✖️ Music is getting the first peer-to-peer DeFi platform backed by real world assets: Opulous
And: Maroon 5's DAO; ByteDance releases TikTok's 'secret sauce'; UK music sector furious over reopening delays; growing decentralized communities; vibe shifts
Instead of eat-sleep-create content-repeat, new funding and fandom models will give musicians more freedom to create the art they want to manifest. Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Opulous, established by distributor Ditto Music, will let artists borrow money using their future royalties as collateral.
Read the article and find out:
💱 How Opulous’ DeFi lending and NFT platform works;
⛓️ What DeFi even is in the first place;
🎹 What it all means for music, beyond Opulous.
TECH
🌱 YellowHeart launches first-ever fan community with Maroon 5 NFT series
Things are moving fast. Just 2 weeks ago we wrote about organising a fanbase as a blockchain-based ‘decentralized autonomous organisation’ and now Maroon 5 is doing an interactive NFT drop which will live inside a DAO. The funds will be used for social good:
“The DAO offers fans an unparalleled opportunity to join a community that’s collectively making a positive environmental and social impact, alongside award-winning pop-rock band Maroon 5. All of the money collected from these three drops (the seed, sprout, and living phases) will be pooled together to fund initiatives the community collectively chooses; each member of the community has a single vote.”
🚪 ByteDance finally makes its ‘secret sauce’ techs available for the public (Chen Du)
Interesting move from the company behind TikTok and other social apps. As far as I know, it’s the first time a major, thriving social media company is opening up its tech for licensing. That tech includes recommendation algorithms, A/B testing, beauty filters, machine translation, automatic content generation, video streaming optimizations, data-driven insights, and conventional cloud computing offerings like compute, storage, and virtualizations.
🔐 Zero Knowledge (Packy McCormick & Jill Carlson)
One of the promises of the Web3 is users having greater sovereignty over their data. One cryptographic way in which this may be achieved is Zero Knowledge Proofs: a way to communicate information, like a password, without actually having to type that password. I found it difficult to wrap my head around the concept, but about 2/3rds in there’s a great example about how one might rent an apartment using this concept, so check that out when you feel lost.
🗝 Ethereum Single Sign On might be the future of internet app log in (Kenneth Henderson)
An obvious domain for the implementation of Zero Knowledge cryptography is crypto wallets, which are, in some circles, completely replacing Web2 social media platforms as the default way to sign in to services.
🤝 Tim Exile on music careers in 2030 and the industry impact of NFTs (Will Betts)
“We’re moving away from a world of breadth – gaming the algorithms to go viral – and towards a world of depth, that’s more about finding your people and going deep with them.”
X
🗯 UK fury as government delays reopening date (Gordon Masson)
“The devastating decision places numerous businesses in jeopardy, wiping an estimated 5,000 concerts, festivals and events from the calendar and costing the UK industry hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenues.”
📈 How to grow decentralized communities (pet3rpan)
“Extrinsically motivated network participants are often driven by external rewards such as financial gain or attention and often optimize for zero-sum short-term self-gain. Extrinsically motivated community members form the basis for weak communities and drive away other, more intrinsically motivated participants.”
⚔ Crypto governance and vote farming (John Palmer)
“I think it's highly likely that protocols like Uniswap and Compound reach a state where their governance landscape is made up of several powerful factions, each with its own governance token and constituency which is coordinating around protocol-level decisions. These factions will compete with each other for voting power the way political parties do, and therefore will most likely be open to anyone.”
💫 Vibe Shift (Sean Monahan)
“I’m hesitant to name our current vibe shift. It’s clearly a return to scene culture, contains elements of Naughty Aughties nostalgia. The players are personalities more interested in the literary than the artistic, more interested in the who follows than the how many followers. Musically—well, I’ve already made my prediction: it’ll be a return of rock.”
📹 No one wins when women on Twitch are pitted against each other (Lauren Strapagiel)
“The trick to being a successful woman streamer, they all said, is to find your own community. The more you curate your own audience of followers who enjoy your style and values, the less trouble you’ll have to deal with.”
MUSIC
My latest Bandcamp purchase is this set of remixes by BRLLNT from Seoul. Highly recommend the Cardi B - Bodak Yellow remix, which I first heard in this fun ravey summer mix by Cowboy Solid.