In March, the English artist James Blake went viral for raging about the grim conditions of the music industry. Streaming doesn’t pay properly! Labels take too big a cut! TikTok sucks! It was welcome fodder from an A-lister. 

Two weeks later, Blake followed his rebuke with an endorsement of a new platform called Vault. The artist promoted Vault as a direct-to-fan solution where fans can subscribe to an artist to access their unreleased music and a private chat. Garnering widespread praise – finally, a big name musician giving more than lip service – Blake also earned just as many naysayers (including myself – there’s a thorny saga of dubious motives buried here). 

Among the latter group was fellow English musician Tom Vek: “The reason that per-artist subscriptions don’t make sense for fans is basic maths,” he wrote in The Guardian. “Multiply the number of artists you really care about by the subscription fees and the costs soon seem unrealistic, resulting in fans investing in one artist at the expense of another.” Content treadmills, paywalls and subscription canceling guilt are all additional reasons, Vek wrote, that the subscription model isn't ideal for musicians. 

To help circumvent these drawbacks, Vek co-founded Supercollector, “a place to create, collect and show off music at a new value.” It’s an on-chain, Bandcamp-esque platform where collectors become “independently verified as a super fan of the music.” It’s also the latest subject of Pariah Carey, my music series that reckons with the woes of self-promotion in a TikTok-colored world.

In my enduring pursuit to find less extractive platforms, I connected with Vek, explored the project’s origins and then tested Supercollector with my own music. Is the platform part of that elusive Elysium where success doesn’t come “at the expense of another?” Should Supercollector become part of every artist’s standard release arsenal? That, dear reader, is what we’re here to find out.

Supercollector

Tom Vek is a self-taught musician from the West London district of Hounslow. As a child, he developed a love for visual art by poring over his father’s vinyl collection. His fascination led him to art school, where he pursued graphic design and made music in his down time. 

While he finished his degree, Vek recorded his debut album, We Have Sound. Tummy Touch Records – a purveyor of dance and downtempo music started by trip hop pioneer Tim ‘Love’ Lee – released the record in 2005. Later, We Have Sound was licensed by the iconic Island Records label, vaulting it into the UK charts. Four tracks charted, and the album itself climbed to number 73. 

Six years later, when Vek released his next LP, he did so amidst a markedly different music industry. Streaming had been crowned king. Visual context had been abstracted. And Vek began exploring ways to recapture the value fostered by physical formats.

His response was Sleevenote, a record-sized iPod-like device that offers “interactive sleeve artwork for your digital music.” 

“I was a big Apple fan,” he told me recently, “but I was conflicted about the iPod because the object represented tech, not an art form.” 

Alongside developer Chris Hipgrave, Vek attempted to crowdfund the project. But hardware limitations – record-sized screen components are non-standard and thus very expensive – meant the device never left the prototype phase. The co-founders then turned to software, exploring a visually rich Sleevenote experience that could pull music from any streaming service. 

Around that time, Vek was also doing design work for Cardioid, a music app that integrated streaming platforms like Spotify with social platforms like Instagram. Cardioid’s founder, C.Y Lee, first introduced Vek to the blockchain. 

Vek saw songs on music non-fungible token (NFT) platforms like Catalog – a recent Pariah Carey experiment – selling for hundreds of dollars. Heartened, he began exploring NFT integration with Sleevenote, and in time, spun off the on-chain portion as a standalone music product. Supercollector was born.

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With Lee as a patron, Vek and Co. designed Supercollector to scrape smart contracts from platforms like Catalog. The idea was to collate data into a user-friendly “live view of what was going on,” Vek said. “We wanted to celebrate the collecting that was happening to try and encourage more people to do it.”

But Catalog and others were still gated platforms, inaccessible to many artists. Price points, too, were unfeasible for many fans, so Vek and Hipgrave turned Supercollector into an on-chain platform of their own.

"We wanted it to be more like Bandcamp," Vek explained. “We quickly put our tagline on ‘a new value for music’ because we could say that we were the only – and still are the only – platform with an enforced minimum [price]."

Supercollector emphasized “entry-level editions” with $10 minimums. In the face of the hundreds of dollars that music NFTs were selling for elsewhere, ten bucks felt like a steal – and a solid value proposition in an expensive on-chain music space. 

Read more: Taking the Nina Protocol’s Music Publishing Service The Hub for a Spin

But then things changed. By the time the platform launched, free editions had taken hold, which prioritized volume over value. A race to the bottom ensued, and the on-chain space began to resemble the streaming ecosystem where streams go for $0.003 a piece. Suddenly, $10 was a premium price point once again.

