✖️ Blockchain basics: how to start a DAO
And: The major labels' competition for your attention; Argentina's musical renaissance; London's O2 recreated in Fortnite; Live sector faces staff shortage
Hi everyone - over the past weeks I’ve written a lot about the community aspects of DAOs. DAOs are just communities leveraging (blockchain) technology, but today I wanted to write a primer for everyone who has little to no experience in this domain.
It started with this tweet by Seed Club’s Jess Sloss. Seed Club is a DAO that builds and invests in communities.
I love the simplicity of it, but I realized it may seem daunting to others, so I’ve broken it all down. I dug into all the terminology and explained it in a post that describes how everything works in a way that is hopefully clear enough for everyone on this list to understand.
TECH
🌱 The paradox of small (Mark Mulligan)
“Either streaming services need to start backing up their creator-first language with creator-first tools, or instead watch from the side lines as someone else does it for them.”
🦾 The top trends in tech (McKinsey Digital)
“These trends may not represent the coolest, most bleeding-edge technologies. But they're the ones drawing the most venture money, producing the most patent filings, and generating the biggest implications for how and where to compete and the capabilities you need to accelerate performance.”
🧐 The role of the arts and humanities in thinking about artificial intelligence (John Tasioulas)
“If the arts and humanities are to advance the agenda of the kind of humanistic AI ethics I have sketched, then they themselves need to be democratised. In a democracy, it’s not enough to give people a vote while effectively excluding them from deliberation; and if they are to deliberate as equals, they have to have access to the key sites in which basic ideas about justice and the good are worked out.”
📷 Instagram appears working on in-app collectibles (Alessandro Paluzzi)
Possibly NFTs. There was some speculation about this already, due to an interview head with Instagram head Adam Mosseri. Now someone has managed to find the functionality in the app - screenshots indicating it’s still very much a work in progress. It also appears Instagram is working on exclusive stories for fan clubs.
🧑⚖️ Roc-A-Fella Records sues Dame Dash for allegedly trying to sell NFT of Jay-Z’s ‘Reasonable Doubt’ (Jon Blistein)
“Dash slammed the lawsuit and claimed it was full of inaccuracies. Dash said he wasn’t trying to sell an NFT of Reasonable Doubt , but rather his stake in Roc-A-Fella Records after the label supposedly tried to purchase it at a low price.”
X
💻 In Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical renaissance (Juan Jose Relmucao)
“In the mid-2010s, dozens of kids discovered that by getting these very basic devices, they were suddenly able to harness the power of the internet, music, and their own freestyle skills. Present-day stars like Neo Pistea (Sebastián Chinellato) and L-Gante (Elian Valenzuela) also had their netbooks to thank as their key to the door out of marginalization and into Latin American stardom.”
🛠 Resurgent live music sector faces staff shortages (Jon Chapple)
“As live music prepares to get back to business, industry bodies in the UK, the Netherlands, France and elsewhere have sounded the alarm over the impending labour shortage.”
🏟 O2 “supervenue” launches in ‘Fortnite’ for interactive virtual gig experience (Miri Teixeira)
“The iconic London O2 building has been recreated in Fortnite Creative, packed with secret rooms and a few exclusive items. The week-long event will see Leicester indie band Easy Life play a live set, with fans able to explore six unique areas based on lyrics from the band’s songs.”
🇨🇳 'A local culture created': How the pandemic connected China's club scene (Andrew Kemp)
Ellen Zhang, the owner of Chengdu’s .TAG club:
“Our local DJs used to warm up for international DJs, or perform at our Hidden Bar, but from last year they suddenly had much more important slots, and were spending time touring,” explains “There are a lot of cities in China with electronic music clubs, so I think last year was a huge help to local DJs’ careers.”
I’ve written about this before in MUSIC x: Why local is the answer to a future of new normals.
Inside Universal, Sony, and Warner’s arms race for your attention (Dan Runcie)
“This is still a superstar industry. The superstar model has been here since the heyday of monoculture with acts like the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie. When Universal acquired EMI in 2011, it gained the catalogs of those artists, boosted its market share, and guaranteed its position to attract the most valuable artists moving forward.”
MUSIC
I’ve been listening to the amazing Lov3 & L1ght album by RUI HO from Shanghai. It pulls from pop, rave, ambient, reggaeton and R&B with an undercurrent of Chinese melodies.
P.S.
You may have noticed 4 of the articles above are written by John, Jon, another Jon, and Juan - and they’re all excellent. We’ve recently started placing author names next to headlines. Partly, because we want to credit the authors better and establish more of an author-orientation rather than a publication-orientation. What also influenced the decision to do that was to have a better sense of the gender balance in the links we curate. It’s not great.
There are multiple reasons for why it is the way it is, but one easy solution: I need to commit to following a more diverse selection of amazing authors in this space. If you have any tips, please feel free to use the comment section in the web version of this email, or drop tips in this Twitter thread. Thank you.