Neither Derive, Web3 or crypto in general is a quick fix or some predestined future, but it does provide new and exciting possibilities for artists and audiences alike. We are convinced that only through active participation and engagement can we unearth those possibilities and mould them into useful positive sum tools and frameworks.

Our four genesis chains are slowly but surely building and we are taking great care to make sure Derive will be a project able to live on for many years. We are progressively decentralising the system until one day we'll be able to fully hand everything over to the community. The initial chains have acted as a lab for figuring out what works and what doesn't and we have had to revise the framework, tweak the models and outright discard ideas that, while fun, might not have been essential to the main goal: co-curation of music via a community controlled and decentralised framework.

During the first quarter of 2022 we begin the work of upgrading smart contracts and website in order to implement and formalise the models we have been experimenting with. We have received a grant from the Danish performance rights organisation KODA, which will help us set aside the time needed for fulfilling our ambitions for Derive.

We're eternally grateful for this opportunity to support music in a direct and novel manner and we're focused on making a splash in 2022. Until then, take care and have fun!

Best wishes for the new year Troels & Simon, Derive

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While the discussion around licensing was very productive and produced usable solutions, the issue of remuneration was not adequately addressed. In fact any talk about new economic models were mostly shrugged off with a "deal with it" or met with purely fictitious proposals that were not remotely tethered to reality. It created a split in an else unidirectional push from a new generation of audience and music creators towards a functioning ecosystem for digital-first culture products.

Along came the platforms and their “solutions”. Most were new market speculators eyeing an opportunity for building and controlling new infrastructure for a desperate music business. Few were there to actually help independent actors find and connect with their audience in a world that had decided music should be freely accessible for all.

The solutions were as expected not solutions at all, but merely extractive schemes devised by vampiric outsiders who cared very little for the music scene and very much for their profit margin. And so the whole space of web2 - the protocols, the blogs, the DIY musicians, the remix culture etc. - was co-opted and converted. Music into "content" and community and audience into "users".

What was missing at that crucial moment around 20 years ago was a way to build a livelihood around the work of creating and distributing your music, as well as building an audience, all while remaining autonomous as to how you wanted to do it.

I think that with web3 technology and the ways of organising within it, the missing piece in the puzzle, that is digital culture and economy, has been unearthed. If we place it right we'll discover a path to an open and free culture that is able to sustain itself economically.

With diverse licenses like Creative Commons we can ensure that everyone has general access to media in a way that enables a true open culture. With tokens and verifiable ownership of digital assets, creators can build communities that both help support their work and also engage in the ongoing task of maintaining the cultural products that spring from it.

New models in music are possible, but finding them requires us to shed our client-mindset and free ourselves from platforms that were neither built for us or by us.

https://mirror.xyz/0x59abbee2F246946Dba01fb037Be603CC0B2B3909/N60LIZPZ6x76QA6jaK9N1RRM0QrO3ZRmBfnKQumzZns

Illustration: SolSeedlings 512print.sol #33 - solseedlings.art

Music has no object since it is basically not a physical thing, but merely recognisable sequences of moving air. Its physical embodiment has been whatever medium could hold it, wether it be tapes, vinyls or CDs. With a CD in hand you could go to your friends house and listen to that CD together, you could place your vinyls strategically next to the record player so your guests could see what you were currently listening to. With the move to digital, music collections don’t mean the same anymore. Services like Spotify and Apple Music try to mimic collections, but the disconnect is just too big.

NFTs alleviate some of the disconnect since they are actual moving objects in a digital space, but in most cases permanence is not adequately ensured, since the actual media files are not living inside the NFT. Most often they are stored in varying degrees of decentralised storage, and almost all cases there is only a single URL pointing to the media. That means there is very little insurance that the music you bought is actually going to be available and you very well might end up with an “unplayable” NFT down the line.

Instead of working against these disconnects I will now try to make the case for a model we’re pursuing within Derive and also in my other web3 label project Polly. A model where we lean into the disconnect completely. It requires the following:

1. separation of cultural product and media

2. collective ownership through collectibles

3. securing permanence with community source providers

4. public access and extendability

Here goes:

Separating cultural product and media Digital media files can be copied in infinity without any loss of quality, so any talk of “original” is meaningless and counterproductive. Instead we need to decouple the media and the work completely and view the .mp3 or .wav file not as the actual product but as a representation of the product. What? Yes, we need to finally detach ourselves from ownership of files and look at the broader cultural product. It shouldn’t be that hard since we’re already doing it on the streaming sites where we are not exposed to the underlying files but to the cultural product enshrined in the files. When we view a video on Youtube we don’t care if the file is on our disk, in a datacenter or coming from a thousand different redundancy servers in the cloud. It’s abstracted away, we have a pointer. That’s all we need.

Collective ownership through collectibles 1/1 NFTs are pointers. Their metadata points to something, so in a sense we can think of NFTs as highly versatile URLs. The problem with NFTs is that only one person can own them, which means that they are pretty exclusive. People get around this by fractionalising and issuing tokens that represent a part of an NFT. There are token standards however, like the ERC1155, that have this feature built in. Basically they allow many adresses to own the same token, which in the reverse translates as a collectible.

