✖️ What’s cooking in Music DAOs? MusicFund, Dreams Never Die, Water & Music, FWB Gatekeeper, Polly, XYZ & Club BPM
And: Meta & the Web3; Live Nation ticket stub NFTs; Investment funds & music publishing; Climate-friendly artist bookings; hip-hop & feminism; Patron shout-outs
Hi everyone -
A little housekeeping. Mondays have been a marathon for me lately, so to create a little balance, the MUSIC x mail will now come out later in the day on Tuesdays (afternoon CET).
One of the reasons for the Monday marathons? Multiple calls with DAOs that go deep into the evening. There is so much happening in the space - much of it organically, away from the status quo.
Today, I decided to write a roundup of some of these music x web3 projects.
WEB3
⛏ Minimally Extractive Meta (Packy McCormick)
“To reach its full potential, Meta needs to disrupt Facebook by turning itself into something that behaves more like a protocol than a platform. With an internally omnipotent founder at the helm willing to lose $10+ billion annually, it might have the organizational will to do it.”
In this piece Packy looks back at FB’s strategy in the past 6 years and dissects recent conversations Matthew Ball and Ben Thompson recently had with Zuckerberg. This is not an article about Facebook suddenly being a good guy, but rather about success in the emerging landscape depending on minimal extraction, rather than the opposite.
📚 DAOs: Absorbing the internet (The Generalist)
A very definitive read about all the forms of DAOs, their tooling, legal aspects, etc. written by an impressive team of contributors.
🛂 Photoshop will get a ‘prepare as NFT’ option soon (Mitchell Clark)
“It’s called Content Credentials, and NFT sellers will be able to link the Adobe ID with their crypto wallet, allowing compatible NFT marketplaces to show a sort of verified certificate proving the art’s source is authentic.”
I’m skeptical whether something like this will take off without being some type of open standard protocol, but it does serve to highlight the problem space around identity and authenticity that’s currently seeing a lot of investment of effort & money. I imagine more DAWs will start figuring out ways to integrate with web3 too.
🫂 Building a “community-first” company (Morgan Beller)
“Community building is going to be one of the most important, if not the most important, skill set for future Founders across industries. You need a community and you need it as early as possible for whatever product that you’re going to build.”
💸 Live Nation is selling digital ‘ticket stubs’ as NFTs (Stuart Dredge)
“Called ‘Live Stubs’ (yes, that has been trademarked) they will debut with Swedish House Mafia’s upcoming US tour. The idea: every fan buying a ticket to shows promoted by Live Nation and held in venues using Ticketmaster ticketing will get a free NFT that includes their specific seat details.”
X
🏦 The changing landscape of music publishing (Dan Fowler)
“If this plays out as expected then it will leave a significant void for new creators and presents a growing opportunity for investment in, and development of, new "frontline" repertoire.”
🌱 Encore unveils its ‘most climate-friendly’ artist bookings (James McAulay)
“🚙 We double offset the carbon emissions of every musician travelling to every Encore booking. 🌳 We plant a tree for every booking.”
Really happy to see James & team committing to this - hope many more will follow.
🛒 Vinyl is selling so well that it’s getting hard to sell vinyl (Ben Sisario)
“Consumption of vinyl LPs has grown much faster than the industry’s ability to make records. The business relies on an aging infrastructure of pressing machines, most of which date to the 1970s or earlier and can be costly to maintain.”
🇨🇺 DJ Jigüe brings Cuban Afrofuturism to the global dance floor (Richard Villegas)
“The average Cuban can’t fathom the amount of money it takes to travel and pay for accommodations, not to mention the visa restrictions from countries who’ve got us pegged as a migrant risk. I’ve never traveled as a tourist. Wherever I’ve gone, it has always been at the behest of an organization or institution.”
🔊 "Feminist AF" author on hip-hop and feminism today: "We're not playing nice anymore" (Kylie Cheung)
“We never say to little boys, "Be sweet." It's a thing we say to girls, and it has long-term consequences that play into many things. So we wanted to disrupt this by saying we don't owe anyone niceness at our own expense. What we owe to everyone in a world that's about justice is a commitment to being kind.”
PATREON
MUSIC x is supported by an awesome community of Patreon members. Thank you.
Tim Degraye, Andraž, Andres Lauer, Andrew Apanov, Arjen van der Straaten, Bo Plantinga, C.Y., Chuck Fishman, Eli Goldstein, Henry Prince, Hunter Giles, Jason Fahlstrom, Kalam Ali, KHT, Maarten Walraven-Freeling, Marc Geiger, Martin Nedvěd, Martyn, Matthias Röder, Nicolás Madoery, Paula Moore, Pete Cohen, Oskar Ekman, Rian, Richard Wernicke, Ro Halfhide, Tim Shaw, Tristra Yeager, Virgo Sillamaa, Carlo Kiksen, Cherie Hu, Deenah Bassiouny, Dick Huey, Gohree Kim, James Keene, Keagon Voyce, Lukas Hermeling, Nur Al Habash, Pietro Fuccio, Sinh Blum.
Innovation thrives when information flows freely. MUSIC x will always be a free newsletter. If you can afford it, consider joining us on Patreon if the pricing makes sense compared to what you get out of this. You can also do us a favour by sharing the newsletter on your favourite Discord, Slack, Facebook, or LinkedIn community.
MUSIC
A year ago I had this (silly) idea to combine the energy of polka with the harder sounds of dance music. I started collecting tunes that sample or incorporate (mostly) Central European folk music… and then memed out this Yodelcore mix.
