Cooper Turley: the Art of Curation, Acts of Redemption and ‘Just Trying to Create a Cool Group Chat’
Cooper Turley helped pioneer social web3 as a co-founder of Friends With Benefits, but faced backlash after tweets he sent a decade ago surfaced. His path to redemption began with Music NFT Launchpad and we check in on his progress.
above: Cooper Turley
Cooper Turley – who often operates under his digital moniker, coopahtroopa – has emerged as an eminent curator of music and web3. He was an early advisor for the formative web3 streaming platform Audius and a co-founder of Friends with Benefits (FWB) – the seminal culture decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). FWB created headlines after raising $10 million in a round led by eminent venture capital firm a16z. He was also a partner at Variant, one of the premier funds investing in early-stage web3 projects, and he’s personally invested in many of the most promising organizations in the ecosystem
Not a musician himself, Turley’s curiosity and enterprising zeal have nonetheless embedded his name within the fabric of the music-web3 zeitgeist. The 27-year-old is an embodiment of his precocious generation of digital natives, unafraid of taking the helm and guiding culture to a more fluid and equitable future. But it hasn’t all been a cakewalk. Bigoted tweets he posted as a teenager resurfaced earlier this year, damaging the trust he’s spent the past five years cultivating in various web3 communities. He’s still dealing with the repercussions.
Through the good and the bad, curators like Turley play an important role in our culture. As we attempt to drink from a relentless faucet of digital noise, they seek to distill quality from the tap, ensuring we don’t have to do so much sifting: our crate diggers, tastemakers, angel investors, film pundits, gallery builders. Expertise and success sew trust, which we exchange for a lens into the cultural pith. Today, as we try to make sense of this very new web3 world, the responsibilities of the curator are especially consequential.
Turley grew up outside of Philadelphia, collecting Pokemon cards, playing basketball, and developing an ear for electronic music. Festival-going guided him to Colorado, where he studied accounting at the University of Colorado, Boulder before transferring to the University of Colorado, Denver in 2016 to focus on music business.
While in Denver, he started writing about music, covering shows and conducting artist interviews for blogs. He managed a few artists and took odd jobs as he searched for his home within the music world.
A professor in his program introduced him to smart contracts as a viable solution for faster royalty payments, which currently rely on systems that can lack transparency and global interoperability.
“I had been residually aware of crypto through some friends, but it wasn't until that moment that it just really clicked for me,” Turley told me recently. “This makes perfect sense. If I stream your song, you should get paid in real time.”
Over the next couple years, he explored both music and crypto, pursuing the former in passion projects and the latter to pay the bills. “I was a community manager. I was doing all these ICOs [initial coin offerings]. I was picking up different contracts to write white papers. I was going to developer conferences and trying to find different paid work opportunities,” he said.
“I kind of took that early curation role that I was playing in music and applied that to web3,” he said. “I started being active as a defi journalist and as an on-chain governance participant. I started trading public markets and learning the day-to-day mentality of, frankly, trading shit coins and how to make a living off of crypto.”
Two years ago, Turley moved to Los Angeles while Audius was in the process of launching its governance token. He advised them with both his crypto know-how and his experience with token launches. From there he pushed further into the token space, helping friends and artists like RAC manage their personal tokens. Turley’s reputation grew, leading to a meeting in September 2020 with Trevor McFedries, a DJ, producer, and director for artists like Katy Perry, Steve Aoki, and Azealia Banks. He’s also the cofounder of Brud and an early Spotify employee.
The contours of FWB emerged from their rendezvous. “I think the great thing about why FWB worked is that me and Trevor were so well connected in the various areas of our life,” Turley said. “Trevor was really plugged in here in LA – he had a very deep entertainment network and I had been working in web3 for a long time.”
Turley and McFedries started handing out FWB tokens for free to “anyone and everyone,” pulling them into a conversation space on Discord. “I honestly don't think that the whole – like this is a DAO, this is a decentralized organization – was ever really front and center, frankly. I think we were just trying to create a cool group chat,” Turley said.
“Then it was just a gradual process. One day you woke up and there were 5,000 people in it, and some of the coolest people in crypto knocking down our doors. So, you know, one day at a time.”
And little by little, one travels far. Last May, Turley shared details of his crypto success, explaining how his bullishness through the first crypto winter – “hodling” when the markets crashed in 2018 – helped him become a millionaire. For Mother’s Day he paid the mortgage on his parents’ house in Devon, Pennsylvania. He also paid off his student loans. “Five years in crypto and it’s starting to come together,” he tweeted.
