Post by @durbin • Hey

Forum for all the latest news and insights related to web3 x music projects, artists, and collectors

Stats

Comments

what's everyone thinking about free music NFTs?
music
music nfts
To kick things off - I've outlined below a little framework I use for assessing problems faced by emerging artists & the job to be done for web3 x music. I've been calling it the Pareto Frontier of Music Discovery but that name doesn't exactly roll off the tongue... One thing we at Decent are really focused on is trying to build for a "post-patronage" creator economy. How can emerging artists actually achieve self-sustaining success without the feudal aids of legacy gatekeepers. I've written a bit about this here: https://mirror.xyz/durbin.eth/EH7FaX8YW9gCY9gCf9o81Pm6x86Us3pp5XWYAxCwc7k I don't think this applies universally - there are platforms, artists & collectors for which this will not be relevant at all - but for me, personally, this is the most interesting problem to be solved & has the greatest chance for synergies with NFT trading // problem that most directly requires an on-chain solution (not everything does...) A couple of days ago, I presented Decent to a group of founders & VC's - here is a transcript of a small excerpt of the presentation: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ok, fair warning - a good chunk of this presentation will be on the problem statement because we feel as though we view it a bit differently than other music NFT platforms & it really highlights why we've built the way have. We think the problems felt by so many emerging artists can be broken down into 3 primary component parts. First, being discovered as an artist is incredibly rare. There are 60K new songs uploaded to Spotify every day. As rational music listeners, most fans optimize for time to enjoyment - e.g., my experience on Spotify is better the quicker that I find a song I like. The effect of this behavior is most of us will listen to the front-page of Spotify, which generally contains superstar artists for which there is already strong social consensus on quality instead of spending hours digging through songs of unknown quality. This is particularly true, when available listening hours are a fixed constant. Even if I might enjoy that new song more, I'm not incentivized to burn two of the three hours of music listening I have available sifting through maybe 5% of the songs uploaded just today. No one is paying me for the value of those lost hours, so my overall expected utility pursuing new songs is lower. Now, this is a very unromantic way of discussing music, which is, for many, a deeply emotional experience, and it doesn't really apply to the most devout music fans. But I think the pareto frontier of music discovery is a helpful framework to understand that the root of the problem today is more a function of individual preferences than institutional gatekeeping. Also, it serves as an interesting link between music discovery and NFT trading. [Second] Because there is still a perception that labels are the key to rising to the top of those 60,000 songs and there are limited sources available for upfront capital, artists sign away astronomical percentages of their future earnings - typically retaining only 12% of the value they create. [Third] As part of these ridiculous deals, artists frequently also lose their master rights, further limiting derivative monetization options. Music NFTs have presented an exciting new option for many artists. I think Cooper Turley reminds us once a week that artists have been able to make the equivalent of 1M streams in 30 seconds on Decent & similar platforms. The current model of releasing music NFTs though doesn't entirely solve for the problems outlined [above]. Trading volume has consolidated around an extremely small number of blue-chip names, which is the equivalent of listeners sourcing alpha from the front-page of Spotify. Artists like Daniel Allan & his Overstim project represent the best of what web3 can offer, but the reality of music NFT trading today is platforms and collectors have much greater incentives to onboard superstars than find the next Daniel Allan. NFT trading behavior, like music listening, consolidates around the names you already know. A big part of this is that there really aren't enough reasons to buy a music NFT. I still cannot really be compensated for those 2 lost hours, let alone engage post-mint, if the only returns I can expect are tied to the incumbent hype of the release. Also, what happens when the hype runs out? The answer to date is that NFTs represent membership to artists' communities, offering unique, direct access to the artists & that is the persistent value. What we have seen is that most artists really just want to make music and don't want the responsibility of managing a community. Artists like Daniel Allan & Harrison First are very much the exception to the rule. That is totally fine and artists should have this freedom; it just means the artist driven perks shouldn't parameterize platform design or be the main selling point. At Decent we create persistent value exogenous of artists' commitment to their communities by letting fans genuinely share in artists' success, reimagining community such that it is positioned around collectors and curators rather than the artists themselves, and really steering into things like liquid curation markets that make web3 a genuinely new opportunity for artists. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Thanks for joining this community & look forward to kicking off the conversation!! -- durbin.lens co-founder, decent.xyz
Welcome to the first community on Lens devoted to web3 x music! Let's use this community as a forum to record keep thoughts and insights on the space so that we all might advance it!