✖ 8 bots for building Discord fan communities
And: TikTok partners with Audius; Generating AI lyrics with music; Songcamp Elektra drops 3 music NFTs; Country's Covid rift; Vaccine passports; China's fan club crackdown
One of the most popular tools for building fan communities right now is Discord. Originally associated with video games, the chat network has seen a significant uptake among music communities over the past few years.
Bots are automations that help you manage your server. I explored some of the most commonly used ones & wrote about them here. Some of the use cases:
👉 Event management
👉 Music radio
👉 Playing games
👉 Multi-lingual communities
TECH
🗳 Moving beyond coin voting governance (Vitalik Buterin)
One of the most popular decision-making frameworks for tokenized communities such as DAOs is voting weighted by the amount of tokens held. In this piece Ethereum-founder Vitalik Buterin talks about the dangers of decentralized governance and lays out various solutions. Important read for community builders.
“Coin voting is attractive because it feels credibly neutral: anyone can go and get some units of the governance token on Uniswap. In practice, however, coin voting may well only appear secure today precisely because of the imperfections in its neutrality (namely, large portions of the supply staying in the hands of a tightly-coordinated clique of insiders).”
🕹 ToneStone is a music creation startup with its roots in gaming (Stuart Dredge)
Founded by former execs from veteran music games developer Harmonix, and Steam / Half Life firm Valve. Here they write about the components of their vision:
Games are great at teaching complex systems — but generally, the complex systems they teach are games. If you are skilled at LoL or Fortnite, your in-game skills don’t always transfer to other aspects of your life.
🖊 LyricJam.ai: A system for generating lyrics for live instrumental music (Olga Vechtomova, Gaurav Sahu and Dhruv Kumar)
“This system supports songwriting process, whereby artists play musical instruments, while the system listens to the audio stream via a microphone and generates lyric lines in real time to match the music being played.”
👾 Tales from Cyberspace: Explore music, gaming & fine art with June, the first (non-binary) child born in the nebulas of the metaverse (Jacob Mendoza)
Jorge Wieneke V, founder of the virtual Minecraft venue Club Matryoshka debuts a new project:
“Tales from Cyberspace is an artistic experience that merges together the world of gaming and fine arts. To create this versatility we combine elements of traditional video gaming such as platforming, puzzles, and stealth, together with real-world artworks from contemporary artists of DSLcollection.”
🤝 And the first streaming service to partner with TikTok is… (Samantha Hissong)
Blockchain-based Audius, who I wrote about before in a piece titled Music streaming as a protocol: why I was wrong about Audius, will let users easily publish their tracks as TikTok Sounds. They’ve also partnered with Hype Machine and are hoping to breathe new life into the blogosphere.
X
🛂 Vaccine passports have arrived in cities with varying degrees of strictness (Camille Squires)
This piece looks into efforts in France, Israel, Italy, the UK, and the US to set up vaccine passport schemes. Some highly centralized, some much less so with privacy and discrimination being areas of friction. We took an anticipatory look at their role in reopening live music back in March.
🤠 ‘We aren’t all dumb hillbillies’: how Covid caused a rift in country music (Kyle Mullin)
“This is entirely the fault of the unvaccinated, and the politicians, clergy, and media figures who are lying to them,” John Paul Keith says. When asked if he was afraid of online firestorms like the one Jason Isbell’s comments sparked, Keith says, “No, I’m worried about having to cancel my gigs, or getting a breakthrough case.”
🚨 From ‘positive energy’ to ‘chaos’: how China’s online fan clubs became a target of Beijing’s crackdown (Tracy Qu and Iris Deng)
The campaign focuses on “activities that induce minors to contribute money to their idols, hurling abuse online and doxxing” and also tries to stop “activities that encourage fans to flaunt their wealth, manipulate social media comments, make up topics online to hijack public opinion and use bots to increase traffic data related to their idols.”
🎧 Gen Z is embracing the art of niche Spotify playlists (Kelsi Karpinski)
“Gen Z’s lives are meticulously soundtracked. People organize such specific moods and feelings through playlists so that they can literally serve as the backing track to those moments. Or sometimes you’re not in that moment at all. Very few listeners are actually hatching evil plots, but “pov: you’re the villain” can still provide that boost of confidence with a dash of wickedness you’re looking for.”
💢 UK musicians back call to end harassment of women at live gigs (Mark Brown)
Organisers of a new Safe Spaces Now music industry initiative say more than 40% of women under 40 have experienced sexual harassment at a live music event.
MUSIC
As you may know, I’ve been involved in a web3 experiment called Soncamp Elektra recently, an 8-week collective art creation camp + DAO incubation experiment that ran from July - August 2021. The team of dozens of music and visual artists and experts in other domains like writers, strategists, and developers, have been hard at work constructing an interactive narrative game with music at its core (accessible on a Discord for people that bought the crowdfund NFTs).
Now, the narrative has nearly played out and so this phase of Elektra comes to a very musical conclusion. Three songs were just released yesterday night (GMT) and put up for auction. They are all amazing. Check out the Songcamp Elektra songs here.
You can bid on them as NFTs. They’ve already reached their 2ETH reserves ($6300 USD at time of writing), which means the auctions will conclude in less than 1 day. There are also PartyBids up and running, which are accessible from the auction page, which is a way to chip into a collective bid & become a fractionalized NFT owner.
