odds are it will unfurl in yet unimagined ways – that tends to be how collaborative music experiments function (look no further than Songcamp’s Chaos and Elektra projects). And like Songcamp, List3n evokes the concept of “scenius” – a term Brian Eno devised as a companion to “genius.” Where genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community. It’s an awareness that each genius we individualize and celebrate is, in actuality, a representative of an entire flourishing scene. 

In voicing his support for universal basic income, Eno lamented our tendency to lionize individuals and waste cooperative intelligence. In working against that mentality, the composer claims to advise students not to get jobs – not to avoid work, but to “try to leave yourself in a position where you do the things you want to do with your time,” he said. 

Web3 embraces that mindset, where passion can speak louder than necessity and people gather organically around shared interests. The notion advances from work we have to do to work we want to do. But for that same reason, web3 is very much a space of privilege, and for now, most people can only participate with this culture if they have the luxury to look beyond necessity.

“Most people aren’t in a position to do [the things you want with your time], so I want to do everything to work toward a future where everyone is in a position to do that,” Eno says. [Universal basic income] is the closest thing I’ve heard to achieving the future I would like to live in.”

Eno may be an NFT hater, but he’s a web3 champion at heart. Projects like List3n have the potential to be scenius bridges toward that future he – and I think most people reading this – want to live in. Where people can spend their time on this earth cultivating skills and relationships they care about. No algorithms, no politics – just a belief that all people should be able to make music if they want to.