✖️ Why I’m participating in Songcamp Elektra ⚡️
And: Jay-Z launching $JAYZ tokens?; Bebe Rexha x The Sims; A song as a DAO; Black TikTok dance creator strike; Hiphop biz x Black tech; How to start a DAO, part 2
A few months ago, Songcamp started as a creative Web3 experiment with a dozen creatives. A few weeks later they sold 3 NFTs raising $30k+. Now they’re starting season 2, with a bigger collective and I’m stoked to support it, because:
It will onboard more creatives to Web3;
We’re doing things that have never been done before;
We’ll have lots of fun & learnings along the way.
Read about my thoughts in detail after the jump.
TECH
💸 ‘A talent scout can’t go to 100 shows a night’ – how big data is choosing the next pop stars (Alex Rayner)
“Record companies have settled for one in 10 of their acts finding true success, with big hits underwriting the less profitable ones. But Withey [of Instrumental] says pretty much all of his less prominent signings turn a profit.”
Interesting bit about streaming economics and the use of machine learning in today’s music business.
💎 The Sims is getting an in-game music festival with Simlish songs (Andrew Webster)
“Bebe Rexha will also be partnering with popular TikTok users for a Simlish karaoke session. She joins a growing list of pop stars to perform in Simlish, including Katy Perry, Carly Rae Jepsen, and, more recently, Japanese Breakfast.”
🔁 How to bootstrap a DAO, part 2 (Jess Sloss)
Last week I wrote a piece about how to start a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, explained in terms for people new to this space. I did so alongside Jess Sloss’ part 1 tweet. I’m not going to write an article every time Jess tweets, but figured I’d clear up some terms that I didn’t & tools for those unfamiliar.
Crowdfund ETH using Mirror
Mirror is a writing platform that allows you to mint articles as NFTs. Mirror’s crowdfunding originally launched in a post by the Mint Fund, a fund that helps onboard underrepresented creators to the Web3, and thus is the best place to learn more. The dev team also published a detailed account about the feature.
Give contributors tokens that = votes.
Award your crowdfunders with tokens that represent voting power in your community.
Transfer capital into a multisig and nominate signers.
Moving the capital, in this case the ETH cryptocurrency, into a multisig wallet means that for transactions to be made from that wallet, multiple people will have to sign. You can set this up in various ways, e.g. needing 100% of the signers to confirm or just a majority like 3/5.
Set up Snapshot, Discord + Collab Land
Snapshot is a community decision-making tool. Discord is what Web3 communities tend to use instead of Slack. I’ve described both of these in my previous explainer, so I won’t go into more detail here. Collab Land allows you to add a bot to your Discord community that will then be able to assign roles to members based on which tokens they hold and their quantities. It can also be used to award tokens for community participation.
Issue bounties + reward work
Now you’re set up to create bounties for things you need to get done, plus set up an incentive structure in terms of rewards for work being done by community members.
(the PartyDAO method)
PartyDAO is building PartyBid, a product for collectively bidding on NFTs.
🌝 The Song That Owns Itself: can a song be a DAO? Yes.
It’s a really cool project that allows you to communicate with a song and get rewarded in song ownership tokens if you figure out what it’s interested in.
⛓ The roots of the music NFT problem (Cherie Hu & Kat Rodgers)
Excellent panel recap of an expert conversation between Kaitlyn Davies, Chloe Alexandra Thompson, VÉRITÉ, Zola Jesus, Mat Dryhurst, Michail Stangl, and Cherie Hu. What I particularly like is that it dives into the cultural dimensions of Web3.
Also notable: it’s Water & Music’s first “crypto publishing experiment” and it has set up a split, so that if you tip for the article it automatically gets distributed to all the parties involved, which also includes the Mint Fund mentioned above and herstoryDAO, which is dedicated to preserving and incubating the stories of marginalized crypto creators.
X
💼 “Creators, by working, are strengthening platform owners’ domination over their ability to work.” (Li Jin)
Excellent thread by Li Jin on Twitter. If you’re not following her already, you’re missing out.
🙅🏿♀️ TikTok’s Black dance creators are on strike (Natachi Onwuamaegbu)
“A movement of Black TikTok artists has effectively called a creative strike: A new single from Megan Thee Stallion is burning up the Internet, and they’re refusing to make any new dances for it.”
🧑⚖️ UK government publishes ‘ERP’ data on making events Covid-safe (after legal action from UK live industry) (Stuart Dredge)
“Concerning is the part on people’s willingness to do the Covid-19 tests that were a key part of these pilots. Only 28 positive cases were identified of people potentially catching Covid-19 during these events. But the report notes “the very low return rate of pre- and post-event PCR tests (only 15% returned both tests)” – and this for pilots where every attendee knew how important those tests would be for collecting data.”
💻 How the Black tech community is leveraging business models that made hip-hop become a massive cultural and business phenomenon (Lauren deLisa Coleman)
Josh Otis Miller of Fund Black Tech:
“Hip hop emerged out of Black voices being suppressed and what is happening in the tech scene is Black voices, Black ideas, being suppressed. Today, hip hop is the biggest income generator in the music industry, the biggest culture-setter in the entire world. Imagine a world where Black ideas and Black tech businesses get a voice.”
🪙 Jay-Z might be about to launch a $JAYZ token
I wanted to save the speculation for last. I was doing some research into plans Jay-Z & Jack Dorsey may have for Tidal and I came across Jay-Z’s alleged Ethereum address. I then noticed they’ve been creating ERC20 tokens, which are commonly used for setting up communities or artist coins. A 3-letter Ethereum address, an expensive Cryptopunk NFT (worth $126,000 at the time of buying) as his profile image on Twitter… Something is brewing. Thread.
MUSIC
This track by Peder Mannerfelt is quite a techno journey. Structured in a rather minimalistic way, but with a very maximal outcome. Punk-y vocals on top. Vaguely reminiscent of Iggy Pop, or perhaps I’m thinking of someone else. YouTube | Spotify.