I asked Vek if he’d considered re-pricing. "We find ourselves in an interesting situation whereby I think our integrity is on the line if we support lower prices," Vek said. "Importantly, with artist-owned contracts we can’t lower the price. All we do is make the pledge to celebrate music being valued." 

"We’d sooner start a new platform at a lower price, so as not to undermine what we’ve established so far,” he continued. “‘Buy a song you love for $10’ gives us a nice simple angle too." 

With this model, Supercollector also mitigates the speculative mechanisms that have thus far reigned supreme in on-chain music. "We are much more of the opinion that scarcity isn’t the main opportunity for a new blockchain-powered music format,” Vek said. “In fact the most exciting thing is the certificate of authenticity element – i.e. you own a legitimate copy." 

It’s simple and resonant. Bandcamp proved that people will purchase songs for a dollar even when they could stream them for (virtually) free, but will collectors pay 10x that price just to become an independently verified ‘supercollector’? Let’s find out.

The Process

I connected to Supercollector through my Metamask (uploaders can also connect via email). Via Supercollector’s simple interface, I uploaded my track “Just Fine,” which is stored on the open data management platform, Interplanetary File System (IPFS). 

Supercollector partnered with Decent – an all-in-one web3 release builder – to build a custom smart contract template that nests tracks within “releases” (e.g. albums), using the standard contract types, ERC-1155. Collectors can nab individual tracks or the entire album, with Supercollector taking a 10 percent cut that’s split evenly with Decent. (For comparison, Bandcamp takes 15 percent.)

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I priced “Just Fine” at the $10 minimum – which is a neat contract feature that allows “real-world” pricing (most NFT platforms still price in crypto). When minting a track, there are also metadata fields and, of course, a visual component. After filling these out and submitting, there was an approval process centered around rights holder verification – i.e. does the minter have rights to mint this song? 

Once approved, I was able to deploy the contract on Optimism, a popular layer-two blockchain that keeps gas costs very low. I spent $0.13 to mint the song and an additional $0.02 to publish to discovery platforms – e.g. aggregators like Ooh La La and Future Tape. (For reference, it cost me $50 to upload “Transom” to Catalog, which still mints on the Ethereum mainnet). 

But unlike Catalog, this isn’t a 1-of-1. By default Supercollector uses unlimited editions – the same way Bandcamp downloads are unlimited. It’s another mechanism that minimizes speculative behavior, as an unlimited edition is naturally less valuable than a limited edition.

An additional perk is that more people can collect to access my Collector Club, a text chat – not unlike James Blake’s Vault – which is available only to “independently verified” fans of my music. Vek says there are plans to allow artists to post more media types in the future, too.

And until then, “Just Fine” will continue to exist on-chain, waiting to be (super)collected.

tl;dr

The ethos is strong and simplicity is helpful. Upload a song for $10 – not 0.0026180889 ETH. Collect it and become “independently verified as a super fan of the music.” And doing so unlocks a more direct relationship between fans and artists – one that can be further deepened with future media.

Traction and switching costs, though, are going to be key. Email-enabled wallets are helpful, but will people migrate from Bandcamp to pay 10x the price on a platform with a much smaller catalog (I was the 65th artist to mint on Supercollector)? Do enough people care about becoming independently verified collectors to do so? And in the on-chain world, do people still value music when the speculative element is withdrawn? 

Another nitpick is that release page- and artist profile-customization rely on the end user knowing CSS (a language for applying styles to webpages). It’s not rocket science, and it ultimately means more aesthetic flexibility (and Vek kindly helped me with mine), but it’s also limiting. And while the homepage is a cool, colorful swathe of releases, there could be a stronger sense of curation – which will be paramount if and when there are more than 65 artists using Supercollector.

Overall, I admire that Supercollector removes the downsides of scarcity models. And it’s cool that fans can still establish tiers of fandom by collecting multiples (though that price point will still be limiting, as most fans will also have to choose whom to support at the expense of another they may love equally). And I love that Vek is steadfastly adhering to this “new value.” "Culture over economics," as he put it to me. I can certainly get behind all of that.

But it’s going to take a sea change. Some critical mass of builders and listeners is going to have to embrace and normalize this new value or people will naturally revert to the Spotifys of the world.

In full awareness of that behemoth of a lift, we need a sea change, and builders should remain steadfast in championing “new value.” So there’s little reason not to experiment in places like Supercollector, because – as I wrote in the Catalog piece: “The more we normalize systems of care, the more pressure we apply to systems that don’t. It feels good to know my music’s first home is in the former.”

Until next time, here’s to you Mariah 🥂

lead image: Tom Vek, photo credit: Kat Green