✖️ An experiment in community-driven media education
And: The Ownership Economy; The music metaverse (almost) ready; On Discord's influence on fandom; Fractionalizing ownership of grassroots venues; Post-pandemic Digital Engagement Outlook
Quite a while back I ran a survey here to ask if people would be interested in a kind of cohort-based-course on the music business. There were some great responses, but ultimately it didn’t materialize. More recently, the idea of running an Academy inside Water & Music came up and I put together a proposal of what that might include. After I presented this proposal in a town hall, things moved fast. I took on the project together with Katherine Rodgers - who runs community ops for Water & Music. Within a 100 days, we went from ideation in that town hall to having set up and run a 5 week course on community building in the Web3. It was a fantastic experience that taught everyone involved what it means to build a community by doing. Kat published a wonderful article going through all the things we ran into, what can be improved, and what worked best.
“While there’s plenty of fascinating theory underpinning Web3 technologies, ultimately most of our course participants applied to our Academy to learn something they can apply more practically — either to their day jobs in the music industry, or to their own careers as artists. During our course planning, we were careful to strike a balance between diving into the theory behind Web3, and ensuring our students left our sessions with tangible resources and frameworks.”
Read Kat’s full article - it’s free to read.
LINKS
🗝️ The Ownership Economy 2022 (Li Jin, Geoff Hamilton, Jesse Walden, Spencer Noon, Derek Walkush and Medha Kothari)
“However, in our analysis, it is clear that simply giving users ownership is not sufficient to ensure that a product wins out over its competitors. Tokens can be useful in capturing user attention and bootstrapping initial adoption, but they need to be coupled with strong product-market fit—solving a widespread need for users—in order to sustain usage.”
🌏 The Music Metaverse Is (Almost) Ready to Conquer the World (Marc Hogan)
“In interviews with experts working at the intersection of music and the metaverse, I heard that several intriguing applications for immersive 3D performances are either possible today or simply awaiting the arrival of the next generation of headsets and smartphones. But most agreed that the broadest potential of metaverse music projects could still be a decade or more away, and that it will be up to artists and audiences—rather than engineers and tech executives—to dream up what shape music will take in this new medium. Drawing an analogy to the rise of music videos, Magic Leap co-founder Rony Abovitz compares the 2020s to the 1970s, with the next MTV still just a glimmer in our cultural and technological eyes.”
🫂 On Discord, Music Fans Become Artists’ Besties, Collaborators, and Even Unpaid Interns (Cat Zhang)
“Such a labyrinthine affair could have only happened on Discord. The platform allows you to message privately with friends, while also encouraging large public servers to form around mutual interests like on Reddit. (In fact, many Discord communities organize via subreddits.) But Discord servers are more gated spaces—conversations aren’t publicly searchable via Google—so the sense of camaraderie and mutual obligation can sometimes be stronger.”
🏚️ New community ownership initiative launched to protect the UK’s grassroots music venues (Marissa Cetin)
“Music Venues Properties is a Community Benefit Society which will seek to purchase freeholds and rent them out to live music operators "at a fairer rate than their present landlords, with greater security and better understanding of the sector," according to the Crowdfunder information. Fans can also invest in MVP via the fundraiser and see a 3% APR on their investment, encouraging the music community to gain ownership of these spaces.”
💻 Will Australian Music Fans Stay Engaged With Digital Experiences Post-Pandemic? (Christie Eliezer)
“There was a 6% drop in participation, from 48% in November 2021, which marked the end of extended lockdowns in the eastern states, to 42% in March 2022 when this study was done. These included watching livestreams (down from 21% to 16%), watching pre-recorded videos of events (down from 24% to 20%), creating content to share online (down from 4% to 3%), and seeing virtual exhibitions or gallery tours (down from 9% to 5%). Those paying for online experiences declined from 38% to 34% during this period. But the Digital Engagement Outlook found that seven in 10 will continue to engage, certainly in the near future, with continued apprehension in some quarters over attending physical events.”
MUSIC
The hardcore punk energy will never die, it will always seep back into our consciousness somewhere and somehow. DoFlame is a fairly new band from Brampton, Toronto led by Mateo Naranjo who fully embodies this spirit. Come on, let’s create a moshpit!