✘ Different modes of crypto music history, and where it's future could be
- CISAC annual report on AI & ISWC - Sony Music sues Marriot Hotels over copyright infringement - Brand, politics, and ethics - Amapiano's second wave - When online content disappears
Culture, and music specifically, have played a role in the development of blockchains and crypto from the start. The first experiments emerged on Bitcoin from 2008 onwards. Crypto music really kicked into gear with the advent of Ethereum and smart contracts. There’s different ways to look at this history. First, in the longer continuum of the Internet and decentralization. Then, through the different experiments that blockchain tech offered musicians to experiment. Finally, through the different cultures we’ve seen develop around the tech. When we understand these different, intertwining, histories, we can begin to understand what the future of crypto music could hold.
The Internet, blockchains, and decentralization
This is a history most of you will be fairly familiar with. It’s the classic story of a Web 1 based around static pages and linear communication. The great invention here was the hyperlink - allowing people to ‘surf’ from one website to the other without friction. Web 2 brought us from a self-owned to a platform-owned Internet. It became easier to join the chorus of people screaming for attention, but the audiences also grew. While we were moving from Web 1 to Web 2, the music industry encountered its Napster-moment. Piracy and filesharing hit the recorded music industry hard. The original Napster still had a central directory, but soon this moved to decentralized networks like BitTorrent. These networks, where you connected to cryptographic hash instead of a file on a computer, paved the way for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin came up as an alternative currency, an alternative store of value. The blockchain Bitcoin got built around the values of cryptographic proof over trust. In basic terms, it’s still a public ledger with a history of transactions. These will only be added to if the nodes in the network validate a new block in the chain. With Ethereum came more functionality through smart contracts, which are programs that self-execute when certain conditions are met. Bitcoin envisions an alternative digital currency to trade and transact with. Ethereum envisions a future where the Internet is basically a large decentralized supercomputer.
Crypto and music
Music played a major part in establishing the technologies that bring the Internet back from a platform-owned state to a more decentralized state. There’s some early music culture on Bitcoin, but it starts to get interesting with DJ Pepe in 2016, which was mostly about token-gated access.
At the same time, Ethereum became a focus for people wanting to enforce much more transparency on the opaqueness of the music copyright complex. The first experiment was with Imogen Heap’s Tiny Human through Ujo Music. This was as much a way to show people how smart contracts worked as it was a statement of how a direct-to-fan sales system could work on the blockchain. From there, and driven by the ERC-20 token standard, much of the work around crypto and music focused on tokenization. Take Jonathan Mann’s Song A Day project, which he started funding through what he called an Initial Song Offering. The idea was to tokenize every track and create a marketplace around it - similar to CryptoKitties or CryptoPunks at the time.
In 2018, the same year as Jonathan’s early experiments, the ERC-721 standard got incorporated, creating NFTs. The first one that I know of with music were Crypto Jingles. All files were stored on the decentralized Internet, IPFS. The basic idea was to buy different samples, put them together, mint the result and then trade those. This was creativity through the blockchain.
The next step was to incorporate the audio into the NFT, which started with Joe Chiapetta’s Rare Digital Rock. A 17 second audio file connected to the NFT via IPFS storage. This was in 2019 and the number of artists experimenting with this new tech was small, perhaps around 50. Most of these were what we can call crypto native artists, focusing much of their work on thinking about experimenting in this nascent crypto music ecosystem. From there, NFTs start to become the dominant element in crypto music. Coupled with Ethereum’s growth more generally, we witness a whole new way of valuing music. There’s two main threads throughout this.
The first couples with 3LAU, whose early experiments with blockchain and NFTs resulted in some big sales. From there, he worked with a team to build Royal.io - a marketplace for music copyright. People could buy percentages of future earnings on royalties. There’s a legal minefield here that I won’t get in to now. Self-custody is important here, because artists can only sell these rights if they control them.
The second couples with LATASHÁ and centres around culture. Again, self-custody is the prerequisite. To be able to experiment with releasing and publishing and distributing music outside of the music copyright complex one needs to control one’s copyright in the first place. The point of LATASHÁ’s culture push was to bring opportunities to underrepresented groups. The question underlying all of this is who values the creative work you make? And then, how do we establish this value? During the early NFT hype this was a combination of the artist and a new market that existed outside of the one everyone else played in.
As crypto developed, and finally went into a bear market, a lot happened, too much to bring into this article. One way to think about this, though, is through a series of relentless experiments. Songcamp tried to bring the LATASHÁ values into group-work and co-ownership structures. It also harked back to Crypto Jingles in creating gamified experiences for both artists and fans/buyers. New platforms came up as well. With Catalog focusing, again, on the LATASHÁ values of creating 1-of-1 NFTs and allowing artists to set the price of their creative work. Kind of opposed to that was Sound.xyz, which settled on more fractionalisation, debuting with editions, e.g. of 25, and lower prices. Eventually prices got pushed down to equivalents of $1 or less. Did the experiments fail because of this. No, not necessarily, but it did show that the early promise of NFTs in music was unsustainable. Music, perhaps, is not a degen play.
Crypto and culture
Degens, of course, are a specific type of crypto culture. While this kind of culture is deeply associated with crypto, and the accompanying rug pulls, scams, etc., it’s not how it started. Bitcoin may have come off the back of a global financial crash, but its early underlying values were very much Cypherpunk. They advocated, and coded, to create a more private Internet using cryptographic tools. Privacy matters, and control of it, too. It’s also about open-source tools, building on what everyone else is doing. But it’s also focused on individual liberty and going against the grain of centralized authorities.
