You'll often hear buzzwords thrown around in web3 music circles like "permissionless," "open source," "interoperability" and "composability." But what does this actually mean?

I like to think of it like this:

Music legos.

Underneath the million-dollar headlines and NFT hype, blockchains are fundamentally a tool for building music products in a new way.

Imagine Ethereum as an open lego board where anyone can build music apps that connect seamlessly, share data and build on top of one another.

This is fundamentally different to the music industry we have right now, and something uniquely possible through blockchains.

Today’s music industry is made up of different walled-gardens and islands that rarely interact with each other. Streaming services withhold most of their data points, only occasionally making it available by limited APIs.

Live promoters share almost zero data about tours or live attendance. TikTok owns your social audience and you can’t take it off the platform.

The core thesis of Oscillator is re-imagining a music industry where all this information is open and transparent, built on open source rails. We’ve already explored why this matters for artists but what about builders and entrepreneurs?

Imagine, for example, if you could pull listener data from Spotify and combine it with ticket sales from Live Nation to unlock hotspots of superfans? And imagine you could then build exclusive group chats or products for those fans?

Not only do music legos allow us to build collaboratively on top of existing data but we could build new products faster. A new app wouldn’t need to start from scratch and build their own data set — it would already be accessible and could flow freely between apps.

It would completely change how the industry works.

This thesis is already building out slowly in web3. We’ve got marketplaces like Sound, Zora and Catalog where artists can mint their music onchain. From there, the music can connect and plug into other apps in the ecosystem — like a lego brick.

Zora clicks neatly into social app Farcaster, so people can collect your music right there in the feed. This is a perfect example of a composable “music lego” that isn’t possible in Web2.

Aggregators like SpinAmp and Future Tape are another good example of music legos. Both are apps that pull music from different NFT marketplaces so you can listen to them in one streamlined product.

They didn’t need to go out and build their own catalog or ask permission, they simply took the open data from pre-existing smart contracts to build a new experience on top of them. Music legos!

Note: there are downsides and pushbacks to this approach, but I’ll get to that later.

Similarly, dozens of apps are building on top of Zora such as Gallery and Mint.fun which expand the user base and growth. They don’t need any permission, and it’s naturally powering growth and expansion organically.

This concept of legos in crypto is not new. In 2020, the narrative of “money legos” started to gain traction around the Ethereum ecosystem.

Decentralised finance (defi) apps built on the open rails of Ethereum showed us how powerful this concept could be. 

Instead of closed, opaque banking systems, DeFi created open, permissionless “money legos” that could click into each other. Suddenly, there was an entire ecosystem of lending, borrowing, trading and yield markets all interacting permissionlessly with money flowing freely between them.

It cut out friction and billions of dollars flowed into the ecosystem. New products could spin up fast and push innovation further.  At one point, decentralised trading app Uniswap was doing more volume than centralised platforms like Coinbase — proof that open systems can very quickly overtake incumbents.

Obviously there’s a downside to building in this open, permissionless arena. If one lego brick breaks, it can create problems for other apps that are plugged into it.

Then there’s the unintended consequences of building on top of other people’s work. Last year, there was a heavy backlash towards music aggregators after many artists realised their music was available on apps like Spinamp and Ooh La La without their permission.

The music industry also faces the unique problem of copyright. Although blockchains are permissionless, that doesn’t mean we can ignore real laws. Putting music onchain is still subject to copyright, licensing, performance royalties and collection agencies.

Building “music legos” with catalog creates a tangled web that could ultimately be pulled at any moment.

While building permissionlessly with music catalog puts you in a legal grey area, building with data does not. Onchain data doesn’t belong to any incumbent or legacy industry. It can’t be blocked or rug-pulled.

After several years of onchain music experiments, we now have millions of data points to build with. Many of these data points represent artist-fan interactions, such as buying an NFT, claiming a POAP, joining a token-gated chat, interacting on Web3 social and so many more.

All this means data is the perfect focal point for building music legos. We can build new products around these open data points and unlock new ideas and use-cases.  As RAC explained in his last blog post, the artist-fan relationship is the heart of the music industry. Everything else revolves around it — we’ve just never had access to this level of granular data before.

We’re still very early but as more data points come onchain we’ll have more music legos to play with. Oscillator’s FanScore is one of the first examples of what happens when you start pulling data points together from different sources. It is literally a music lego, building on open data from Sound Protocol, Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, as well as personal ERC20s, airdrops and other onchain interactions.

It's easy to get carried away with million-dollar headlines, NFT sales and memecoins. But we need to zoom out for a second and ask what blockchains are really useful for.

At the core, they are simply open, permissionless databases.

That means anyone can build on top of them, create tokens and contribute apps. Most importantly, anyone can verify the data flowing through them and use that data in unique ways.

We hope to see more and more music legos to help build out the ecosystem further. If you’re interested in building something with Oscillator, please reach out.