I've joked that the biggest impact of blockchain technology on the music industry are the friends we made along the way, but I'm starting to think it isn’t such a joke. If the networks that have linked us previously have been discrete —unsaved phone numbers in WhatsApp groups and expensed rounds of drinks at the bar— it seems that new technologies have the opportunity to make these connections explicit. Co-created zines, collaboratively curated exhibitions, collective compilations. None of these formats are novel, but the means available to attribute, compensate and organise are.

Over the last year, I've had the deep pleasure of travelling to talk about these ideas. It is not lost on me that while touring a lecture on how decentralised technologies can enable music communities, I found myself deeply enmeshed in the decentralised music communities I was talking about. Autonomous not in our use of technology but in our approach to organising, or lack thereof. Sure, several of the groups I interacted with have organisational structures, and some use categories like "music festival", "record label" or "radio station" to describe the work that they do. What I found most striking however, was the sense of community I found in between the organisation, at the interstitial conference lunch tables and late night sticky-floored clubs. We found ourselves together in New York, in Amsterdam, in Istanbul not because we had all phoned each other up to arrange it, but because our common interest lead us to the same room, on the same crowded street, in the same city.

This is powerful, and is something I'd like to overstate. It is a miracle to me that we can run into old friends and internet acquaintances by chance or by circumstance in cities all over the world, simply because we have a shared love of music. It's corny as hell but it's something tech companies and Twitter evangelists look past too quickly when attempting to build us streaming services and metaverses.

Communities are not the domain of work but the domain of people, and to suppose that communities can arise from work or as the fruits of that labour is to miss the point entirely. Communities are, to quote Jean-Luc Nancy's 'The Inoperative Community', the "interruption, fragmentation, suspension" of the necessity to produce and complete. Communities are chat rooms, not job boards. This isn't to say that we don't work collaboratively to make beautiful things, but that the work and these things are not what hold us together. It’s the people, the dance floors, the shared meals, that keep us coming back for more.

Music communities are more than the sum of their parts. I'm hopeful technology can improve the ways we create and collect, disburse and distribute, but would be remiss to say that the ecologies and scenes which have endured despite and in spite of this work can be replicated by a block in a chain.