Digital collectibles mimic physical formats like vinyls and CDs because they are owned by many and they allow for community to be built around them. NFTs have worked well for the visual arts because 1/1 is a concept that translates well in a world of original artworks. My thesis is that music needs to delivered in the form of collectibles to properly translate in a token economy.

https://twitter.com/andy8052/status/1451642736629661703?s=21

Securing permanence with community source providers Now this part is where this model maybe requires new standards to emerge for current types of NFTs and collectibles. Most standards today only allow one media URL, which means that if that fails, for whatever reason, the NFT is dead 💀. A multiple source approach would allow for the communities holding the collectibles to be verified as source providers and add media sources to the contract. If the checksum of the original file is stored in the metadata by the creator the sources can verified before they are presented to the end user.

https://twitter.com/troels_a/status/1456574035739951104?s=21

General access and extendability Which brings us to the final piece of this model. We’ve already accepted that the files are not the product, so why not allow the world to enjoy the music in a way that also benefits the inner circle of collectors and creators? We’ve established a community by issuing our releases digitally as collectibles, and depending on the power the original creator is willing to bestow, we could consider it to now be a DAO. The governance token is already there in the form of the collectibles, so that’s covered. The file permanence is also there, so now we can put it to work by attaching a license for the general public to use the music in certain ways. Maybe the license allows aggregators and markets to list the collections, maybe a license to sell downloads or even a streaming service that reads from the files provided by the community. Any value the files generate outside the DAO could be funnelled to members of the innermost circle of collectors.

A new model For a lack of better words I call this approach the “ring around”-model. Creators facilitate a way for collectors to form a ring around a body of work and incentivise them to help govern and provide access to it for the general public. Everyone wins.

I urgently feel this model need to be explored. Music and web3 will have its big moment soon and we will have to be prepared with better models than just web2 in a web3 wrapping.

https://twitter.com/troels_a/status/1450956142658605059?s=21

I've often used the term autonomy when I've tried to describe what it is about Web3 that excites me so. Autonomy to me is the ability to act, to evolve and react to the things around you. In music it means being able to change modes, have new ideas and test them, work on new styles and explore novel approaches to your praxis. For me, everything about being a recording artist is equally important; the ways in which I conceptualise thoughts into music is just as important as how I present them to the world in writing and visual style. The way I present my work means something.

When I don't have the full palette at my disposal, when I am not able to work freely from my beginning to my end, I loose some of that meaning. Work becomes disrupted sentences, syntactically lacking, low resolution images that convey something but what is distorted by the medium.

Building a community and then having it sold back to you repackaged as useless analysis tools and "empowering insights" is not autonomy. Having to market your work as meaningless interchangeable units in a largely opaque system that has proven unworthy on multiple occasions is not autonomy. Labouring for some billionaire CEO with a vision of the future that is as bleak at it is boring is not autonomy.

What Web3 has unlocked for me with all its gadgets and gizmos is the antithesis to depression: imagination. What it provides is a set of sufficiently general tools and protocols to allow practically anyone to participate in the way they imagine to be right. And that, dear reader, is autonomy.

derive.works

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To front the third of four genesis chains we bring you Anja T. Lahrmann, a composer, producer and musician who has been performing as Excelsior since 2015.

The voice is often the aorta in Lahrmann’s body of work. She approaches composition as narrative sequences in which vocal structures, melodic lines and chords unfold alongside chains of digital processing like small paths in a landscape.

Having developed her musical persona by positioning herself amongst varying constellations of musicians, she tends to see herself more as a collaborator than a frontwoman bouncing openly against the borders of collectivism and DIY.

We are stoked to have Anja join Derive and look forward to her contribution. To support Anja and Chain #003 head on over to Opensea to collect one of the 15 currently listed tokens for a mere 0.01 ETH. All funds go to the chain and the contributing artists.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x399dad55c6bdabd7ebe0ada12627c261f81c6428/3

https://anjatietzelahrmann.com/

Please read our first Mirror post for an introduction to Derive.

derive.works Twitter | Instagram | Discord

Derive is founded on the premise that the ways in which we create, share and convene around music should spring from the creators, their work and their audience. It is an attempt at locating positive alternatives to the commonplace modes of operation in the music industry. Alternatives that are sustainable and transparent and work for both the creators and their audiences.

To kick off this new endeavour we’ve launched and experiment in co-curation between creators: Chains 💿 ⛓️

How do chains work?

A token is passed from creator to creator allowing the holder to add a work to the chain whereby the token's path through the network of contributors function as the curation mechanism.

Each chain is funded by the sale of 100 collector edition tokens that grant access to downloads, special discord channels and further perks down the line.

How do I get involved?

First ting to do is to pick up one of the collector tokens listed on OpenSea for a mere 0.01 ETH. Doing so directly supports the contributing artists and their work. https://opensea.io/assets/0xderive

Secondly there's the Discord. It's open for everyone to join and we encourage you to do so if you're just remotely interested in learning more about Derive and where we're going with this. https://discord.gg/q4FJBkXF8Y

How far is the project?

The first two of four genesis chains have been launched and the first music has already been added. We've sold the first collector tokens and funds have been transferred to the creators in accordance with the funding model. It dictates a direct 10% share for each contributing artist or group. The collector tokens are being released as the chain progresses and new contributors are onboarded.

What's the plan?

Because much of the process at the moment is manual the four genesis chains allow us to tweak and refine the process and models as we set them in motion. The idea is to figure out what parts work and improve and automate things as Derive progresses. That means developing new smarts contracts, improve and add more features to the UI and work on including the community in more and more processes. We want to develop the project in a direction that best suits the two main groups of the project: contributors and collectors aka artist and audience.

Concerning the latter we are actively working to form a DAO around Derive. A community platform owned, operated and developed by the people contributing to it is the end goal for this project.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!

💿⛓️

derive.works