Comment piece on “Reboundling The Audio Value Chain” by Multicoin Capital

Web3 is about open data and content, then it's up to the curators to find what it's valuable.

Music curators are the playlist makers, fan DAOs, youtubers, they could be individuals or collectives. They could own a stake (socialtoken/NFT) in the artists they discovered early, and push the artist’s work and story with their platform.

An example of a curator would be @theneedledrop, who does enticing reviews on urban music and up and coming artists. He curates his YouTube channel with 2.5 mill followers, and whoever is making this Spotify playlist.

Music communities have one of the most supporting cultures to local artists. We all take pride to see the one from our city/country make it. Since the pandemic, artists are playing less gigs, but we are seeing “local artist pride” birthing from online communities.

Kenny Beats shared a story of a 16-yr-old producer that join his discord, made an EP that was cheered on by the community, now signed with the same label as Adele and Radiohead.

This is why even though Audius now is looked at as just Spotify with a token, I’m still excited for them, because they are building one hell of a strong artist community in discord.

For the record, I don’t think labels would vanish. I simply think they’ll become one of the stake owners of the artist’s work. Instead of working for a record label, the label works for the artist. A label’s roster in web3 would be a curated list of music NFT owned by a curator

Global artist communities could be empowered by a Web3 economic structure, pulling the inspiration from The Graph:

• Artists - Subgraph (Song) Developers
• Streaming Platforms - Indexers (hosting songs and datas)
• Influencers/DAOs/Record Labels - Curators
• Listeners - Delegators

The Graph’s tokenomic is constantly being improved, but it’s the basis of how I’m thinking about web3 economies today. The design games well discoverability, risk sharing, profit sharing.

One of the hardest issues that stops this from becoming a reality is financial regulations. Once you make your work a financial product that people can invest in, you are faced with security regulations. However it’s not impossible. David Bowie did it in 1997, generating 7.9% returns/year over 15 years) in the late 90s, but only investment banks were able to buy it. DeFi and NFTs is laying the pavement for something like this to be accessible in retail.

We still have some figuring-out to do in regulation, web3 stack for content platforms, etc. But I'm looking forward to how this would shift the industry and cultural boarders.

Check out this playlist of borderless, genre bending music from Asia.