A few experiences in the recent past have led me to what will follow this essay. An old mate recommended I look up Audius, another suggested I release my upcoming album as an NFT, among others. After reactivating my Twitter, listening to hours and hours of podcasts, and reading a few white papers (most of which kind of made sense) - I’m here to try something new.

I’m a self-taught guitarist and singer/songwriter. I started playing music almost 20 years ago. I’ve worked on records and releases as a solo artist and with a number of bands, and at the age of 33 I’m soon to realise one of my life’s most profound ambitions. I somehow managed to make a record last year, in interconnected isolation - with a baby entering our family. I tracked it at home, sometimes while my daughter was asleep, and subsequently sent it around to friends to contribute during the 2021 COVID lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia.

Making a record and releasing a record are very different things. Even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the music industry in Australia (like the rest of the world) had become a broken system. During my bachelor degree, a philosophy lecturer showed us a cartoon that he told us represented ideology. There were two younger fish swimming past an older fish. The older fish says “how’s the water today?” To which the younger fish reply “water?”

There are some who might argue that despite the potential for improvement - modern music is in fairly good shape. I would disagree. Like fish submerged in the ocean, we have taken for granted that the tides have changed over time and the water has gotten increasingly shallow. The industry has become so bloated with intermediaries shaving off percentages from already grossly undervalued products. Those who now drive the mechanics of the industry make more money than those who give the source material to the system. Those products will also likely be choked up in the eventual bottleneck of centralisation.

This reality, amongst other things, drove me to leave a band that I spent the most significant portion of my formative years developing. As a new parent the best analogy I have is sending your child off into the world, out of your protection and guidance, to be moulded and reconstructed by everything they meet beyond your front gate. Eventually, I saw no future for myself in what that band became.

There is an interesting tension that exists between a scene and an industry. Our band operated (and it still operates) within a vibrant and expressive local music scene. We could easily sell out a show in our home city any night of the week. In those rooms, full of family, friends, and early fans, the experience of the music deeply meant something. We knew this, because people would tell us. They loved the songs, and could see that we loved each other. 

Despite the fact that there is undeniable cohesion and energy within an isolated scene, it would be difficult to convince someone in the modern music industry that a band could have a viable future sticking purely to its home audience. I had no desire to tour constantly for the next 20 years, though the modern distribution landscape almost necessitates it. There is no money to be made in producing music, and so the sacrifice required to make a decent living as an independent artist is utterly disproportionate. You have to be away from home, isolated, away from family and support, consistently.

Artists should be rich with time, under ideal conditions. It’s how art comes to life; through reflection, experimentation, the evolution of perspectives across a lifetime, and the refining of a particular voice to communicate those ideas. The music industry currently in no way values or offers opportunities to monetise the importance of time in the way other industries do - particularly to a certain tier of artists. The importance of an hourly rate is central to the economics of business, down to the sheer existence of opportunity costs - incurred when someone you’re paying could be doing something else.

Artists can spend years of their life, and thousands of dollars creating something that can be used for 4 minutes on a streaming service for a 10th of a cent. This fragmentation of value is ludicrous, and it’s a scourge on our culture that we have allowed such a paradigm to become commonplace. The decentralisation and restructuring of value in web3 platforms feels to be of inherent good to me.

I had in many ways given up on music as a central part of my life. I began making this record purely to make good on the goal I had set all those years ago. I drafted a simple release plan that suited our lifestyle and that I could manage myself. Now, following the research resulting from my Audius and NFT introductions the plan has changed. I never had the capital, or the stomach, to get into cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin first went berserk. However, something about web3, blockchain, and the creator economy made more sense to me than what I had known of crypto previously.

The album is called #GRANDMOTE. It explores the remarkable meaninglessness of life. Creating something out of nothing. The inherent liberation of absurdity and perspective. Most importantly, it is about learning to start all over again.

2022 will see the independent release of the album, with an accompanying podcast called #GRANDMOTERADIO. By the end of the year, I will have expanded the podcast into its second season to speak with other artists about their experiences of making their records. Not to go deep on the technical process, though that will be part of it I’m sure. Primarily it will be to go deep on the personal process; about who they were at the start and finish, how their relationships changed, and what they were seeking to achieve through this discrete artistic pursuit.

Both of these projects will be available on web2 platforms, but there will be exclusive access available for a web3 audience. I’ve also got a couple of cute NFT drop ideas for the middle of the year. From the limited research that I’ve done, I can’t really see much (if any) attention being meaningfully paid in Australia to the future of the web3 music industry.

So here we go. New year, new music, new world. 

