If record labels take all the money and you don’t even own your music, it’s time to check out what DAOs and NFT drops can offer musicians

When Reo Cragun's grandmother died, he was in his sophomore year at Washington State University. He’d been given a full ride, and he was working toward becoming a doctor. No one from his family had ever graduated from college. The only problem: he hated it.

His grandmother’s death spurred an existential crisis. “Life is short,” he told me recently. “[Her passing] was my wake up call.” 

She had always encouraged him to make music, so he dropped out of school and went all in. Fast forward a few years and Cragun – who describes his music as a “bob and weave between electronic and hip hop” – has toured the world, opening for megastars like Lil Yachty and Billie Eilish. He’s collaborated and toured with Flume and sung on Grammy-nominated albums. Now he’s bringing his voice to web3, championing the blockchain’s ability to reframe ownership and build community.

Earlier this year, he crowdfunded 20 ETH for LNRZ decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a creative incubator that onboards artists into web3 and plays an important curatorial role in the space. He also sits on the board of the Music NFT Launchpad, a cohort-based onboarding community started by Cooper Turley – whom Cragun endearingly called the space’s Messiah. 

And the artist recently partnered with Sound.xyz to launch their new Sound Protocol alongside his latest EP, Frameworks, showcasing the new permissionlessness that’s attempting to make music more accessible and equitable.

Born in Vancouver, Washington, Cragun had been making music as a hobby for a few years, but nothing serious, when his grandmother passed away. “I had two songs and they were not good,” he said with a laugh.

So he started practicing and recording. “After I had three or four songs, I thought, well I gotta go to Los Angeles – that’s the only option. After I go there, I'm gonna make it big, right?” he said. “And I went and I fell flat on my face, like I lost all my money within the first month of being out there. I hit rock bottom and I was fucking scared.”

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It wasn’t all bad, though. Cragun made some close friends in LA, like pro basketball player Jeremy Tyler and his future creative director, Mark Urbina. “I ended up sleeping on both of their couches,” he said, “and I made a lot of music.”

The artist got his first deal with the independent record label 10K Projects and his brand took off from there. Within a few days of dropping his first single, he’d earned a Spotify Global Hit and was listed in the US Viral Top 50. Tours with Lil Yachty and Eilish followed, as did a bigger deal with Virgin Records.

“I was like, holy shit. All right, cool. I guess this is gonna work out,” he said. “And it really did – it changed my life.”

As time went on, though, Cragun’s eyes were opened to the realities of the industry. He realized his creative projects weren’t always his to control, and the more he looked under the hood, the greater the misalignment he saw between his own creative narrative and the one fashioned by his label. 

“I realized, holy shit, I don't own any of my music. None of us do. What the hell's going on out here?” he said. “I realized how much money they were spending in the most ridiculous areas. I was just like, oh shit, I need to get outta this deal cause I'll never make a penny.” So he did.

LNRZ DAO with kickin graphics

Not long after, Cragun met future bass artist Harley Streten, better known as Flume. They made music together and then went on a world tour, but then Covid hit. “I've been touring for the last three years – what am I gonna do with my life right now?” he wondered. “That's when crypto and web3 music grabbed my complete attention.” 

After buying and hodling some tokens and exploring profile pic projects, he started to see how the blockchain could be applied to music. In a web2 world colored by streaming platforms without native social tools and Instagrams with black-box algorithms, it’s exceedingly difficult to connect with fans; web3 was offering a more intimate arrangement.

“It was a completely different experience. It’s no longer top-down distribution – it’s more center outward, where I have this song and I can decide I'm gonna drop it tomorrow, which is way more humanizing, and what I prefer because I'm a personable person. In traditional platforms, I’m more of this mysterious figure because it's like, well, how the fuck do I talk to everyone?”

Cragun started diving deeper, meeting some of the space’s early adopters like Turley and Sound.xyz co-founder David Greenstein. “We all had early conversations about music NFTs and whatnot, but Sound didn't even exist at this point,” he said. “I ended up doing a whole bunch of the user interviews for Sound, and then we all went live.”

