Web3 | MUSIC x

NFT Avatars and Onboarding Subcultures to the Web3

Posted on September 21, 2021 | by Bas Grasmayer

You may have heard of CryptoPunks and Bored Apes. They’re NFT series of 10,000 unique and randomly generated images of characters. They’re also 2 of the most well-known examples of ‘NFT avatars’ – a trend which has exploded in the crypto space of 2021 and is set to permeate subcultures once they move into the web3.

Here’s how, and why.

PFPs & NFT Avatars

NFT avatar projects are casually referred to as PFPs: ProFile Pictures, since that’s a common use case for them. They most often have up to 10,000 template characters that are ‘minted’ by people wanting to own one. Minting costs money (cryptocurrency) and in the process of minting randomized traits are applied, ranging from extremely rare to common. These may be variables like skin colour, headwear, haircuts, shirts, background colours and anything else you may think of that’s appropriate to the project. Many projects will have 10 traits with 10 variables per trait.

Once minted, the character is created and will remain unchanged, so before you mint, you usually only know what the style of the project is, but not what your NFT character will end up looking like. Once all NFTs from a series have been minted, the value of some of the PFPs may increase, since people may try to purchase ones that specifically appeal to them (like Jay-Z’s CryptoPunk).

Being early

The creative web3 space is still relatively small. Many of the more successful projects specifically cater to the crypto community and its aesthetics. As interest has peaked, so have the number of PFP projects that now flood the space. Many struggle to get all their NFTs minted, often resulting in minted NFTs being sold for a price lower than the minting cost, which further slows down the minting process.

Yet we’re early. Many types of aesthetics that are popular in subcultures, for example as album artwork, in music videos, or as tattoos, don’t necessarily resonate well with those already onboarded to the web3. While some of the aesthetics emerging from the web3 space will go on to become cornerstones of emerging subcultures, a more diverse variety of aesthetics will become popular in the web3 as more people get onboarded.

A PFP project making slow progress on minting seems bad, but if it finds ways to onboard the subculture in which its aesthetics are rooted, it can succeed over time and enjoy a potentially more meaningful success than it could by shilling to speculating crypto bros (f/m/non-binary).

Onboarding subcultures

The social dynamics of what’s happening right now are not unique. The clearest memory I have of subcultures shifting to a new type of internet is from around 2009 when artists started switching out the MySpace Music players on their profiles for SoundCloud embeds. SoundCloud’s player was clearly superior. While MySpace limited you to a maximum number of tracks per profile, SoundCloud allowed you to upload 4 tracks of any length per month for free in those days. The benefits were obvious and thus once a few musicians in a genre embedded the SoundCloud player on their MySpace profile, you’d see it spread like wildfire through their subgenre.

The type of people who were the first to switch out their player, the innovators, are now onboarding to the web3. Many of them are already experimenting with NFTs and DAOs. PFPs allow them to signal the web3 to others in their cultural space, just like how the SoundCloud player signalled a shift from the age of downloads to the age of streaming. PFPs are not enough though, since their utility is not as obvious compared to an embeddable player that was easily twice as good as what preceded it.

For subcultures to onboard to the web3, there are two main hurdles to overcome:

Proof of stake (PoS). The energy use associated with Proof of Work blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum has made many people unwilling to touch any type of crypto. So, I expect a few factors in the next year will drive more people to the web3: 1) Ethereum switching to PoS; 2) maturing ecosystems around PoS blockchains such as Tezos and Solana; 3) more accessible layer 2 rollups for more diverse use cases.
Usability. It currently takes about 30-60 minutes to onboard someone to the web3 and buy their first NFT, like an ENS domain (see my primer below). They have to open a wallet, verify their identity on an exchange, buy crypto, wait for transactions to clear, etc. It’s hard to figure things out. It’s easy to make expensive mistakes. Many people who are already onboarded forget how hard it is: try onboarding a friend who’s completely new to it. Sit next to them. Walk them through all the steps.

Subcultures and PFPs

A year from now, things will likely be a lot easier for newcomers. Besides work being done on the previous two bullet points, tech giants like PayPal, Square / Cash App, and likely Facebook / Instagram entering the space will help decrease the number of hurdles (at the cost of decentralization).

It will increase the viability of sounds and images that are specific only to certain subcultures and decrease the necessity to make plays that cater to the wider web3 community. So if you’ve been hesitating to start a PFP project or a DAO, because you don’t think the people are onboard for it yet: start small and do it anyway. Consider a lower number than 10,000, and don’t rush, don’t shill too hard. Your audience will get here eventually and you’ll be the CryptoPunk equivalent of your domain. The OG PFP NFTs of your subculture.

I don’t know about you, but I’m so ready for crypto goth, crypto gabber, and actual crypto punk. See you soon.

