40 years ago, in the Summer of 1981, Video Killed the Radio Star was the first music video played on a new cable station called MTV. The irony was purposeful and prophetic. Video Killed the Radio Star highlighted how video would change the way the world consumed music and MTV re-introduced something else; another means to measure the worth of music and its artists based on paid metrics.
A shiny object MTV was, it did nothing to counteract what creatives were experiencing in an industry that made a practice of mentally, financially and at times physically abusing its artists. But artists still risked it all for a deal and the only real access to MTV. MTV was just another sugared ingredient in the badder of industry enriched fame. Most artists measured their success and gambled their self-esteem on the ability to get signed. Through the 90s, Fame would became Celebrity and further compromised the mental health and lives of multiple mainstream musicians and the culture they helped create. Still, popularity, determined by industry, remained the carrot?
Faster internet speeds and P2P music sharing would eventually kill MTV. In fact, the egalitarian rhetoric said today about Web 3 is almost verbatim what was said about P2P by the same tech voices. “The revolution was here! Music should be free” they hailed, with all the superman-sized assurance they regularly mustered. Equal amounts of vitriol, of course, was expressed by artists and industry. But in the end, industry negotiated its silence, leaving a system that now serves everyone BUT music artists.
Time didn't stop and millennials and Gen Z grew up. Today most consumers could not imagine paying for music. Web 2 was supposed to level the playing field for artists with unobstructed access to their fanbase. Now, we could truly be independent with just a 1000 fans and an algorithmic bribe to the social media barons. Meanwhile, musicians work the game to make the industry’s job easier finding and fucking the next big pop star conveniently praised for their use of social media. The promises of pop status, broken time again by the entertainment industry, still had knee jerk appeal.
Web 2, with all its faults, was a bootcamp for what was to come. This is where NFTs and social tokens come in. The artist moves from building a fanbase to building and sharing an economy of culture with their fans.
The terms Social Tokens and Tokenomics is a put off for me; linguistically. My preferred term is Social Cake. $SocialCake is an access pass to a who and a what? Access is given to those with $YourCake and the ‘what’ determines $YourCake’s value.
It’s 2021, I was new to NFTs, as was everyone, I tried to apply to Roll and Rally to get my own social token. I was kindly denied access to Web 3 technology based on my Web 2 metrics? The hell?
It is still a popularity contest of prospects and risks. Web3 culture is trapped in the same capital conventionality found in prior iterations of 0 and 1s.
As with social tokens, the old guard can easily be found in the language used with NFTs; whitelists, platforms, tokens, bids, marketplaces, reserved, pre-sales, giveaways, follow me, rarities?! THIS language manages culture; it doesn’t create it.
Web 3 transforms Follow Me into Follow Us.
The challenge with technology, as we use it, is that it’s here to serve capitalism and pop consumerism is here to make us feel valued; within it. It’s been 35 years or so since we started consuming via the internet and the underlying culture that reliably erodes our mental health as creatives has not changed. What will we change for ourselves this time? In what ways will our relationship change with fans; our people? What strange place are we inviting music people into?
New tech always paints the walls white to make a room feel new. Music can help the layers underneath bleed through.
This new world won't just seem weird because of new words and terms, but because the culture is off. Musicians don’t have “auctions”; and selling to a handful of collectors does not a fanbase make. Obtaining a bag this way, to be clear, is an option, not a criticism. Music should strengthen it’s imprint in the art work.
When it comes to blockchain technology, we musicians are trying to find way inside a world and ways of an entirely different art medium. Bags aside, we are lost. With respect to our own mental health history with industry, popularity and scarcity, how can music begin to use Web 3 in different ways?
The fleeting nature of the past 20 years has encouraged a passivity around fan hood. And I don’t only mean passivity in the obvious sense, with vanity likes and follows, but also how it shows itself in the remote-aggressive actions of social media based fan gangs. Fans who pop stars seldom, or care to have influence over, unless cancelled themselves.
I once heard Black Dave, an anime hip hop NFT artist say,
‘…marketing music in the NFT space allows the artist to not just target but choose their fans.’ - @blackdave.eth
So why are we pricing NFT music at 2 ETH+ ($6,000+) instead of devising ways to pass out more slices of cake for considerably less. Don’t let those same tech voices or pilgrim successes, distract you from the frontier that Web 3 can be for all. This is not a baking competition. Just focus on stirring your foot in the batter.
Now is social cake good for everyone? No (full stop). Just like social media was the achilles heel of so many artists, this too will intimidate some. And the tech is not there yet, to help manage things. If $YourCake is trading against other currencies outside of your community, then you’re going to need legal and financial help from the some old faces. There is also the question of creative control. Not every artist does well in crowds or even likes to deal with people. That being said, Web 3 ain’t for every body; but what technology has ever been? There are people who don’t watch tv or refuse to stream, preferring old school wax records. Do you. But if you wanna do this, then let’s go!
The possibilities of cake are endless, but as music creatives, we should be mindful of the old pitfalls that usually ride in on the euphoria of new tech.
I’ll be blunt, if musicians are going to do anything, it will not be on Ethereum. Perhaps leave it to the whales. Ethereum is not only obscenely expensive, the tech bros got yall thinking a whale is the most powerful fish in the sea. Music moves like schools of fish; which is adaptive not natural. They swim together to look like a whale to predators. I know it’ can scary to build new marketplaces on other chains, but this is exactly what we as musicians need to do to create our own market culture.
Social Cake and chain reviews is well beyond the scope of this op-ed, but I invite the NFT music community to help me, help us, think differently about how our people will be introduced to music on the blockchain.
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Hanifah Walidah is a musician, NFT curator, Kernel Fellow, and founder of Beats Per Mint ($BPM), a decentralized monthly curated music collection, first-time minting platform and community onboarding tool, on the Near chain. I’m inviting those with standard currency (ETH) to fund the first year of Beats Per Mint through Mirror. This would be an investment in both music and market options for musicians. More about Near here.
Follow @beatspermint on Twitter. Ask questions and share your thoughts there.
Hanifah Walidah