✘ Crypto has a trust debt, music alone can’t fix that
And: Readyweights; Crypto's three body problem; Latin music scene rises while streaming revenues drop; Multiplayer music communities; Digital Music Act x Spotify app store?
When Bitcoin entered the world it was on the back of a financial crash that evaporated a lot of people’s belief in the safety and security of our international banking system. The promise was great: what if we can establish a currency that isn’t regulated by opaque systems, but by decentralized and automated processes? Except, the main drivers of crypto adoption have always been speculative. Taking advantage of hype cycles means tapping into the speculative element. This means that every interaction becomes financialized. This can be a lesson for culture producers – value your work – but it can also be harmful – not all value is market-driven. A branding effort was made when people started talking about Web3. This tried to position a blockchain-based Internet as a third iteration – read, read/write, read/write/own – of the evolution of the Internet. It’s proven hard to move beyond speculation to actual use cases. What are the actual problems that blockchains and cryptocurrencies solve? Moreover, through the sheer speculation and the associated rug pulls and other illicit behaviour, crypto has a trust debt. Music is a soft power solution, but it’s not a panacea. What’s next?
Can code be culture?
Music is an odd thing because it lacks substance. It is, by nature, fleeting. Until we captured music through recording technology, it was impossible to take it with you outside of your voice, humming, or instrument-playing. Copyright, which is effected the moment something gets recorded, has centred on that final product – the master – for a long time. Of course, there’s performance rights, but even those performances go back to a recorded piece of music. What’s more, music has a history of compression as much as a history of recording or distribution technologies. For a long time, the question has been to what point audio data can be compressed to still be recognizable as a song.
All of that, however, doesn’t make music culture. That comes through the meaning we attach to it, the experiences we affect through it. A similar thing happens with crypto, derived from cryptography – a language unto its own in the same way music is. There’s a certain abstraction at play and with a blockchain, there’s a need behind it to make sense of an abstract world. Push decisions into a binary if-then-relationship chain. The smart contract will execute automatically.
Music feels like the perfect meaning-making machine to place on top of crypto. People connect to it, and find meaning and solace and joy through it. Connect that to the cold binary of the blockchain and it feels a perfect marriage. At the same time, we give meaning to technologies all the time. Blockchains are no different. Each blockchain actually has its own culture around it. Solana is different from Bitcoin is different from Ethereum and the latter has Layer-2 chains that have their own culture again. So yes, code can be culture – meaning can be attached to it, but it’s easier to do so through artefacts like music where we’re more used to finding cultural meaning.
Moving beyond the debt
Crypto is full of scams and rug pulls. There’s no denying it. Most people don’t trust it because of that. At the same time, there are a lot of great uses of the technology, also in music, that promote a highly social culture of support. From a personal perspective, I think that the experiment in scene building that was Wild Awake is one example. But we never made the technology, the crypto aspect, really work for us. Of course, it’s great to get artists to experience a revaluing of their work and to build a community. But the tech can offer more when it comes to the creation of culture, the creation of meaning.
My partner in Wild Awake was Jamie, whose artist name is Sound of Fractures. His latest project is Scenes and it’s a work in progress that everyone who takes part in immediately becomes a part of. It reimagines what an album can be as he asks people to respond to a prompt and upload a photo. One of these photos ends up as the cover for a single. Each one is minted and allows the project to expand beyond the circle actively participating. It’s a wonderful expression of concentric circles powered by a love for music and a technology that binds people and ideas together.
Another example is a recent experiment by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. The basic idea is to take a creative work and run it through an AI model to see whether it can find it. There will be traces of it, that’s how creativity works. Now, we suddenly have a way to locate such utterances. The underlying artwork has been minted as an NFT.
“This new sculpture of ours already existed inside embedding space, but we decided to surface and share those weights as an artwork. It is fitting to use the medium of NFTs to do so, establishing the provenance of an artwork or concept with no concern of the media associated it being used liberally by others.”
‘The space’
There is no space, there is just code. Popularized in its misuse, there’s a choice in how to engage. Music can be seen as a pure culture to breathe air into that non-existent space. And yet, it’s as institutionally broken as crypto itself. Bringing the two together can creating meaningful place – a nook or crevice where people come together to share a love and a passion.
LINKS
🐎 Readyweights, minting concepts (Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst)
“From our perspective this new dimension of artworks, currently referred to as "training data", is something to lean into and explore deliberately. Once artists learned that distributed 2D photographs of their art were viewed more times than the 3D original, some began to modulate their works to photograph better, implicitly understanding that media recorded of the work was, for better or worse, a part of the work.”
✘ I love both of these people’s work a lot and see them as true trailblazers. Here, again, they don’t just ask the question to engage from a creative standpoint, but they do so themselves. They don’t just tell you about a future, they show you how they build it. And, for me, it’s the kind of future around AI we need.
⚖️ Crypto's Three Body Problem (Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti)
“In contrast to tendencies of years past to put everything on-chain, what crypto needs is a significant reduction in scope, and a much richer and more active social context. To put it another way: what accounts for crypto’s three-body regulatory problem is not merely underdeveloped technical infrastructure, it is the culture of separateness itself. Crypto is a bank run on the entire cronyist financial sector. But this asset flight should be into local communities, not into an abstracted digital “space." From the rhetoric of putting real-world assets “on-chain,” to attempts of regenerative finance to transform the world solely through digital abstraction, many in the industry have characteristically missed the point.”
✘ This piece served as an inspiration for my musings today. They also ask for a different approach to working with crypto, one that I fully support and hope to see effected in the world around me.
⛹🏾♀️ Multiplayer music communities with Fam (UFO & Nick Smith)
“Ambitions for onchain music and experimenting in new formats for creating and releasing music on the internet. Positive sum collabs with artists and people in the community, to help make art, music, and experiences happen.”
✘ This is a podcast/radio show, so have a listen. The idea to let tech help communities grow - as Nick is trying to do with Fam - is one I support. The great thing is that they look at the needs of community and then look at tech for help instead of the other way around.
🌎 The Latin music scene is back and better than ever, so why isn’t the money? (Luz Ayala)
“While it may seems that these artists must be raking in the dough through all their music, Independent artists must generate a staggering 5,000,000 streams annually to make the US federal minimum wage. Additionally, Latin artists incurred the highest distribution fees this year, revealing a noteworthy financial challenge within the Latin music industry. Since 2022, earnings per stream for independent Latin artists has declined by a whopping 21% .”
✘ A direct impact of lower ARPU in non-Western markets. This just continues to shine the light on the need for broader revenue pillars around music besides streaming.
⁉️ The DMA means a better Spotify for artists, creators, and you (Spotify)
“Thanks to the DMA we’re looking forward to a future of superfan clubs, alternative app stores, and giving creators the ability to safely download Spotify for Artists or Spotify for Podcasters directly from our site—and that’s just the start.”
✘ This is only Europe, and only concerns iPhones, but the picture that Spotify paints is intriguing. I’m sure we’ll read a lot more about this in the next few weeks. Is the future a Spotify app store where you can find apps for your favourite artists or album games?
MUSIC
Donato Dozzy released a new album, Magda, where he explores a deep, dubby, bassy, techno. Apparently inspired by the Adriatic Sea and his family there, it definitely resonates with emotion throughout.