In the 20th century, the prevalent music drifting into one’s ears was heavily dependent upon location. The city you lived in could strongly predict what genres of music you either created or consumed. These location based genre constraints were largely imposed by the technology of the time period. The dissemination and proliferation of records across city, state, or country lines were exceedingly limited due to the physicality required to interact with any one piece of music. Listeners and musicians alike only being exposed to music they could get their hands on in the immediate vicinity of their place of residency. This is what brought rise to sounds consigned to specific locations from which entire sociological subgenres stem; there were cultures, movements, and communities built entirely around local music scenes.

Before the Fourth Industrial Revolution the ease with which one could increase their musical erudition was inextricably tied to social class. Simply put, it costed a significant amount of money to diversify your musical palette. Creating a personal library was much more involved. It required listeners to not only have the necessary devices for playback, but also to be in the know and connected to the right communities for the procurement of new music. The same stood for musicians at the time. The music you created and learned about was heavily dependent upon your access to the knowledge of music makers around you. It was also dependent upon what instruments and mediums you could afford that existed readily in the environment around you. It cost money to travel and visit different places in which you could be exposed to new music. It cost money to build up a broad diversified music library. If you couldn’t afford it, you were limited musically.

Location and social standing worked to create pressure cookers in which some of the worlds greatest music Genres were born. Seattle Grunge, Memphis Rap, Detroit Techno, New Orleans Jazz, Deep South Blues, all of these and more were products of circumstance. With the advent and maturation of the information age, lines across these Genres once relegated to their location and the inhabiting communities have become increasingly blurred. For better or for worse, people in any location on earth can listen, learn about, and make music from any Genre they’d like to, with an ease that has never existed before. However wonderful it is that anyone in the world can find and fall in love with music from half way across the globe, something equally wonderful is slowly being lost as time goes on.

When a Genre is no longer bound by location, shared struggles, shared beliefs, or shared interests, it is has no strong foundation from which to truly blossom. It can be argued that Genres are now becoming diluted with no real substance behind them. They are being created for creations sake. An artifact of music in the 2020s is that it is all sounding increasingly similar, which makes sense of course. Artists are simply taking the best things from Genres they appreciate and integrating them into their own art. At face value this is not an inherently negative thing; however the FLOPPY team laments the inexorable demise of the Genre and the communities backing them.

The FLOPPY team intends to rectify the pitfalls of modernity by building a shittier version of a DAW on the blockchain. No we are not madmen. No we are not lazy. We aim to build a platform that imposes artificial constraints upon a community of like minded people in pursuit of birthing a unique microcosm of music on the blockchain. We are providing a unique music making experience. In which people can create music of a unique quality. The world is going to know where our sound comes from. “FLOPPY type beat” imminent.