After spending four years in various marketing positions at Universal Music Group, Steph Guerrero made the jump to web3. She captains El Drop, a Twitter Spaces dedicated to Latinx artists – a community she’s long championed – and she runs Goat for Mars, a consultancy that helps artists transition into web3. She also operates as the chief marketing officer of Legato, a web3 licensing-as-a-service platform for creators.

Recently the web3 label Dreams Never Die held a town hall call to address some tumult and a sudden restructure within the community – which was especially unexpected coming on the heels of a successful release of their founders pass, where all 1,000 sold out in less than 24 hours. On the call, some folks largely reduced web3 to being a tokenized financial system for the existing music industry – a facile representation for what has turned into a rich culture and community. When Steph spoke up for that community, she was the recipient of derogatory remarks and treatment.

We dove into this, the complexities of music licensing, the role (or lack thereof) of the major labels in web3, and the rest of Steph’s musical story, eventually landing on hope and gratitude for the sublimely weird on-chain music culture that refuses to let the bullshit seep into this space.