J-Ha
My partner and I went to a very different kind of concert for our shared birthday: James Blake's "Piano Tour" in San Francisco.
The show, to be held at an unspecified venue within 15 minutes of San Francisco, was organized through bside. Bside connects independent venues and artists to the fans that support them.
I got early access to tickets by being a James Blake subscriber on Vault.fm for $5/month. Vault.fm enables artists to drop music on their own terms and lets fans subscribe to access drops, which, in James' case, are songs released without a traditional music label.
James drops music via Vault.fm at least once a week, letting subscribers know via text message.
I also heard about the early access tickets via text message.
He chats with his community of subscribers in an earnest group chat in the Vault.fm mobile app. He shows up so authentically with short messages that share thoughts and info at meaningful moments.
The show venue wasn't revealed until two days before the show. During the show, James said Ticketmaster controls 80% of venues, so finding a venue through bside can be a challenge. And yet, The Warfield came through.
The "Piano Show" was James as a vulnerable, authentic, and inspired artist, and it was true to its namename: It was just James, a piano, and a few machines. He said he wanted to show us what it is like when he is creating and writing music. He performed powerful sound experiments, talked with the audience, demonstrated how he creates effects, and started/stopped songs when the machinery didn't work as expected.
As he demoed creating a loop, it captured sounds from the audience. As the loop played throughout the song, we heard ourselves as co-creators in the music we love.
Someone called out a request. I'm paraphrasing, but cheekily James said, “If you know anything about me, you know that I never do requests. In fact, now I’ll never do that song again.” And then proceeded to play the song. He paused to say, “I’m not playing this because you asked for it. It was next on the setlist,” which was met with uproarious laughter.
Isn't this what artistic creation and fan connections are about?
For a brief moment during the show, James talked about the music industry issues we face today as artists and fans:
In a Mar 2024 interview with Variety, he said:
Music is my life’s purpose, and I will not have mine destroyed by a bunch of labels and tech companies who don’t even pay us and exploit us relentlessly... I’m extremely lucky I got in before streaming took over and before all these shady deals were made behind our backs.
As a poet, this resonates. Which artist longs to put their "life's purpose" through the funhouse mirror of middleman monopolies? Which artist wants to distance themselves and profit incommensurately from the people who love what they create?
Inspired by James' quest, I did a bit more research about these issues, Vault.fm, and Bside and realized that a project I work on, XMTP, an open, secure, private, and decentralized communication protocol, might actually have a role to play in the quest.
Vault.fm was cofounded by David Greenstein, who also cofounded Sound.xyz. Sound.xyz is built with the Sound Protocol, "a permissionless, open source, modular smart contract framework for efficient creation of digital collectibles by musicians, artists, and creators."
Here are Greenstein's thoughts on how Sound.xyz and Vault.fm are meant to work together:
Alongside Vault.fm, Sound.xyz, and the Sound Protocol, how might XMTP help enable authentic, equitable, secure, and direct connections between artists and fans?
A large part of the Vault.fm app experience is a group chat between fans and the artist. This group chat could benefit from being built with XMTP, bringing Vault.fm's messaging features onchain and aligning with Sound.xyz’s vision of empowering artists through blockchain technology.
Group chat between artist and fans, built with XMTP would provide a secure and private chat platform that enhances artist-fan engagement while ensuring the ownership of communication data for both the artist and the fan.
Currently, Vault.fm does not provide the option to create your own groups or 1-to-1 chats with other subscribers, so people create groups on other platforms to coordinate meetups, for example. XMTP could be used to expand chat functionality in Vault.fm while also providing the security and privacy guarantees of Messaging Layer Security (MLS) and verifiable identities.
Additionally, because the Sound Protocol and XMTP are both open and interoperable, the possibilities for composing fundamentally unique, meaningful, and safe experiences for artists and fans are endless.
What might we build together?
Bonus: Streaming Royalty Calculator
On a related note, you might be interested in learning about the Living Wage for Musicians Act of 2024, which aims to help ensure that artists and musicians can build sustainable careers in the digital age. I found the Streaming Royalty Calculator on the page particularly interesting.
Sponsored by Representatives Rashida Tlaib (MI) and Jamaal Bowman (NY) and backed by United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), the bill is built to pay artists a minimum penny per stream, an amount calculated specifically to provide a working-class artist a living wage from streaming.
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