Along the way to our current moment, there’s been a big push around the culture of public goods. This is what Paul Dylan-Ennis, one of the keenest minds of crypto culture, defines as Regens. This subculture focused on governance experiments and drove a lot of DAO culture. They look, and looked, at our institutions and think that they can be better. There’s a strong history of co-operativism here as well. I’ve previously written how DAO culture leans in to, and should learn more from, cooperative culture. This movement of Regens was strong while Ethereum and other blockchains grew. However, they’re not the dominant culture right now. Those are the Degens, the ones who play to play and play to win. They drove a lot of DeFi and NFT initiatives, and currently can be seen around a lot of the memecoin activity.
What this meant for music, basically, is that the LATASHÁ style of values haven’t come out on top. Crypto music, as a broader culture, has succumbed to the vagueries of the Degen culture. Play the game, and win sometimes, or at least when you have the bags to push things in your favour. Everyone gets lucky and gets some free money sometimes.
The future is an infrastructure
Even though Degen culture reigns at the moment, there’s a lot of interesting things happening that will lead a shift away from that and back towards self-custody ideals. First, there’s specific artists creating culturally relevant experiences and bringing people into them. Sometimes this also harks back to the early days of tokenization, like with Sound of Fractures or BlackDave. More importantly, these experiments go back to using blockchain-based tech to create new music economies.
There is another change happening as well, form our current moment and into the near future. Crypto music was, what’s in a name, music intertwined with crypto and blockchain. The blockchain, however, has always promised to ‘fix’ the music industry. A lot of the issues around the music copyright complex revolve around things like attribution, allocation, data sharing, and speed of payments. All of those things can be solved through the blockchain. What we’ll see happening, with tools like Revelator Labs, is that this will happen in the background. Whereas the last few years saw artists mostly be either a Web3 artist or not, more and more they can all tap into the various bits of tech that might help them. The most important thing will still be self-custody - control of your rights. Just like Imogen Heap already imagined in 2015 about Tiny Human:
“The project was also to show how rich and how many tentacles one song can have, and all the people that it connects to, which often gets very lost in our digital music world, because we just see the music and if we are lucky we might see an image connected to it.”
That’s the challenge still, and one which we should talk about relentlessly. The tools are there for artists to build their worlds, let’s make sure the culture exists to support them.
Personal note
If you enjoyed the above piece, and you’ll be at Sonar+D, come find me in Barcelona on 14 June to go much deeper into how that last part about infrastructure could work.
LINKS
🖋️ CISAC annual report provides updates on AI campaigns and ISWC refinements (Chris Cooke)
“Through that work, he goes on, three core principles have emerged: the need for creators to consent to the use of their work by AI companies, the need for creators to be fairly remunerated, and the need for AI companies to be fully transparent about what training data they use.”
✘ I encourage everyone to dig deep into the report itself, but Chris highlights some of the most important elements here.
⚖️ Sony Music sues Marriot Hotels for alleged ‘rampant’ copyright infringement in social media posts (Daniel Tencer)
“The complaint asserts that Marriott’s use of Sony’s music in social media posts was at times carefully designed to capitalize on the popularity of a particular song or artist, and that Marriott was “well aware” of the impact of music to the visibility of its promotional social media posts.”
✘ Sony seems to be on a warpath to protect their IP better recently. I’ll be curious to follow along with this one again Marriot, because they previously had a deal in place which seems to have expired. Let’s see who comes out on top and how.
‼️ Brands, politics, and ethics: Navigating the complex landscape of morality (Serdar Paktin)
“For brands to regain and maintain their credibility, they must adopt a consistent and principled stance on global issues. This involves promoting peace, condemning violence and injustice, and supporting humanitarian efforts without bias. Brands must also be transparent and accountable in their actions, ensuring their messaging aligns with their values.”
✘ Serdar brings a lot of great examples in the piece as well. Most importantly, his call is one we need much more of in the public debate. This isn’t about pointing fingers, but this is about accountability.
🪩 Amapiano’s second wave: How Kwaito opened the door for Amapiano’s evolutions (Jake Colvin)
“As we spoke on the phone in the early evening, Golden Lady passionately described an artist in South Africa sending her beats while sitting in a backroom on an upturned bucket. Another producer, she said, had been borrowing his mother’s teaching laptop to make music. Countless more had lost projects when the grid power went off, shutting down their PCs. These young innovators were producing music in tough circumstances, she told me, and were getting written out of the story of amapiano’s global success. Golden Lady put me in touch with some of the underground producers she’d been talking to. As an outsider, she thought I could write about amapiano from a new perspective.”
✘ Even if you don’t like the music - which I can’t imagine! - this is a great story about music more generally. How do scenes start? Where do sounds come from? What happens when a local culture becomes global?
🫥 When online content disappears (Athena Chapekis, Samual Bestvater, Emma Remy, Gonzalo Rivero)
“The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.”
✘ Some great insights on the way we deal with data, archiving, and death on the Internet.
MUSIC
A few years ago, the legends Tony Allen and Jeff Mills worked together on an EP. It’s been on my mind the last week or so. It’s groovy, smooth, funky, uplifting, and really finds its way into your cochlea. Once there, it settles in as if in a comfortable chair. My favourite track on the EP is On the Run.