Sound.xyz emerged last year to address two foundational inequities in the streaming economy: 90% of streams go to 1% of artists and very little value is realized by the artists themselves. Streaming’s subscription-based, one-size fits all pricing model fails to accommodate the myriad of different kinds of music listening and connection.

Sound’s solution uses music NFTs to connect artists directly to collectors (i.e. fans) in different ways. Conceptually, fans purchase a limited edition of an NFT and 95 percent of the primary sales revenue goes directly to the artist – with the platform taking a 5 percent fee to fund continued development. Artists maintain 100 percent ownership of their music – which is uncommon in traditional label contracts – as well as full creative control, both of which were key motivators for Cragun’s interest in web3.

In September, Cragun partnered with Sound to release the Sound Protocol in tandem with his new album, Frameworks, in a sign of a new dimension of accessibility for the platform. Prior to that, Sound had relied on permission-gating, curating the artists who could release music on their platform. 

They’ll still rely on curation to limit releases on the Sound Application, but the Sound Protocol has been decoupled from the application, resulting in a fully permissionless base layer that anyone can use. It’s also modular and composable, with additional features that include decentralized metadata and other ways to personalize a release.

“[Before when] you wanted to do something at a higher level, you needed to figure out how to hire a dev, or you better be good friends with somebody that’s willing to take an equity split and take a bet on you,” Cragun said. “With Sound Protocol, you don't need that.”

With a group of collaborators, Cragun created five songs across four cities and released them as Frameworks. He wanted the ability to customize the drop with as little friction (e.g. technical complexity, high gas costs, etc.) as possible. Sound Protocol – in tandem with Bonfire.xyz, which allowed Cragun to create his on-chain hub where he could mint the NFTs – provided him that solution.

These tools are part of a larger movement toward meeting artists where they are. “There's so much talent out there and they see what's going on, but they have no idea where to start,” Cragun said. “It can be overwhelming, which is why I think we need to simplify things and just make the process much easier.”

The less friction, the more people will show up, and that’s been reflected in adoption rates. “There were only a couple hundred active wallets trading music NFT at this time last year,” Cragun said. “And now there's like 6,000.”

That’s encouraging, but just how significant is that growth? As Austin Hurwitz points out in his popular One Big Idea newsletter, Sound’s total volume would make it just a top 600 project on OpenSea – the world’s largest NFT marketplace. “Outside my echo chamber, most of my peers don’t ‘get’ Music NFTs,” he writes. “A common refrain is, ‘I understand why this is good for artists, but how is this a better consumer experience?’”

Read more: Unchained Shows How Web3 Can Cut Out Intermediaries Like Music Distributors

“I think it's gonna take a few acts to be massively successful,” said Cragun. He suggested that some combination of major label distribution and successful “grassroots artists who started at the very fucking bottom” could be a winning formula.

He also sees curatorial communities like LNRZ – which supports newly onboarded artists by facilitating weekly releases on Sound that have been “selling out in two seconds” – and “easily digestible curriculums” from projects like the Music NFT Launchpad as integral components to helping bring artists into the space. 

“But also, on the other hand, getting off of the Internet and fucking doing some cool shit,” he said. “I wanna throw 200-person live shows where it's not like the standard crypto event where you go and you’re fucking networking, shaking hands and da da da da. I think it's important that you turn this into a live show experience and you can't network because the music's so loud and people are raging in front of you.”

It’s telling that music’s success in crypto hinges on becoming decidedly less “crypto,” which – alongside less friction and a better music consumer experience – will rely on more genre and people diversity. It will mean being particularly intentional about inclusion, and instilling a deep sense of belonging and trust in artists, who are accustomed to getting hosed by the industry. 

We can’t get so bogged down in the mechanics – promising as they may be – that we forget to look beyond the Frameworks – that space where people rage and sing, where culture brews and nothing else matters because the music’s just so loud.