In addition to granting life-giving sustenance, water and music also share the quality of being measured in waves. The seminal research community of the same name stands unequaled in its measurement of the music industry’s sundry ebbs and flows.

Last year, Water & Music launched Wavelengths, an event series that brought their digital presence – a robust Discord server, extensive research and analysis, databases and other tools – to the real world. This past weekend, the community hosted their inaugural Wavelengths summit, a one-day conference in Brooklyn that brought together 250 of the brightest minds at the bleeding edge of music and technology. 

Artists, founders and other leaders of the nouveau music industry were tasked with making sense of this wild moment, when web3, artificial intelligence (AI) and other new tech threaten to disrupt an industry driven by the major labels and preserved by an inequitable streaming paradigm. 

The summit was held at an East Williamsburg club on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, an industrial neighborhood that boasts spacious – a rare quality in New York City – warehouses and a bustling nightlife. As club goers trickled into the various nooks of the nightclub Elsewhere, a group of music tech fiends convened in the Chat Room, a plant-filled bar within the club that’s better suited for, well, chatting. 

Over the course of four hours, digital relationships gained physical contours as four community DJs – Rowan, BRUX, Athena Yasaman and Greg Liburd – provided the score. We in turn did laps around the room, priming the mind with lubricants and good conversation before the next day’s early morning summit, where we’d confront tech’s frenetic pace for the hope of a more equitable, community-driven industry. That challenge was best summed up by core Water & Music team member Diana Gremore in a summit-ending mic drop: “We're fucked but maybe we can do something about it.”

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Water & Music founder Cherie Hu began the day with her state of the union address, introducing an interactive agenda where panels – traditional conference fare – were eschewed for roundtables. Central to our experience would be the Q&A and polling app Slido, which enabled the audience to engage with questions in real-time, generating insightful word clouds and a rich speaker-audience dialogue throughout the day.

And what a day it was – blue-skies and 72 degrees. Spring had fully sprung. We were gathered at 99 Scott Studio, a nearly 5,000-square-foot event space that neighbors Elsewhere and features 20-foot ceilings and a perimeter draped in warehouse chic: fading, whitewashed red brick, exposed metal piping and light seeping in through walls of black-paneled windows. 

I found a chair in the middle of the room, aiming for the same approximate spot as my last romp in this space – back in 2019, dancing to Kim Ann Foxman’s trance-tinged house meets propulsive-yet-emotive techno. This go-round I danced less but kept more brain cells – and certainly learned a few things about the systems that support those late night capers.

Up first in the intimate Currents room, Austin Robey of Metalabel, Songcamp’s Mark Redito, Nicole d’Avis, previously at Seed Club, and Kevin Duquette of Topshelf Records, explored decentralized music communities through the lens of history – tracing precedence through the hearts of grassroots movements, co-ops and artist-first independent labels.  

Read more: Keeping On-Chain Music Weird: Highlights from Music Ally's NEXT Event

Kaitlyn Davies, who leads membership at Friends with Benefits and curatorial partnerships at Refraction, moderated the panel. It was the most thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the day (and worthy of a dedicated overview – stay tuned), an intelligent distillation whose goal was to find the ever important through line for effective, authentic community building.

Happening concurrently on the main stage – the laws of spacetime preventing me from being at every session was my only qualm (and a testament to the quality of the curation) – was an exploration of fan-first technologies. Hu shared later in the day that during the session, the audience had named email as the prevailing fan-first technology of choice – a humbling take given that technologists have since spent decades building more “robust” community tools.

Streaming platforms – despite having plenty of opportunity to enrich that nexus between artist and fan – aren’t positioned to be that. Their stranglehold on music was the topic of the next session, alongside the alternative models and artist strategies emerging in their wake. 

“How many years until the streaming model expires?” asked panelist David Turner, Strategy Manager at Soundcloud and author of the popular newsletter, Penny Fractions, riffing on the idea that many of us have succumbed to a case of streaming fatalism. “So much music is streamed, so I’d like to believe something comes after that, but streaming as a form of music consumption is really pervasive. The firms behind them may change shape, but the form itself is strong.”

