✘ Tokens, what are they good for? Absolutely indie
And: Music tech continues to attract investment; OnlyFans' stunning economics; The sound of belonging; Indie music is the only industry worth saving; Art, not evidence
The music industry is not going through a change of paradigm, but it’s going through a paradigm of changes. Since 2015, we’ve seen fast-paced changes in the technologies to support production and distribution. At the same time, we’ve seen - again and again - how the law and the evolution of finances struggle to catch up with the pace of cultural and technological evolution. All of this has led the team at MIDiA to call our current time one of bifurcation. This expresses itself in the way we see lean-back experiences of streaming versus lean-in experiences of social media. There are, in other words, monetization models that focus on consumers and those that focus on fans. This isn’t new, but it’s being exacerbated by the platform models serving both sides. MIDiA makes listeners out of consumers and players out of fans. The former simply want to listen, the latter want to interact, remix, edit, chop-up, play.
Self-custody of rights
The question hanging over this kind of bifurcation-thinking leans heavily on the debates around equitable remuneration such as we saw in the UK in recent years. We live in a streaming economy, and streaming has brought the economics of the recorded music industry back up again. This has, however, mainly benefited the major rightsholders in the industry. At the same time, with the rise of social media we also saw a rise of a creator economy. These creators hold a lot of sway, because they reach large audiences.
What happens in between these two modes? On the one side we find those listeners and on the other side we find those players. Of course, a lot of the interaction with creators through social media is parasocial. What’s more, it’s a form of escapism. And yet, there’s a lot power in all this play. There’s interaction and artists can feed off of that. Similarly, the interaction tends to extend to happen between the players, between the fans. This isn’t just about music. You only have to take a look at the workings of fan fiction - Anne Kustritz brilliantly talks about communities finding a ‘pocket public.’
But to truly take advantage of this player-mode, it’s important to own the rights necessary to make this happen. Remixing, modelling, speeding up, and everything else people think of involved working with the original IP. It means interacting with copyright just as much as anything else. It is, in other words, a mode which truly comes alive when an artist retains custody of their own IP and associated copyrights.
So why tokens now?
Monetization happens mostly through streaming, or, more generally, through the more traditional recorded music distribution routes. There are systems in place to track this, and globally agreed upon methods to bring revenues back to rightsholders. And yet, this system doesn’t fit naturally onto the player-mode, the remix-mode. There, it’s important to trade and track stems, remixes, versions, projects and all in various states of readiness and distribution.
KOR Protocol has created a way to track of all this, utilizing blockchain technologies. What’s more exciting, is perhaps how this can move the question of ‘what can the blockchain do for music’ to ‘what can music do for the blockchain.’ It’s a solution to a problem of rights allocation and revenue sharing in our transmedia world. Moreover, it’s an invitation to play, to start to think about what music could be by letting it interact with the technology itself. This can be music, but also turn into a video game, or a piece of fan fiction.
Both sides of the bifurcation leak into other. Transmedia worlds such as those pushed on by KOR will find their ways into those traditional distribution revenue models. To bring those two worlds together, Revelator Labs allows artists, and others, to tokenize their royalties from those distribution networks. Tokens could always be infused with meaning, but by connecting them with real-world assets like royalties they can also become currencies between different groups of players.
Absolutely indie
Indie artists and labels are best positioned to take advantage of this developing ecosystem. They retain ownership of their rights and can freely experiment with their communities across transmedia. At the same time, they can tap into more traditional distribution routes and bring those revenues into the game. This extends itself to a form of infrastructure ownership, where copyrights, and thus revenue opportunities, sit across the playing field. What happens here, is that the fan-to-fan interaction becomes so much more important. Not only from a revenue perspective - they can earn money by creating and sharing in revenues - but also from the perspective that the artist has to do less community management.
What I see developing here, is the infrastructure to support the independent artist and label. They will create the early examples, or small-scale models, of the digitally integrated and empowered music ecosystems of the future.
Let’s meet at ADE
I’ll be talking more about the above at ADE, together with the people from KOR and Revelator Labs, as well as Sound of Fractures. This happens on Wednesday 16 October from 3pm til 5pm at the Andaz in Amsterdam.
Reach out, and let’s meet up!
LINKS
🥾 Long players: Why Music Tech continues to attract investment (Trevor Clawson)
“And yet music tech is everywhere. If we go to see a live show technology drives the close integration between music, lights and background video. When the last Beatles record was released, it was AI that enabled a poorly recorded vocal by John Lennon to sound like a professional take. And when we buy tickets, the secondary markets and surge pricing are underpinned by technology.”
✘ A great piece showcasing the strength of the music/tech landscape. From social diversity to big bets, it’s all there.
🪭 Breaking down OnlyFans’ stunning economics (Matthew Ball)
“As the distribution of revenues are unequal, so too are fans. There are over 305 million registered fan accounts (not all of whom are “active,” let alone paid subscribers), which works out to 74 fans per creator, but the top creator accounts have tens of thousands to millions of fans.”
✘ It’s the power law, hard and simple and exacerbated by the creator economy. This is why we need to build the indie ecosystems I describe above.
🖭 The sound of belonging (Josh Dalton)
“Fans don’t just want to listen—they want to belong. And when we give them that chance, when we finally make streaming social, we’re not just preserving music. We’re amplifying its power, allowing it to transcend platforms and playlists and truly become what it’s meant to be: ours.”
✘ A great accompaniment to the sentiments expressed above with the added bonus of explaining why interactivity, or social actions, create a sense of belonging that music needs to thrive.
🫡 Independent music is the only industry worth saving (Dan Dewar)
“This is the legacy of the music industry as shaped by the major labels. A culture that not only tolerates but celebrates toxic power dynamics. Stories are reported regularly but rarely come with consequence (social accountability sits outside of this and rarely leads to industry accountability). Artists and executives who have operated under the protection of fame and wealth continue to be heralded as titans of the industry. The actions of Sean Combs is not an aberration—they are the outcome of an industry operating as it was designed.”
✘ Dan is coming from a totally different angle than me in the piece above, but he comes to the same conclusion: “This is the industry where you will find the early traces of the next great leap in consumption models. It’s where you will find repeated innovations on artist business models and operating structures.”
⚖️ Art, not evidence (nora rahimian)
“In most countries, freedom of speech protects this. But when it comes to certain genres, like hip hop and drill, we’re seeing a significant increase in the way that lyrics are used as evidence in legal cases. Lawyers and judges with no background in these genres argue that “it must be true”, especially when the defendants are poor (another example of how the power of celebrity plays out), and then use those lyrics to convict.”
✘ nora takes a similar view to enabling that Dan does above, but switches it round to fans and the way art does get treated as a place of non-imagination in court, especially drill and rap.
MUSIC
You’ve probably never heard of the Dulcitone, but perhaps you do know what a Fender Rhodes is. Well, the Dulcitone is its predecessor. A gorgeous instrument created in the mid-19th Century in Glasgow. Nightports pull the playing of Matthew Bourne on the Dulcitone together in a number of mesmerizing tracks. Another great addition to the Leaf Label catalogue.