Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s bi-monthly breakdown of the music-web3 byway. 

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – on the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Protect your voice

By now AI Drake feels like old hat. As you may know, an anonymous artist called Ghostwriter recently uploaded a song with AI vocals that mimic the voices of Drake and The Weeknd. Both artists release music through Universal Music Group (and its Republic Records), who promptly demanded the music be taken down from streaming services.

“Platforms have a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists,” Universal responded. Harm is the wrinkle in that statement. 

In response to the incident, Rob Abelow recalled Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, an impressive mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album. EMI, The Beatles’ label, took it down, but its suppression made it more popular (a phenomenon, Abelow notes, known as the Streisand Effect). The Grey Album resulted in elevating Danger Mouse to new heights and opportunities as he went on to win six Grammys and collaborate with A-listers like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, MF Doom, Cee Lo Green, Gorillaz… the list goes on. Hard to call that harm.

In a subsequent piece, Abelow suggested that licensing your voice might be a good approach for artists to pursue. It’s a means of protection, because whether we like it or not, AI isn’t going away and its development isn’t slowing down. Abelow referenced a framework created by Holly Herndon, the forward-thinking artist who built her custom Holly+ voice model and decentralized it, licensing its use to her Holly+ community in exchange for revenue shares in any works that used her voice.

“There is more opportunity in exploring this technology than trying to shut it down,” Herndon told the New York Times. “As an artist I am interested in what it means for someone to be me, with my permission, and maybe even be better at being me in different ways. The creative possibilities there are fascinating and will change art forever.”

The artist Grimes made headlines for embracing a similar rationale. “I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice,” she Tweeted. “Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with.  Feel free to use my voice without penalty.  I have no label and no legal bindings.”

So what’s the lesson here for artists? Ostensibly, the arrival of AI means the amount of music released into the world is going to increase by an order of magnitude, and in our current streaming paradigm of attention-at-all-costs, more music means less chances of being heard. So should artists resort to attention-grabbing tactics like Ghostwriter or Danger Mouse to showcase their skill? Make music with Grimes’s voice? Launch their own APIs? What is the correct balance of ethics, art and business? 

How’s web3 fit in?

Unsurprisingly, someone – and probably not Ghostwriter – minted a copy of the AI Drake song on the blockchain, which makes takedowns markedly more difficult. The battle between on-chain art and traditional copyright continues to brew.

But there are healthier use cases for the blockchain, too. Amidst the replicas and copycats, the blockchain serves as an opportunity to verify authenticity, which in a world of noise, will be valued at a premium.  

“I have this weird sense that NFTs are really about digital identity and lowering the cost of being able to coordinate your fan-base across the web,” said Butter founder Vaughn McKenzie-Landel during a web3 panel at Music Ally’s NEXT event in London. And in that way, “web3 has a massive counterbalancing effect on AI.” 

Still, that doesn’t mean artists can mint their canon and then stand idle. “Artists won’t be able to rest on their laurels – they’ll have to move into a world of flow, like building community,” he said, referring to AI’s evolving capability of replicating art. “It isn’t static – artists are going to have to do more things and be more active. To combat [this reality], web3 gives you more opportunity to capture more nuanced value.”

That nuanced value is still tough to define – it certainly has to do with stories and context and community, but the contours of this world are just coming into focus. It’s the elevation of those qualities that yield what the web3 folk at NEXT referred to – endearingly – as weirdness. Protecting that essence was a key topic, and the event took place around the same time another prominent web3 music community lost theirs.

Dreams Sometimes Die

Recently I profiled the web3 label Dreams Never Die. The piece was published shortly after the team minted and sold 1,000 founder passes in under 24 hours (I purchased one, and have since returned it). The future seemed bright, and I was excited about a community that was actually prioritizing music discovery, a seemingly lost art in the age of the algorithm. 

But suddenly, one of the co-founders resigned and many from the rest of the core team were let go without warning. During a subsequent town hall, in a meeting meant to assuage concerns, the situation worsened. Tempers and egos flared, and misogynistic language was used toward a female member of the web3 music community. 

The outburst came just after the remaining team attempted to explain the changes in the organization’s vision, expressed in a way that lacked the essence of what makes web3 not web2. It was heartening, though, to see the community pushback so vehemently, because we’re not building a tokenized financial system for the existing paradigm. Many seem to think that’s all on-chain music is, but this is new territory, and weird should come with it.

Elsewhere

Some exciting things! The music NFT platform Sound will soon be opening its doors to the masses. Active community member Jason Meinzer patented a process that allows anyone to “stake capital into a music artist that gives them a new way to raise it by sharing success with you.” The Gitcoin Grants Beta Round is live, and the socially scalable, credibly neutral music indexer neume is partaking (their page is here, and if you’ve never gotten a Gitcoin passport, here’s a good how-to). 

Onwards.

Coda

First, I’d be remiss not to share that Lucian Grange, Universal Music Group’s CEO that has been making headlines for wanting to shake up a streaming model that isn’t working, had his contract extended through 2028. The terms: $5 million salary, an annual bonus with a target of $10 million and a “one-time transition equity award of $100 million.” 

I’m mentioning this because it feels unimaginable to call yourself an advocate for more equitable artist terms while accepting that much money. Grange is not the only one, of course – Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s “serious bid” to take over Arsenal in the Premier League is even more egregious. Still, it’s the latest indication of a toxic, loathsome reality that should be viewed as an affront to musicians everywhere.

Moving on, in memorial, we lost two greats these past couple weeks: Ahmad Jamal and Harry Belafonte. The former had a singular style, heard in dozens of records that span an incredible seven decades. And the latter was “an agent of change,” and no less than “the musical voice of civil rights.”

So go listen to these guys – here are a couple to get you started.