Post-pandemic music scenes

Posted on August 30, 2021 | by Bas Grasmayer

There is no end in sight to the pandemic. Yet a privileged few are getting a taste of it. A preview. The ingredients of post-pandemic scenes will be an urge to move forward, a nostalgia for what existed before, and the integration of methods of resilience in the new status quo for music.

The urge to prefix ‘post-’

The urge to move forward, to connect with music and each other again, is one of the driving forces behind the demand for events and people’s willingness to spend on it. People who are attending an event for the first time since the start of the pandemic come out, vaccinated or tested, but also people who have been plague raving. While many people have spoken out against plague raves, I’m not aware of any blacklists existing and suspect perpetrators will be quickly forgotten in a wish to move on and reunite.

There are also people who have left the scene: from artists, performers, workers in other domains of music, to party-goers. Some have moved out of cities, some changed careers and became programmers, train drivers, designers. Sad as this may be, it also creates space in the most competitive areas for newcomers who perhaps carry a different vision than the old guard does.

There has always been a certain passing of the torch, usually gradually. Now we’ll see it in high contrast.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia comes in many forms. Younger generations will be nostalgic for a future they anticipated having. They’re going to manifest that future now. Then there are the people that are frozen in time. One day in February or March 2020, they left the club and went home, expecting to do the same thing next weekend. For them, in part of the world, that weekend is finally emerging.

This dynamic is also manifesting in music, creating an interesting tension between new emerging visions and the desire to return to our old place of comfort. It’s a perfect recipe for new sounds that integrate throwbacks – whether that’s Britney Spears vocals, 90s subculture aesthetics, or pop punk.

Methods of resilience

Livestreams, NFTs & DAOs, and countless new formal and informal organisations have all emerged as methods to offer resilience in a period of hardship. Instead of zeroing in on specifics, like we do in the links section of the newsletter, let’s look at the bigger picture.

Normalization of virtual music experiences.

Livestreams and other types of virtual music experiences will sit alongside other offers. They may be highly socialized or ‘single player’ and need to adopt ‘better than real life’ strategies in order to succeed.

Interconnected communities.

Virtual events and Discords connected international communities in ways they weren’t before. While previously the connections were through traveling musicians and promoters, now people from different places have connected through music in another way. This change may be difficult to spot for most readers who have been creatively or professionally involved in music for years, but it’s tangible for superfans as well as aspiring artists just starting out.

New formal networks.

The past year has seen organisations form from the events sector lobbying and trying to stay afloat to social justice organisations standing up for people in music. These organisations are constantly finding ways to stay relevant and help people deal with the issues of the day. They’ll be able to provide representation post-pandemic where previously representation didn’t exist (or struggled to gain visibility).

New informal networks.

Most networks don’t have a name or legal entity, so the changes happening here are harder to represent, but crucial to music going forward. For example: in Berlin, organizers have been allowed to throw gigs outdoors, but with 8 months of gloomy weather per year, the city’s not exactly set up for this. People have scrambled to organize spaces, assisted by formal networks, but coming together in new configurations that previously didn’t exist, with no formal name to signify them. The connections being shaped & the integration of previously disconnected networks will shape at least part of the post-pandemic music landscape in cities around the world.

Web3.

For substance, read everything or anything we’ve already written about on this topic. In short, communities can now turn the value they create into money by raising funds through NFTs and other types of tokens. This goes into platform-agnostic community bank accounts. It’s a powerful dynamic that will be as influential for the next generation of culture as the web 2.0 was for the previous. It gives more people the chance to opt out of the status quo & do things differently. I’m particularly curious how collectives & the informal networks that formed during the pandemic will utilize this for events (real & virtual), merch (real & virtual), and to support their creative work.

At the beginning of the year, we anticipated 2021 would be characterized by new scarcity models. Rather, it’s not just the year – it’s the decade.

Why your crypto startup looks like a scam

Posted on August 24, 2021 | by Bas Grasmayer

The Web 3 is still rough around the edges, but the growth of value has been immense. Fertile ground for scams. This piece aims to achieve two things:

How to avoid potential scams, and;
How to avoid your company looking like a scam.

This is based on years of watching the crypto space, from ICO pump & dumps to the NFTs & DAOs of today, so I’m not talking about any company in particular. However, should you have the feeling what I say applies to your own, then following the advice laid out here can improve your public perception.

No way to check transactions ‘on-chain’

NFTs took off in a way other digital goods didn’t, because they’re verifiable and you can actually own them in your own wallet. When a platform, for example an NFT marketplace, doesn’t make it possible to track this info (for example via Etherscan), you lose all the major benefits of NFTs. There’s no transparency and there’s no guarantee that the NFT will live beyond the lifespan of the platform in case of bankruptcy or an actual scam. This is really important, because projects will fail. Nearly half of all 2017 ICOs had failed by mid-2018.

