Steph Guerrero’s Race to Self-Regulate Music NFTs With Legato
Coming from inside the music industry, Steph Guerrero saw first hand how major labels can’t innovate like web3 startups can
Steph Guerrero grew up balancing her love of music and technology, building computers with her entrepreneurial father and doing “a lot, a lot, a lot” of voice training. Though stage anxiety ultimately steered her away from life as a performer, it did nothing to diminish her love for music, and throughout her career, she’s never deviated from its intersection with technology.
Born in Miami to Ecuadorian immigrants, Guerrero spent her high school years building out artist friends’ Myspace pages and helping them understand this wild new world of digital identity. Later, during an internship at Sony Music, she convinced the label they needed a young person like her to teach artists how to use social media because that was the future – they gave her the gig. And as technology continued to evolve, she embraced similar onboarding roles when iTunes, YouTube and Spotify each created their own paradigm shifts in the music industry.
Today, after spending four years in various marketing positions at Universal Music Group, Guerrero’s made the jump to web3. She captains El Drop, a Twitter Spaces dedicated to Latinx artists – a community she’s long championed – and she runs Goat for Mars, a consultancy that helps artists transition into web3. She also operates as the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Legato, a web3 licensing-as-a-service platform for creators.
Conceptually, “legato,” a musical term for notes played smoothly in a connected fashion, seems like the perfect unifying thread for Guerrero’s career. Across all of her work she’s made on-ramps smoother for artists, advocating for more accessibility and transparency everywhere she’s been. Just like the “legato” that serves as a performance marker in music, Guerrero has made sure that the connective technology between people and art is smooth, free of breaks, where things flow unencumbered.
Her work at Legato is more of the same. Essentially, the lean team is facilitating – and building upon – intellectual property copyright registration in web3, helping to smooth tensions between traditional frameworks of ownership and public, permissionless blockchains.
Check out the Legato web site
Earlier this month, they released their first product – robots-txt.xyz – a way to provide default usage licenses for existing and deployed non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It’s a reference to traditional robots txt files, which tell search engine crawlers which URLs they can access on a given site. Legato is doing that in web3, empowering artists with licenses that tell aggregators if and how their NFTs can be displayed.
It works like this: artists select from one of seven Can’t Be Evil licenses drafted by the venture capital firm a16z and use them to embed permissions into their on-chain work, ensuring that whomever is aggregating or displaying their content has the right to do so.
In the future, the organization plans to create embeddable licenses that can be purchased from wherever an artist has their music – from their personal websites to streaming platforms. And because they’re on-chain, ownership can be built into the smart contract and splits can be handled automatically. In all regards, it’s an evolution that enables more transparency and more agency for artists.
Ultimately, Legato’s success will depend on achieving critical mass, and although these licenses serve as a solid foundation, their validity will greatly benefit when buttressed by a more formal legal framework. But that’s also the point. Legato is trying to preempt regulation and create precedent for NFTs – which are notoriously difficult to situate within familiar legal bounds – to allow the community to “self-regulate” before “some major scandal happens.”
Read more: Blockchain Adoption is Real and Happening Now. Tech Giant Broadridge Has the Receipts
We chatted recently about how her journey through various waves of industry change has led us to this moment – and to this opportunity to bring more fluidity to yet another inflection point.
Decential: I’d love to start from the beginning and get a sense of your story, where you're from and when your relationship with music began.
Steph Guerrero: I was born here in Miami and my parents are from South America – they immigrated from Ecuador. My dad has always been an entrepreneur. Early in my life, we actually moved back to South America and that's where I did my elementary school.
At school they discovered that I was able to match pitch at a really young age. And they were like, ‘maybe music is her thing.’ So from then on I just started learning music. I was part of the choir. I dabbled in instruments but for some reason that just wasn't the thing that worked for me. The ukulele is the one instrument I still play.
But I did study vocal performance all the way on through college. A lot, a lot, a lot of voice training. But I have terrible stage anxiety and it was really bad. So I knew that even though I loved music, that was not my role in life. I wanted to be a little bit behind the scenes and support music.