Then, earlier this year, racist and homophobic tweets surfaced that Turley had posted between 2011-2014. He tweeted an apology, concluding his message with a promise: “I will prove my intention to create a more inclusive culture not just in words but with actions.”
Responses ranged from damning to supportive, with some providing constructive feedback that left room for transformation:
“Thanks for the statement,” tweeted one person. “I hope you use the coming days to center the folks who were hurt by your old tweets, to listen, and to do the work to make this space better for them.”
“Given your financial position and power, perhaps you could use it to boost POC / LGBTQ projects,” tweeted another. “To show with actions instead of words, like you said.”
“It was the hardest moment in my life,” Turley told me. “I had to step down from FWB. I had to step down from Variant. And I had to step down from dozens of other DAOs…I think it was a really big opportunity for me to learn how to better myself and sort out the role that I played in the community. Frankly it allowed me to really just focus – for lack of a better term – and really zoom in on what I cared about.”
In his time off, Turley honed in on music NFTs. They seemed to be the perfect union of his collector mentality, combining his appreciation for music, his commitment to supporting emerging creators and his knowledge of an emerging ownership economy. He’s spent nearly 75 ETH (approximately $187K as of this writing) on 361 music NFTs on Sound.xyz, giving him the largest collection of anyone on the platform. Could music NFTs also be an avenue toward “center[ing] the folks that were hurt by [his] tweets”?
Turley’s was one of the first names I heard when I started diving into the music and web3 space in 2020. While researching this music NFT piece, his name showed up everywhere. Music NFTs as the industry salve for unlocking untapped value, better connecting communities and redistributing wealth is a narrative that Turley has helped steer with his words and his wallet. I ended up citing him several times in the article, but when thinking about how to frame his work and perspectives in the face of his censure, I must admit I was conflicted.
Cancel culture is a product of a heightened lens into everyone around us. Today you can discover everything about someone in less time than it takes to make coffee. You can record, publish, and promote almost anything in minutes. How many people have we lionized simply because their transgressions were committed behind closed doors?
Read more: Music NFTs Become Latest Battleground Between Capitalists and Creators
Technology has provided us with a torch to bring light to those sealed rooms, which is powerful and important. It’s also given us an enduring ledger on which we can visit and revisit misdeeds. (In a perverse sense, blockchain and cancel culture share this trait.)
In an age when digital paper trails are constantly being compiled into dossiers, who should be allowed to err? What’s a fair punishment for the laconic, misguided, racist and homophobic jottings of a teenager that were discovered a decade after the fact? Is the court of public opinion qualified to carry out the sentence?
The renowned author and social activist bell hooks has reckoned with questions like these: “How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
hooks’ words evoke another tweeted response to Turley’s apology:
“I’m glad you took responsibility. You don’t get a pass tho. I’ll be watching to see the change in you and holding space for your transformation. I encourage it. In the future Please aim to fit in with your highest self and the highest vibes of humanity. *Said with Love 👑🌊”
To heed these beliefs is to acknowledge that we are complex, imperfect beings, impressionable to the good and the bad around us. What matters is if and how we seek redemption after we transgress, and whether or not we do the work to rise to become our highest selves
In August, Turley announced his Music NFT Launchpad, “a cohort of 10 artists brought together to learn about web3 and mint their first Music NFT.” The month-long program is devised to “help people feel more comfortable about taking their first steps in the space,” Turley told me.
According to a Mirror post outlining the program, it would “prioritize underrepresented creators, and was created with no barriers to entry. The Launchpad is a free opportunity designed as a way to prepare creators for success in web3.”
The Launchpad is modeled after Seed Club, a DAO that helps burgeoning communities tokenize. Turley is an early Seed Club contributor and investor who helped launch the $CLUB governance token. The Launchpad’s selection process, Turley told me, involved a committee of benefactors – more than half of whom are people of color – who culled the first cohort from more than 200 applicants. Besides prioritizing marginalized creators, candidates were also judged based on the quality of their music – invariably a sticky criterion – and a demonstrable level of consistency in their work, as well as a genuine curiosity in the NFT space.
The selected cohort is diverse and mostly non-white, ranging from people who have never released a song to label artists to independent musicians with close to a million monthly Spotify listeners. The one commonality is that none of them have ever minted a music NFT.
The program’s curriculum covers the fundamentals of NFTs, the music NFT landscape, practical platform and community-based applications for NFTs, and best practices for distributing them – with the key objective being to mint and sell a first NFT.