No roadmap, whitepaper, explanation

Transparency is key. It’s early days. Things are clunky, they might break, and there are scammers around. The crypto space addresses this with loads of transparency through whitepapers and wikis that explain exactly how things work, what they plan to do in the future, and even the smart contracts that power it all. I personally wouldn’t spend money anywhere where this is missing. It’s such a basic thing.

As an example, here’s the Audius whitepaper (PDF).

No clear skin in the game

The crypto space is young, but it’s easy to build a network. When that network is missing, it suggests being new to the space, not understanding it well, or perhaps not having the intention to. What can compensate for it is a network in another domain, like music, sports or art, so that their reputation can be checked.

No team page on the website

This is not a must, but when all else is missing I want to know who are staking their reputation. I want to find these people on Twitter, Discord, LinkedIn and see who they’re connected to. Basically: who’s handling the money I spend?

It’s not that hard to figure out when post likes & follower counts just don’t add up. There are also tools to figure out what % of an account’s followers are bots. To me this often feels like someone trying to buy legitimacy instead of earn it. Scammers tend to move fast, because they need to pull the rug before people bail out.

Err on the side of caution

There are plenty of platforms that do things well. Don’t let FOMO get the better of you. Steer clear of platforms that tick the above boxes and give them time to sort things out. Help your friends do the same. It’s estimated that 80% of 2017’s ICOs were scams with $9 million being lost to them daily (2019). Lots of people trying out the promises of Web 3 got burned immediately and the whole space became known for it.

Let’s not let that happen again.

A music service based on collective bids on NFTs (aka fractional NFT ownership)

Posted on August 13, 2021 | by Bas Grasmayer | 2 Comments

This week hundreds of people pooled money to collectively place a bid on NFTs and attain fractional ownership using a tool called PartyBid. They succeeded. 478 people teamed up to form the Party Of The Living Dead and secured one of the highly popular (and expensive) NFT collectible CryptoPunks. 25 people acquired an NFT released by music x web3 project Songcamp Elektra, calling themselves Elektranauts.

The Elektranauts PartyBid (@prtyDAO) has officially won the auction for “Log 2: Godina’s Message” on @ourZORA !!!$SQUAD UP 🥳https://t.co/py566k4LtB https://t.co/sGGsND1I4P
— SONGCAMP (@songcamp_) August 8, 2021

After purchasing the NFT (of which there exists 1), buyers get ERC-20 tokens which represent the fractional ownership (of which there exist proportional amounts for each buyer). In my recent piece about data autonomy & the creator economy I explained how tokens on blockchains can be used to create platform-independent social groups. This is an example of it: the fractional ownership of the NFT represents group membership. In the case of the Party of the Living Dead that membership is signified through 1,201,725 $DEAD tokens and in the case of the Elektranauts through 2,100 $SQUAD tokens, a reference to a term used by the Songcamp DAO. What if certain privileges were given to those group members?

From whales to swarms

The NFT boom that happened over the past year saw so-called ‘whales’, people with a lot of (crypto)currency to spend, place huge bids in auctions. As the usability layer of the web3 evolves, we see groups of people (often organised in DAOs) come up with tools like PartyBid to be able to compete with whales.

It is early days for the web3. It may feel differently if you’re out of the loop, but new ideas, interfaces, protocols, tools, improvements, standards are being proposed, shipped and adopted on a daily basis. So what can build upon PartyBid? What can build upon fractionalized ownership of music NFTs?

A Bandcamp for Fan DAOs?

Fans can now come together to place collective bids on music NFTs. Afterwards, they receive tokens to signify their status as a fractional holder of that NFT. What if there was a service that offered extra perks based on the (fractional) ownership of music NFTs?

I buy music on Bandcamp for 3 reasons: 1) to support artists (for the brave: here’s my collection), 2) to get the audio files in order to DJ, 3) to offline sync the music into the Bandcamp app. The music may also be available on large streaming platforms, but I like the idea of ownership & supporting financially – it’s a win-win. So I stream my purchases from the app, or play from the offline cache. Could similar dynamics be utilized for a next-gen music service?

Each fractional NFT token you hold could unlock things like offline playback, although it may take a few years for the music licensing landscape to catch up with the web3. So let’s look at two other scenarios:

Fan chat

Communication tools for mini-fan clubs, e.g. a group chat. You login with your crypto-wallet, the service reads your tokens and 🪄✨ like magic ✨🪄 you’re connected to other fans. It would have to compete with other apps that may implement tokenized group chats, like Telegram (and I predict Instagram), so perhaps music-specific features should be included, initially by integrating with web2 platforms like SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, etc. A web3 route would mean empowering the group with tools specifically tailored towards DAOs of music fans.

