As a kid my world was small. I grew up in a rural, 600-person town in Minnesota best known for having a roller-skating rink that burned down. There, youthful dreams were often cast toward something bigger – usually without knowing what that something bigger was. For me it was music that filled that space: local radio stations, my parents’ dusty vinyl collections, album liner notes from the CD section at the local library – trappings of music’s stories, rife with exotic places and other bits of magic. They gave contours to my own dreams.

Back then I spent all my pocket money on CDs, and I can trace much of my listening habits today back to moments of my childhood. I remember one, around 2005, when I bought System of a Down’s Toxicity on a whim – sight unseen, sound unheard. It was heavy and dark, but catchy and dripping with social commentary. I remember the feeling of not knowing how to process what I was hearing – System guitarist and vocalist Daron Malakian’s apt assessment was that they sounded like “Slayer and the Beatles had a baby.” Whatever it was, it was new, it knocked me on my ass and it was great.

System of a Down led me to nu metal – Deftones, Tool, Nine Inch Nails – which led me to a King Crimson brand of progressive rock, whose longform development and assiduous technical detail led me to minimalism. From there it was an easy jump to experimental music, which ultimately became my beat at Vice. In retrospect, my way was heavily routed by this Armenian-American band – even though back then I couldn’t have pointed to Armenia on a map. Still, System helped make me, and it made my world bigger.

Through this lens I encountered the Nvak Collective, a “next generation record label and artist advocacy collective that fully embraces web3 to drive change for creators.” Nvak was started by Tamar Kaprelian, an Armenian-American artist and entrepreneur who signed recording contracts at a young age with industry legends Clive Davis and Jimmy Iovine. 

Kaprelian joined forces with singer-songwriter, producer and fellow Armenian-American Alex Salibian (best known for producing Harry Styles’ first album), as well as Tamir Diab, a computer graphics supervisor who helped bring to life Hollywood hits like Avatar and Iron Man. The trio rallied around the mission that “talent is equally distributed, but opportunity isn’t.”

Nvak means music in Armenian, the collective’s Web3 Director Sammy Del Real told me, and it’s a call for using music to better distribute opportunity. Del Real is a first generation American himself, and he shared his own story of musical success as a teenager, and after discovering web3, finding particular resonance in the Nvak philosophy. 

That spirit is resonant with this small town kid, too. Recently, Del Real and I sat down to discuss his journey, and the tailored – and successful – approach Kaprelian and Co. are taking to elevate their small roster of artists from overlooked places.

---

Del Real was born to parents from Barranquilla, a bustling seaport in north-central Colombia. His father was a Latin jazz pianist, and Del Real grew up playing music. In high school, he played drums for a band that eventually signed to Downtown Records – home to acts like Gnarls Barkley, Eagles of Death Metal and The Cranberries.

The drummer graduated from high school a year early and spent a long stint touring. Later he did studio and session work before ultimately taking a break from music to try his hand at real estate. While working for a brokerage in Houston, a colleague introduced him to crypto. 

Del Real understood crypto through the lens of his 10-plus years at Burning Man. “Burning Man is a huge part of my life,” he told me. “That ethos and understanding that literally we can build whatever you want – the sky is the fucking limit. And you get to see the magnitude of what humans can actually do if they are given the opportunity.”

Del Real is the chieftain of one of the only live music theme camps at the festival, which he says has enabled him to better understand one of the crucial components of web3: coordination. “The decentralized manner of how we work in this space and the tools that are being used make you think differently,” he said.  

In 2016, thinking differently led Del Real to start a large-scale solar farm to mine Bitcoin, utilizing only renewable energy. With four partners, he turned the project into a successful business. Subsequently, he became one of the founding members of DoinGud, an organization that enables artists to send money to social impact groups – directly on-chain. And later, with 12 people from the same team, he helped organize ETH Barcelona, the first Ethereum conference in Spain. 

Crypto also led Del Real back to music. In 2021, he minted his first music non-fungible token (NFT) with the Barranquillero artist Vale, and the experiment brought him into community with Nvak, for whom he became an advisor and eventually an investor.

“Let's super-serve humans from these different markets,” Del Real said, remembering how he bought into Nvak’s vision. “Let's create a really interesting way for a record label to do this development, because artist development doesn't happen anymore – due to virality and just wanting to pour gas over fire. That's obviously what makes money, but we can make money by hyper-focusing on what matters, which is artist development. The problem is that it costs a shitload of money.”

Extensive development costs lead many labels to engage in what Del Real called the “pay and spray model” – i.e. allocating funds to more artists than they can meaningfully support, betting that one of them strikes gold so they can recoup their investment. 

Nvak, rebuffing conventional practice, has only three artists on its roster. The focus is on connection and care – creating the conditions for artists to grow. They do one-year contracts and they license – not own – the artists’ masters, offering small upfront advances and then “health care, living expenses and marketing and production budgets,” Del Real said.

“We help make the music as well,” he continued. “Alex [Salibian] produces and writes with all of our artists. And if you look at ‘Snap’ by Rosa Linn, it's co-written and produced by Alex and Tamar [Kaprelian].”

Rosa Linn is an Armenian artist Nvak discovered in 2019 in a small Armenian town called Vanadzor. Since then, Linn has competed in Eurovision, garnered more than a billion streams and performed as the opening act for Ed Sheeran.

Linn is joined by Talia Lahoud – a Lebanese songwriter who has more than 100 million views on TikTok and released the first Arabic song on music NFT platform Sound.xyz – and Annika Rose, an LA-based artist who has emerged as one of on-chain music’s foremost stars. With Nvak, Rose recently launched a blockchain-powered “music video game” for her song, “Bruises.” Together they created an interactive, immersive experience that uses web3 to deepen artist-fan engagement.

Read more: Avenged Sevenfold’s M. Shadows is Asking Big Questions and Using Crypto to Deepen Fan Connection

“We look to web3 as a way to frontload our operation expenses to give the artists much more runway,” Del Real said. “So we've been working with these three artists and developing all this stuff on web3, with Anika first – she was the first artist that we went full on [web3] with.”

Nvak conceived the music video game by marrying music videos with game-play elements, on-chain fan clubs and status. “A lot of times in games, whether it be Zelda or Mario or FIFA, music actually ends up being a huge component,” Del Real said. “But in this case, we're flipping the script where the music itself is actually the game – the experience.” 

Nvak found that people on average spent about 10 minutes – about three times the length of the song – in the game. While they hoped it would also function as a web3 on-boarding ramp, “it did not prove to be a new fan acquisition or onboarding tool,” Del Real told me. That said, despite having no marketing budget for the project, thousands of visitors minted 2,500 “NFTickets” in three days, proving the new vehicle was a viable engagement tool. And as a dynamic piece of media that can evolve over time, the game offers untold connective – and monetizable – opportunities for the future.

“Basically you've tripled the attention that people are giving, which is huge. [The streaming world] has cheapened the experience of music, not the music itself. Obviously the music value is there, but it's become such a passive endeavor,” Del Real said. “Some of the world building that you can take advantage of – especially with web3 – is amazing. Now we're trying to take all that information that we've garnered from the music video game and [determine] what we believe the next generation of consumption will look like. We’re just at the beginning.”

---

With the right tools and intentions, the Internet can localize our interests. We can transcend physical space and mitigate cultural distances, and our worlds can grow. Music can resound from a small town on one side of the world to a small town on the other – and that changes us, sometimes even reroutes our paths. All around the globe, in places exotic and plain, there are people and bits of magic waiting to be found, strung into tales, woven into song, sung into ears. “There's fucking stories to be told,” Del Real told me. “Everybody's got a story – literally every single person.”