✖️ David Bowie – Artist, disruptor, creative technologist
And: Brands in the metaverse; a false hope for physical?; Mental models for NFTs; Tech questions for 2022; NFT metadata
It’s almost David Bowie’s birthday, it’s also almost the anniversary of his death. It’s also almost six years ago that Bowie released the wonderful Blackstar, a record that saw him reinvent his sound and artistic persona once again. This time he teamed up with jazz artists like Jason Lindner and Mark Giuliana. He also took inspiration from the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips. This record would not have sounded as it did without these contributors and inspirations. It’s also typical of how Bowie remade himself and his music time and again: by finding new collaborators. It might be the most personal lesson one can take from Bowie, that the people you commune with define not just what you make but also who you are. Bowie found communion through his artistry, his disruptions of masculinity and stardom, and his desire to try on new technologies. I’ll take you through these three communions and show you what we can learn from Bowie as move through ever faster phases of change.
LINKS
🪁 How Brands Can Enter the Metaverse (Janet Balls)
“Each entity that creates a virtual world does so with its own access, membership, monetization rights, and formats of creative expression, so the business and technical specifications vary widely. The metaverse refers more to the concept across these individual worlds and experiences and the acknowledgement that we are entering into a more substantive, immersive landscape than ever before.” [emphasis mine]
🧱 How subsidies helped Montreal become "the Hollywood of video games" (Corey Bridges)
A really good piece on how the current videogame ecosystem in Montreal couldn’t have started without a tax credit system but at the same time it has led to problems of unfair advantage, labor market distortion, and arbitrariness. It’s a great example of the catch-22 that any government tax-backed ecosystem finds itself in eventually.
📼 2021 in Music: More artists succeed as streaming drives music growth, fuelled by record label investment (BPI)
Strikingly, the growth in physical sales - which keeps ticking up - seems driven by the same stars who dominate streaming: the likes of Adele (vinyl) and Olivia Rodrigo (cassettes). It’s difficult to talk about a revival of the physical format when it’s driven by people who have most likely never listened to the music via the physical format they bought.
🧠 Magic Beans: What is the best mental model for NFTs? (Venkatash Rao)
A pretty long read that I read over the holiday period. I think it’s a really good framework to bring people closer to understanding what all that Web3 fuss is about.
“That’s 3 classes of mental models for NFTs, which I summarize as follows:
Signifier-value mental models
Agency-value mental models
Right-to-future-rights mental models
Or in other words, the right to represent a thing, the right to do things with a thing, and the right to expect certain things in speculative environments. These mental models correspond to a scale of increasing value and increasing speculativeness.”
⁉️ Tech questions for 2022 (Benedict Evans)
“Most of the questions I’ve discussed so far are about the future of tech, but a central theme in the trends presentation I published last month was all the ways that industries much bigger than tech are being disrupted now by things that tech was excited about 10, 15 or 20 years ago. Across brands, consumer goods, advertising & marketing, TV, retail and ecommerce, all the old value chains break up, all the cards are thrown in the air, and no-one knows where they’ll land.”
🏊🏽♀️ Deep dive into NFT Metadata (Anett Rolikova)
Being in the music business we all know how important metadata is. We should therefore be especially attuned to how metadata gets organised on chain. Anett has a great, if somewhat technical, deep dive.
“It is complicated for the NFT marketplace (or any other NFT minting platform) to know what’s the mimeType (definition) of an element definition of metadata - whether it is "img", "video", "iframe", "gif" or other file format. The front end does not know what kind of file you just uploaded on the platform as it can read only the tokenURI which points to IPFS/Arweave/ centralised storage link. The link itself contains (if it is uploaded to IPFS): ipfs://SHA (hash algorithm), for example: ipfs://QmQ9xMUDiWtVp1YMU1f1MpcdsB3enP6V3JfYmTmhnju5JC which does not gives any information to backend how the file should be displayed. Whether it is a video, image, gif... the front end needs to know what type of file you just uploaded in order to show it correctly. This can be done by adding check boxes of what file you minted in order to show it correctly on the front-end.”
MUSIC
I couldn’t not link to a David Bowie track after writing this piece today. And since I love Blackstar dearly I’m giving you Lazarus. Much has been written about this track and the record in relation to Bowie’s ongoing fight with cancer and the fact it was released two days before his death. To me, all that shows is the level to which Bowie attempted to orchestrate the narratives around himself, both as a person and as an artist.