Fan galleries

As a fan you can show off your collection on a profile. A service might help people find holders of fractional tokens of NFTs minted by the same addresses. That means: if an artist created 2 NFTs, the token holders for those NFTs can find each other through the platform.

This could create an economy on its own. If other people want in on the fractional ownership, then a new community could organize and place a bid to buyout the original community. The original’s members would be able to profit from the increased value of the NFT, plus would still be able to join the new community’s bid, so they retain access after the sale. Importantly, the original artist would also be able to receive a % of resale money, if such a clause is contained in the smart contract.

And then…

To imagine what the space could look like, one should ask “and then what?” If a certain scenario plays out, what does it look like when people build from there? What would have to surround it? There’s a whole lot of imagining going on right now and a lot of building. Some of it will follow patterns we’re familiar with from the web2, but much of it will diverge.

What’s becoming clear to anyone paying attention: what makes NFTs is not the high auction sums – it’s their functionality & use to underpin a new decentralized social web.

The non-static tipping point: how culture’s going non-linear and generative

Posted on July 20, 2021 | by Bas Grasmayer

Deepfakes, infinite albums, generative NFTs – creative pioneers are rapidly pushing technology-enabled concepts into the center of web culture. Whereas just a few years ago, it was hard to get people to care about non-static media, it’s now grabbing people’s attention and their (crypto) currency.

Problem-solving

The Infinite Album gives video game streamers a way to soundtrack their streams without risk of takedowns. The AI creates soundscapes that react to your gameplay and even lets Twitch viewers use commands in the chat in order to influence the soundtrack. The music industry as a whole has been unable to form a global approach that makes it easy for gamers to understand what music they can play on-stream. This situation has given room for new entrants, some very tech-driven, to solve a clear problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0KCZlvNVKw

Another example I’ve mentioned here before over the years is Endel, which provides ‘personalized soundscapes’ that help the listener focus, relax or sleep. They’ve essentially taken a common use case for music and have built a product that doesn’t neatly fit within the common formats of the music industry: a mental health app with adaptive soundscapes. Their artist collaborations include techno pioneer Plastikman (Richie Hawtin) and Grimes.

World-building

One of the most ambitious projects to recently launch is Holly Herndon‘s ‘Holly+‘. The singer, musician and frequent AI-collaborator has created a deepfake version of herself which people can then collaborate with. Another way of putting it is that Holly, through her collaboration with Never Before Heard Sounds, has created an instrument that is based on herself. She will set up a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) to govern her likeness and is creating an NFT auction house using the Zora protocol to sell approved artworks. She describes:

“The Holly+ model creates a virtuous cycle. I release tools to allow for the creative usage of my likeness, the best artworks and license opportunities are approved by DAO members, profit from those works will be shared amongst artists using the tools, DAO members, and a treasury to fund further development of the tools.”

Other recent examples include a new release by Agoria & Ela Minus on Bronze Player, a tool that lets artists create music that recomposes itself infinitely, which in a way makes recorded music feel more like performed music in that you won’t be able to experience it exactly the same way twice. A linear version of the song was also released (embedded below).

One NFT platform I’m keeping a close eye on is Async, which sells art NFTs in layers, allowing the creator to set rules for the manipulation of the art and the buyers to reconfigure the work. After starting with visual arts, it launched Async Music:

“This is music with the ability to change its composition. It may sound different each time you come back to listen. This is achieved by breaking down a song into separate layers called Stems. Each Stem has multiple Variants for its new owner to choose from. In this way, a single Async Music track contains many unique combinations of sounds.”

Water & Music, run by Cherie Hu, estimates that Async has grossed about $650K in revenue from music NFT sales in May & June of this year, taking the third place in terms of music NFT marketplaces by revenue size.

Status-shaping

Possibly the largest non-static art projects, by revenue share, are NFT collectible avatars such as CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club. These avatars are generated from variables like hair & skin colour, accessories and other types of character customization, leading to sets of 10,000 unique avatars. These collectibles are then sold as NFTs. Particularly CryptoPunks are highly valued due to them being minted before last year’s NFT explosion and thus being a status symbol in the budding Web3, often selling for tens of thousands of dollars. There are even cases of people paying over a hundred thousand dollars, like Jay-Z for CryptoPunk #6095.

A tipping point?

I believe that music’s future is non-static. It gained a default characteristic of linearity in the age of the recording, meaning: a song will sound the same every time you hear it. That’s a very recent trait for music to have by default. Now with powerful connected devices and a new generation of DAWs, we’re seeing this temporary reality of the recording age unravel and become optional rather than a default.

If you’re an artist, this unraveling means greater freedom in how you approach music as an art; it can be interactive, adaptive, generative, dynamic, augmentative, 3D, etc. If you’re more interested in the business side, you may find that you can take a page or two from the gaming industry’s book and make more money by charging for features rather than the content itself. Sell features, not songs.