A few experiences in the recent past have led me to what will follow this essay. An old mate recommended I look up Audius, another suggested I release my upcoming album as an NFT, among others. After reactivating my Twitter, listening to hours and hours of podcasts, and reading a few white papers (most of which kind of made sense) - I’m here to try something new.

I’m a self-taught guitarist and singer/songwriter. I started playing music almost 20 years ago. I’ve worked on records and releases as a solo artist and with a number of bands, and at the age of 33 I’m soon to realise one of my life’s most profound ambitions. I somehow managed to make a record last year, in interconnected isolation - with a baby entering our family. I tracked it at home, sometimes while my daughter was asleep, and subsequently sent it around to friends to contribute during the 2021 COVID lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia.

Making a record and releasing a record are very different things. Even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the music industry in Australia (like the rest of the world) had become a broken system. During my bachelor degree, a philosophy lecturer showed us a cartoon that he told us represented ideology. There were two younger fish swimming past an older fish. The older fish says “how’s the water today?” To which the younger fish reply “water?”

There are some who might argue that despite the potential for improvement - modern music is in fairly good shape. I would disagree. Like fish submerged in the ocean, we have taken for granted that the tides have changed over time and the water has gotten increasingly shallow. The industry has become so bloated with intermediaries shaving off percentages from already grossly undervalued products. Those who now drive the mechanics of the industry make more money than those who give the source material to the system. Those products will also likely be choked up in the eventual bottleneck of centralisation.

This reality, amongst other things, drove me to leave a band that I spent the most significant portion of my formative years developing. As a new parent the best analogy I have is sending your child off into the world, out of your protection and guidance, to be moulded and reconstructed by everything they meet beyond your front gate. Eventually, I saw no future for myself in what that band became.

There is an interesting tension that exists between a scene and an industry. Our band operated (and it still operates) within a vibrant and expressive local music scene. We could easily sell out a show in our home city any night of the week. In those rooms, full of family, friends, and early fans, the experience of the music deeply meant something. We knew this, because people would tell us. They loved the songs, and could see that we loved each other. 

Despite the fact that there is undeniable cohesion and energy within an isolated scene, it would be difficult to convince someone in the modern music industry that a band could have a viable future sticking purely to its home audience. I had no desire to tour constantly for the next 20 years, though the modern distribution landscape almost necessitates it. There is no money to be made in producing music, and so the sacrifice required to make a decent living as an independent artist is utterly disproportionate. You have to be away from home, isolated, away from family and support, consistently.

Artists should be rich with time, under ideal conditions. It’s how art comes to life; through reflection, experimentation, the evolution of perspectives across a lifetime, and the refining of a particular voice to communicate those ideas. The music industry currently in no way values or offers opportunities to monetise the importance of time in the way other industries do - particularly to a certain tier of artists. The importance of an hourly rate is central to the economics of business, down to the sheer existence of opportunity costs - incurred when someone you’re paying could be doing something else.

Artists can spend years of their life, and thousands of dollars creating something that can be used for 4 minutes on a streaming service for a 10th of a cent. This fragmentation of value is ludicrous, and it’s a scourge on our culture that we have allowed such a paradigm to become commonplace. The decentralisation and restructuring of value in web3 platforms feels to be of inherent good to me.

I had in many ways given up on music as a central part of my life. I began making this record purely to make good on the goal I had set all those years ago. I drafted a simple release plan that suited our lifestyle and that I could manage myself. Now, following the research resulting from my Audius and NFT introductions the plan has changed. I never had the capital, or the stomach, to get into cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin first went berserk. However, something about web3, blockchain, and the creator economy made more sense to me than what I had known of crypto previously.

The album is called #GRANDMOTE. It explores the remarkable meaninglessness of life. Creating something out of nothing. The inherent liberation of absurdity and perspective. Most importantly, it is about learning to start all over again.

2022 will see the independent release of the album, with an accompanying podcast called #GRANDMOTERADIO. By the end of the year, I will have expanded the podcast into its second season to speak with other artists about their experiences of making their records. Not to go deep on the technical process, though that will be part of it I’m sure. Primarily it will be to go deep on the personal process; about who they were at the start and finish, how their relationships changed, and what they were seeking to achieve through this discrete artistic pursuit.

Both of these projects will be available on web2 platforms, but there will be exclusive access available for a web3 audience. I’ve also got a couple of cute NFT drop ideas for the middle of the year. From the limited research that I’ve done, I can’t really see much (if any) attention being meaningfully paid in Australia to the future of the web3 music industry.

So here we go. New year, new music, new world.