A beautiful Brooklyn evening at Wavelengths

Today, those firms are strong too. Despite an elusive profitability, they’re able to persist and hold sway, often through smoke and mirrors. “Platforms are tightly controlling the way people discover music and I don’t know if these platforms are going to give up any power,” said music journalist Liz Pelly, who’s been challenging the streaming machine for years. “If you ask most artists, they can’t tell you how much they make from streaming.” 

“Opaque algorithms that benefit artists in imbalanced ways can – as an artist – feel very disempowering,” commented Charlie Kaplan, VP of the streaming service, Audiomack. Via Slido, one artist claimed it accounts for only “2-3 percent of [their] income.” 

And that’s not because that artist’s raking in so much cash that their streaming income appears paltry in comparison. On Spotify, for example, 98.6 percent of artists make just $36 per quarter.  Black-box algorithms and various payola-like schemes – like opting for an even tinier payout rate for increased discovery opportunities – demand a significant mindshare from artists, yet give them almost no way to control their fates.

“It feels like playing the lottery,” Pelly continued, citing the massive wealth disparity that works for only a fraction of those who play this game. Nine out of 10 of albums are getting just one percent of streams – or in other words, 10 percent of albums are capturing 99 percent of the revenue.

“Artists should be able to set the price of their work – putting your music on a platform that allows that will always be more beneficial to the artist,” Pelly said. “I’m a big fan of [Bandcamp]-type models, but how do we reimagine them in ways where the amount of money taken out before reaching the musicians is as small as possible?”

Cutting out the intermediaries is an important pursuit, but could there also be an opportunity to increase the industry’s top-line revenue? “Should the goal be to grow the overall pie rather than move around the chairs on the deck?” Kaplan asked. “I wonder if there’s more value in revenue diversification – in many countries around the world there are socialized support structures. Are we thinking too narrowly about the problem by thinking about how the pie is divided?”

Soundcloud’s Turner said, “we should think about it because it’s the main thing that supports the music industry, but it is too narrow. We’ve strung everything into either streaming or buying mp3s. There’s a greater plethora of options than just winnowing things down – when everything is shrunk down so far, we struggle because people don’t see anything outside of it.”

“This is late stage capitalism in a country that is cutting music programs left and right. It’s finding wins where you can get them and trying not to lose your fucking mind”

— Jeanette Wall

Kaplan agreed. “Resisting the narrowness of streaming is really important,” he said. “How can we broaden the toolkit that we give to artists as opposed to submitting to this unmoveable, black and white way?”

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Broadening that toolkit happens to be one of the calling cards for web3, the focus of the next non-panel on the main stage. “There are different levels to engage your fans in web3. There isn’t one playbook – there are lots of ways to experiment,” said Jeremy Stern, co-founder of music non-fungible token (NFT) platform Catalog. 

“[Web3] gives you means for more autonomy – maybe you don’t have to sign that record deal or give up the rights to your music,” he continued. “It doesn’t make sense in every case, but to have that option is really huge for independent artists.” 

Unlike with streaming, NFTs are infinitely programmable – and importantly, contingent on decentralized blockchains instead of centralized platforms. But not everyone wants to experiment – there’s a high barrier for entry and the value of how that autonomy emerges is non-obvious. “It feels like a labyrinth, a hall of mirrors,” said one of the artists in the audience. “Can you drop a needle for us?”

A healthy critique of web3 followed, rooted in the pitfall of tech-laden jargon. “Consumers don’t care about technology in the slightest,” said Melanie McClain, founder of Blurred Lines. “Abstracting away the technology and the terms is important. Music fans don’t know what [the NFT marketplace] OpenSea is and they don’t need to – start providing what people actually care about and use that language.”

Beyond the tech, there’s a new value set materializing as well. “We don’t want to grow and scale for the sake of growth. We want to grow at the pace that makes sense for us and our artists,” Catalog’s Stern said. “There’s a long history of incumbents who have twisted peoples’ arms so they play ball in the way they want to. We want to work with as many people as we can, but it has to be on the terms of the tech we’re using, and we’re not interested in sacrificing our values for scale.”

But sometimes it’s the tech itself that gets in the way. “Can you in good conscience ask people to mint on Catalog with the price of gas fees” – referring to the currently steep cost of performing a transaction or executing a smart contract on the Ethereum mainnet – “instead of putting the music on Bandcamp?” Davies asked Stern from the audience.

