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.

Prescience, Presence

Last week, the world lost Ryuichi Sakamoto, a singular composer who won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes. He was also famously exploratory – unafraid to both speak against legacy paradigms and experiment with new technologies. His explorations included non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which “may have represented to Sakamoto the fruition of a dream he has harbored since the 1980s when the proliferation of CDs promised to usher in an era of digitization that would enable all artists to manage their own copyright, distribution, traceability, and finances in a more direct and fair way.” 

Sakamoto was keenly aware of the ways in which new technologies could affect coordination surrounding music and since 1998 he’s been regularly thinking about the Internet’s effect on human behavior. 

“In the old days people shared music, they didn't care who made it; a song would be owned by a village and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever,” he said in a 2009 feature in The Guardian. “That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now with the Internet we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.”

Web3’s potential to empower micro-community is one of its greatest appeals. In a recent edition of his Where Music’s Going newsletter, Rob Abelow broached the same topic, comparing vanity metrics (e.g. who’s got the biggest follower counts) to relationship intensity, ultimately developing a rubric for measuring fandom that carries more gravity than a single number. In three short phrases, he summed up a pithy formula:

“Turn listeners into fans.

Fans into super-fans.

Create a tribe.”

“It sounds obvious,” he writes, “but I'm surprised how few seem to prioritize this path.”

Sakamoto was probably surprised, too.

Real human value

Abelow created a calculator that measures new fan metrics – Fan Lifetime Value and Total Fan Value – to help artists transcend the superficial stats and build for deeper connection. Over the next couple years, as artists observe the ways in which web3 can enable more intimate and fluid relationships, I think we’ll see a lot more of this.

In that vein, Music X co-editor Maarten Walraven and Jamie Reddington – who plays music under the moniker Sound of Fractures – revealed details about their new scene-building project Wild Awake, which will facilitate releases for a small cohort of electronic artists and use them to coordinate community (they also just announced their first drop with British artist, C O N T X T). The concept is akin to the excellent metalabel approach that, hopefully, continues to build precedent for a more collective future for creative communities.

Perhaps one reason we’re not already seeing more of this is crypto’s macro focus on building infrastructure. Patrick Rivera recently resurrected a piece from 2018 called “The Myth of the Infrastructure Phase,” written by Dani Grant and Nick Grossman, which traces a cyclical Internet history back to email and messaging in the early 70s. Every step of the way, the apps go first, subsequently informing the type of infrastructure needed to support those apps. “We need way more teams building at the consumer layer to help inform what infrastructure needs to be built and actually have people use it,” Rivera wrote.

Similarly, the token accelerator Seed Club – which just launched their new Seed Club Ventures program – penned a blog post that suggests we’ve arrived at a developmental phase where the most value will come from apps. “Infrastructure is not the safe haven you might think it is,” they write. “Not only is that not what we most need right now, we don’t think it’s where the majority of value in crypto is going to be created going forward.

“Crypto is fundamentally a consumer technology,” they continue. “Value flows to the social layers in this world, not the technological ones.”

Indeed, human behavior tends to dictate the technological structures we build – rarely does it work the other way around. We may do well to approach this world as gardeners rather than architects. 

Digging in the mud

Speaking of that social layer, Water & Music recently launched a – as expected – spectacular study on the psychology of the music non-fungible token (NFT) collector. The music research decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) interviewed 18 collectors and four industry subject-matter experts that spanned both the web3 curious and the web3 native.

One heartening finding was the primary incentives for purchasing music NFTs: the music, the artists’ stories and early proof of fandom. The feel-good vibes of supporting an artist appeared as a motivator, too, and return on investment (ROI) was reportedly less a factor than one might have thought. All positive findings.

“On-chain ownership of the music is of more value to [the collectors], as it represents proof of their identity as a fan and allows them to stay connected to the artist’s community.” 

This is the connection we can build around.

Elsewhere

There were some milestones hit by some of the folks facilitating this new on-chain music world. Music NFT platform Sound.xyz crossed the $5M threshold for artist payments, and fellow NFT platform Catalog launched splits enabling easier value allocation across contributors. Lens – whose protocol is empowering the kind of app building Rivera and Seed Club are seeking – is seeing an uptick in music NFTs. And the FWB-adjacent DAO List3n – the brainchild of Canadian musician Tyler Bancroft – officially launched, selling 178 (as of this writing) membership passes for a project focused on supporting emerging web3 artists through unconditional grant funds (disclaimer: I own one of these passes).

All of this is heartening indeed. There are plenty of points of friction that remain, like misaligned expectations and knowledge gaps in web3 literacy – not to mention the interminable tension between permissionless on-chain music and legacy IP structures (more on this soon), but it’s progress. Let’s keep digging.

Coda

First things first – diversity remains a big issue, across music and web3 (and the world at large). A new report called Fix the Mix tracked – among other things – the top 10 songs streamed across major streaming platforms in 2022. In total there were 36 distinct songs and 256 credits. The results are egregious:

And in web3, a report by Boston Consulting Group found that only seven percent of founders are women. There’s work to be done. 

So go listen to music that features women and non-binary folks. Here are a couple songs to kick it off, one by Beverly Glenn-Copeland that I never tire of, and a new discovery (courtesy of the web3 label Dreams Never Die) by Lola Young.