“The one thing that I want to highlight is I've come really full circle on this,” Turley said. “I used to think that there was a clear path where every fan of every artist would be collecting music NFTs, but now I'm starting to realize that web3 collectors are very different from the average fan. These collectors are typically a lot more engaged with the artists. They actually care a lot less about an individual song and more just about having exposure to the artists as a whole – the relationships that they have are a lot deeper and more sophisticated.”
Turley is alluding to the 1,000 True Fans theory – the prediction that internet creators can be financially successful with fewer fans because online networks enable more focused curation. Just get your top thousand fans to pay you $100 per year and you’ve got an enviable salary – that’s the aspirational vision that’s guided the creator economy and platforms like Patreon and Twitch. Through its “more sophisticated” on-chain mechanisms for building value and connection, web3 offers means to improve upon the centralized services that web2 creator platforms are providing.
“The mental shift here in web3 is that it's not about getting a million listeners – it's about getting a hundred collectors,” Turley said. “And I think that scaling is not necessarily trying to get a million collectors. It's actually creating better systems around how to engage those smaller pockets of collectors – that they can go further for your brand.
Over the past decade, “API-ification” – as writer and technologist Toby Shorin called it during his talk at FWB's inaugural in-person festival – has happened across the entire supply chain, giving anyone with internet access the tools to create a brand in minutes. Music NFTs – which can be minted quickly using open-source smart contracts and then displayed on any number of NFT marketplaces – extrapolates upon that trend, layering ownership capabilities into the traditional creator stack.
The distance between zero and one is smaller than ever, which means more people have access to branding creative means and generating potential success. With greater access, though, saturation inevitably sets in, undermining discovery – a problem on overt display in the web2 streaming industry, where 90% of albums are getting just 1 percent of the total streams and 20 percent of tracks have never been streamed at all. The role of the curator has become more important than ever.
On September 8, Turley announced he was starting a new $10M fund called Coop Records, “a hybrid between a venture fund, a record label, and an incubator.”
“What if you could be an early investor in Spotify,” Turley tweeted. “Universal Music Group or Roc Nation? Drake, Post Malone or Illenium?” he continued. “Web3 gives us that opportunity - and that’s why I’m starting [Coop Records].
A week after the launch, Coop Records announced its first investment. The new fund co-led a $1.1M round in Relics.xyz, a music and metaverse platform powered by NFTs and incubated through the indie label Monstercat.
I asked Turley if the fund would follow in the Launchpad’s footsteps and prioritize marginalized builders. “Launchpad has more [of] a focus on underrepresented creators,” he said, “but it's something we are looking for at the fund.”
Last week I joined a Twitter Spaces that recapped the Launchpad experience. Turley moderated and made space for every participant to introduce themselves and reflect on their journeys. Generally, the cohort riffed on themes of empowerment and gratitude, excited by the increased agency that web3 affords.
“I’m really thankful for this launchpad because it made me realize I can do it,” said one artist. Many expressed particular appreciation to Turley for his guidance and for creating a generative, constructive space – sentiments he reciprocated by acknowledging each artist’s role in cultivating that space.
The word culture actually comes from the word cultivate. Until the early 18th century, “culture” as a noun didn’t exist – it was a verb attributed to cultivating the land and encouraging natural growth. In time it came to reference the cultivation “of the social conditions for a healthy society,” as Toby Shorin wrote in the essay that emerged from his FWB Fest talk.
How much does our understanding of “culture” change when we reconsider the word as a verb – a dynamic process perpetually in flux? How does it reframe the idea of “cancel culture”? The word “cancel” has a foreboding sense of finality. One of cancel culture’s damaging features is its tendency to focus on punitive measures for the offender rather than the reparations owed to the offended communities. But what if it were reimagined as an opportunity for collective transformation?
“Accountability could be a more restorative justice approach as opposed to an approach of canceling engaging…we have to give people the grace to make mistakes,” said the scholar, author, and MacArthur Fellow Ibram X. Kendi in a recent interview. “We have to…really distinguish between those people who made a mistake and are trying to heal the damage that they brought and those people who are refusing to acknowledge those mistakes.”
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation,” wrote bell hooks in her seminal book, All About Love. “Healing is an act of communion.”
As a torchbearer and curator, Turley has a greater responsibility than most to treat this budding space with care. Projects like the Music NFT Launchpad are an act of communion, a step toward rebuilding lost trust. And they’re a manifestation of Turley’s intention to create a more inclusive culture – a motivation that hopefully continues to imbue his projects, from Coop Records and beyond.