Recently, Team PHLOTE welcomed producer, DJ, and Soulection member AbJo to Gather.town to discuss his evolution as an artist and opinions on the future of web 3.0 and music streaming.

AbJo grew up in the city of San Diego throughout the beginning of the beat scene, which is where he first got his start in music at the early age of nine years old.

When asked about his immediate influences he opts to cite names within the classical and jazz genres such as Bach, Beethoven, Quincy Jones, and Robert Glasper. As he says:

“I don’t just make beats, I make music.”

- AbJo

His calling card, as he says, is what he can do with sampling. AbJo grew up in the club scene at a very young age with an uncle that worked as a hip-hop club promoter - he saw big names such as Busta Rhymes, The Lady of Rage, Slum Village, and Exile, in San Diego, long before they made it big.

He would run through records picking up samples and became comfortable with the artistic practice early in his career.

Before getting into web 3.0, there was a certain formula to AbJo’s music releases - produce content, put it on web 2.0 and Spotify, promote, do shows, and hope the right people would find it and want to use it. He never prioritized streams or album sales to gain revenue.

By entering the crypto world, he found a whole new dynamic to a promotion that benefits everyone involved for simply being in the space. He explains:

“If somebody decides they wanna place a bid on something I put up, that could potentially end up funding my way to make them more content."

- AbJo

Web 3.0 gives a whole new outlet for communicating and building relationships with fans. AbJo admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever been super interested in connecting with my audience in any way other than musically.”

Now, with the web 3.0 space, he can mint his content, provide his fans with something of value and sentiment, as they both make money off of it at the same time.

On the topic of streaming, AbJo explains that he has been successfully collaborating with Audius for the past year - one of the only web 3.0 affiliated streaming services that are no longer in beta.

The web 3.0 streaming quality and user interface looked promising, along with the fact that he would be making dividends, and a year later he can see that they were not lying.

Many people, like AbJo, were skeptical at first about decentralization, but soon recognized the freedom it provides.

“We can literally write our own tickets, see that value, and share that value with other people.”

- AbJo

On the other hand, services such as Spotify are beginning to be seen as more of a utility - it allows people access to music, but many artists are beginning to realize that they can’t expect to make the majority of their income off of it.

AbJo’s main goal with NFTs is to give fans access to unreleased content. He plans to do a Mirror crowdfund for his next project and develop a coin that provides access to a dropbox of unreleased content and sneak previews, as well as inside information such as being the first to know about an upcoming gig.

The Soulection member summarizes this as a strategy of utilizing and incentivizing your biggest fans - a fan can obtain value in the real world and in the digital world through this coin, get their desired use out of it, and then proceed to sell it to the next fan.

Overall, this would provide a direct connection to an artist and their music for a large number of their fans.