Hi all.

I’m Brodie Conley and welcome to my Mirror page. I’ll be using this space on the new internet to write about the intersection of music and Web3!

I’ll save the initial massive resume drop and instead link y’all directly to my LinkedIn, if you want to get an idea of my music world and policy credentials.

I have solid experience in the area of artist management (Kelp Management – Lido Pimienta; Andy Shauf, among others), and also managed a not-for-profit festival called MEGAPHONO, which brought music industry professionals to Ottawa, Canada for a showcase festival and conference geared towards providing opportunities for local artists to expand their reach and develop export opportunities. I’m particularly proud of my work at MEGAPHONO, and the positive learning and growth opportunities that it catalyzed for Ottawa and region artists, and am very excited because this exact type of artist development and community dev work will be revolutionized by Web3 tech.

I’m also a policy and governance nerd (a “policy enthusiast” who tries to keep up with the literature). Having studied public policy and political science, I’m already seeing many ways in which I can apply my policy background analytically in the Web3 space (and in this Mirror space). I can see how useful concepts from the public policy and political science literatures (hi, path dependence!) will be when thinking about, analysing, and building Web3 communities and platforms.

And finally, I am an artist and musician.  I make music as Fine Form, am always working on many different collaborative projects, and have an extensive catalogue of previous projects (see: Future States) scattered across the old web (we’re really going to need those ENS names to point to all of our previous musical identities and projects!). One of my hopes in getting involved in this space is that it will allow me to grow my art and music, in the sense of getting it in front of more ears, but also to meet and make music with new collaborators, learn new production and recording skillsets, and grow as a musician and collaborator.

So, it’s fair to say that, outside of the draw of making the music industry (and world) more fair and equitable, my excitement around Web3 is also because it clearly aligns with all of my interests –community building; music creation; music administration; public policy and governance; and more.  Which is also why I’m excited to write about Web3 and music. I am passionate about these things and about making the world better, so let’s get moving.

This is all a big experiment for me, with a few key goals:

1)    to enter the space, teach myself and learn about web3 from bottom to top (& decentralized node to decentralized node!);

I’m fairly new to Web3, but the clear message to everyone keen on entering the space is “the best way to learn is to do!” and I 100% agree. This site will help me track and document my own learning and involvement as I explore the Web3 world, and especially as I join DAOs, contribute, and learn about how Web3 organizations are approaching the music industry and creating innovative platforms and modes of organization. Writing down my thoughts on a consistent basis will help me to understand how I am conceptualizing the space, and allow me to continually to re-evaluate what I have learned.

The music space on Web3 is nascent, but already massive in scale, and I’m excited to dig in and explore its many corners.

2)    to understand and use the power of Web3 technology to form community and (re)build the music industry to be more fair and equitable;

Much more on this to come, but my entry into the space is based on my belief that Web3 technology is creating a fairer world. I’m extremely bullish on the idea that Web3 tech and specifically, token-based decentralized governance, and the associated structures that are evolving from the tech (DAOs, NFTs, etc.) is fundamentally altering the way that communities form and build value. The decentralized nature of the technology (the “fundamentals of the tech”, we could say) itself will incentivize these newly forming communities to establish more fair and equitable forms of governance from the get-go.

Now of course, that last sentence is also an admission that *web3 technology by itself isn’t inherently fair, it relies on humans to make decisions together to create fairness and equity.  ***But this is true of most anything – there will always be individualists who don’t understand the power of collective action. Some folks will want to set up governance systems on web3 that resemble traditional, hierarchical, capitalist institutions, and the flexible architecture of the Web3 tech allows for that (to a point).

But, what is different with Web3 is that the underlying technology allows for new forms of governance, many not yet considered. Tokens allow for collective ownership and unique governance setups with individual community members (or token holders) being assigned power upon joining and often, in response to contributing.

Of course, I’m new to the space and just learning, so don’t want to make any grand proclamations about anything, but my first impressions and entry into Web3 have shown me just how many individuals are keen on using the key value propositions of the tech (decentralized governance and ownership) to create institutions that are different from those of Web2 and the current “real world” economy. While the option to create similarly structured, hierarchical organizations to those already in existence is available, it seems to be that people in the Web3 space are genuinely excited about the power of decentralized governance, community building, and sharing power and benefits.

What does this all mean for the music industry – that’s what we are going to investigate, together. But, it’s safe to say that new structures enabled by Web3 are going to have an impact across the entire industry – production tools, labels, publishing, distribution, financing, rights and royalties management, streaming, and more are all going to be changed by Web3. And hopefully for the better.

This is precisely why I am getting in to the space – I want to work with and build an equitable future music industry.  I’m hoping this Mirror page will help me to better understand the Web3 music space, connect with others in the space, and grow the space by…..

3)    teaching, you, the reader, about Web3 and the music space along the way.

Teaching is fundamental to growing the Web3 space. Without on-boarding new users to Web3, it will never grow into fundamentally changing institutional structures. New user growth in Web3 seems to be expanding exponentially right now, as media coverage grows, etc. But, fundamentally, to form new, big, powerful, fairly governed institutions that alter (& I don’t want to say it, but “disrupt”) the existing, hierarchical institutions will take massive amounts of people defecting from the traditional to the new, as new institutions are being built from the ground up.

If there’s anything I’ve learned so far upon dipping my toes into Web3 and music, it is that it can seem extremely complex and confusing, and so the real and perceived costs to entry into the space are high, in terms of both time and effort. This is especially true under our current reality, when most of us are just trying to pay our rent and spending much of our time labouring to do so. And so, a goal of this site will be to unpack and make the concepts of Web3 a bit easier for people to understand. I’m specifically hoping that some readers from the Canadian music industry hop on board for the ride, follow along, learn something, and then jump in headfirst themselves, to help reshape the industry from within whatever institutions they work at.

I’m not sure at this point what my publishing schedule is going to look like moving forward. As I better understand what my time contributions will look like jumping into the world of contributing to DAOs and spending time digging, reading and learning, I will come up with a clearer schedule. But for now, hi!, and expect more soon.