“It’s absolutely an issue,” he responded. “As an industry we aren’t quite ready for mass scale or mass adoption. I think it’s pretty clear that most apps will move to [layer two blockchains] in time, where you’re not being prohibited by gas.”

The question becomes, then, what happens now while we’re caught in the in-between? Prior to the summit, Hu tweeted a thread that depicted a sad state of affairs. Last year NFT trading dropped a whopping 97 percent, and she cited other concerns that indicate “a shift back towards traditional web2 notions of scale as the marker of success, rather than more web3-native values of community-building that drew so many artists in the first place.”

Read more: The Music Industry Is a Slowly Sinking Ship Beset By Complexity. Water & Music Guides Web3 to an Alternative

Some of those indicators are an “oversupply of artists, over-reliance on platforms for exposure and bias towards incumbents with existing resources.” Sound familiar? In the face of these struggles, how – asked moderator Sarah Mackenzie, Creative Director at MUTEK – can we boost morale? 

“It’s not about who sells it first or who sells it for the most, it’s about your own artistic journey,” Stern said, riffing on the malleability of web3. “Success looks different for everyone and it doesn’t need to happen right away.”

“Think about the value that people in your community stand to gain,” said panelist Sam Schoonover, founder of Forward Studio and innovation lead at Coachella. “I think tokens are the glue rather than the end game. The morale should be based on whatever these tokens are trying to serve rather than the token itself.”

It’s an enticing shift, but how do we measure the intensity of a bond if not by the size of the transaction that first welds it together? And if success is customizable, after so many years of an online network fueled by a fairly standard set of “success” metrics, how will artists know how to measure it? 

Those answers are important and remain emergent, in need of more time and more experimentation. But one thing is for sure: “It's really difficult to be an artist, and it’s only become more challenging,” said Hu to kick off the final event, a debate she moderated comparing financing models for emerging artists.

“I think the beauty is there are a lot of different solutions to solve the problem,” said Shav Garg, co-founder and CEO of Indify. “We shouldn’t only have the streaming product that we do — and that’s not going to change in the next 5-10 years. I think there’s a huge potential to monetize loyalty and not just the breadth of an audience like Spotify does.”

Eventually artists have to answer the question, “how comfortable are you putting yourself in proximity to routes to make money?” said Jeanette Wall, U.S. label manager at City Slang. 

Across the spectrum between art and commerce there are sticky existential questions of artistic purity mixed with the pains of reality. “Ultimately all these channels get fucked up by whoever has the most capital,” Wall said. “This is late stage capitalism in a country that is cutting music programs left and right. It’s finding wins where you can get them and trying not to lose your fucking mind.”

Most of the “artist helpers” – as Hu called the folks across the industry who support musicians in some way – are tasked to help navigate that space and determine which artists are most likely to find those wins. An audience member asked how each of the panelists evaluates the risk of investing in an artist.

“How do we evaluate investment risk? If it’s cool, then let’s fucking do it!” answered Songcamp’s Redito, who was also part of the final panel. “Working alongside people who share a belief in a similar world matters. Lead with art and community first. Financial is secondary.”

“Is it good? Is it saying something in a way that needs to be said?” Wall responded. “If I’m a label, sometimes I don’t care about the risk, because sometimes there’s shit that’s too good and we just believe in ‘em. If people don’t get it, then fuck ‘em.” 

“This is a financing conversation but what we’re talking about is culture,” Hu remarked.

And that sums it up, really. Across a day that scanned financial and emerging technologies for solutions, we were always really talking about culture. It’s the reason we can admit we’re fucked and still move forward. As long as we still care about the culture, we’ll try to find a way.

Should we study familiar platforms like TikTok and Spotify until we can find creative ways to exploit them? Should we invest in nascent blockchain tech that isn’t ready for mass adoption – with the knowledge that mass adoption could risk negating those “web3-native values of community-building” – but allows you to build entire, infinitely configurable worlds? Or should we just stick to email?

In all cases people are just trying to connect with other people – and sustain the lifestyle or practice that allows them to deepen that connection. As we seek solutions the key is that “we’re building this together and that’s an important ideological shift,” McClain commented during her panel. “It’s two-sided and that’s really special.”