The other passion that I had thanks to my dad is computers and technology. My dad would bring home motherboards and explain what they were. And little by little we started collecting pieces of a computer and then he showed me how to put it together.
I had a computer at a very young age. My parents let me roam free on the Internet at a time where, you know, it was the beginning of the Internet. It was kind of nice and friendly. There were no dangers – I definitely wouldn't be taking the same risk with my children that they did.
But at that time it was fun. I had friends who were grownups in other countries that were just experimenting with video calls. Cause it was like the first time the video calls were a thing. I'm saying this because it's very reminiscent of what's happening in web3, which feels very innocent and happy and that's what I love about it.
I know [web3] is a long-term thing, not a short-term thing. I know that we cannot fight the establishment because the establishment will eventually get to where we are. But working at labels, I realize that they are not innovators. They have access to a lot of catalog and they have a lot of bargaining power, but that's pretty much it.
They're not gonna be nimble and able to experiment as much as independent musicians can. After working at labels for a really long time, I realized my thinking had become very jaded, where I literally would look at an artist and I was like, ‘hmm, not gonna generate new streams,’ or, ‘what collaborations can we realistically get so that we can generate streams?’ And thinking in this optimize-only mindset was depressing. I lost the love for music, so I took some time off.
“I don’t think majors are innovators, unfortunately. That’s the reality.”
D: Thanks so much for that. So how did you come to know that you wanted to jump into web3?
SG: I was working with an artist who I had never heard of. She was assigned to me at Universal, but she was amazing. And her fan base was so passionate. And there was a piece of merch that our Spain counterparts came up with that to me seemed so dumb. And I thought, who is gonna wanna buy this? But it sold out right away and I was just blown away at this. And I thought, what else can we do with this passion? What else can we offer them?
And there were some first rumblings. This was at the end of 2020, like when Shawn Mendes was doing an NFT drop. And I think The Weeknd had done one. So I thought let me find out more about this, and I literally spent the next six months learning as much as possible and realizing that this was the future. It was undeniable for me that it was the future.
When I realized, I started asking questions within [Universal] – like what about if we do this and what about if we do that? And I started seeing some roadblocks – things would get stuck in legal, which I understand because, you know, it's a big company. But you have that for too many weeks in a row and I just couldn't advance as quickly as possible, so that was not the place for me anymore.
D: What do you see the role of the majors over the next couple years as web3 continues to grow?
SG: I don't think majors are innovators, unfortunately. That's the reality. And so I think they're kind of waiting to find the easiest way for them to plug in [before they] move forward. They're just gonna wait for these tools to be built that are easy to integrate into their program.
If it's something that they can plug into their distribution system, that's gonna be the way they're gonna go. I don't foresee them innovating or creating something. I remember when they wanted to create their own MP3 store, and they just failed miserably. So I foresee that they will go to the startup that presents the most feasible and accessible solution and that will take off – a la Spotify.
D: Makes sense, and switching now over to those startups and the web3 ecosystem, how have you found artists and what have been the recurring pain points for onboarding artists into this space?
SG: So at first it was just onboarding artists for the sake of onboarding them. And then I realized I needed to be a lot more selective because any artist that I onboarded instantly wanted to make money instead of spending time in the community.
That's been the biggest pain point: I don't want to bring in people who just want to be in the space for the sake of being in the space. You know, there was one artist who basically told me I will participate in NFTs if I have a $2 million advance.
And I finally told them, ‘I don't think the space is ready for you yet.’ And that's it. I think the culture is the biggest shock that a lot of artists are having. They don't realize that and now that there's a bear market and the FTX thing and all of these scams happening, the general artists are kind of losing interest.
And then there's a few creative artists that are independent and just kind of testing things out. And they're the ones who are raring to go and saying like, ‘let’s do it – let's figure out how we're gonna do this.’ Those are the ones I'm most excited about.