On April 30th, TikTok creator Megan Broni, AKA Girl on Couch, uploaded a video asking DJs to remix a song she wrote: “I’m looking for a man in finance, with a trust fund, 6’5, blue eyes.” The song went viral, and the rest is history, with dozens of remixes and interpolations of the catchy tune over the past month. Even brands got in on the fun.
About a month later, famed hip hop producer Metro Boomin tweeted a SoundCloud link to “BBL Drizzy”, a beat he created sampling a parody song by King Wilonious bearing the same name. Boomin invited the public to add their verse for a chance to win a free beat and, later, an additional $10,000 for the winner and another free beat for the runner-up. Artists from all over the world rushed to the booth to come with their beat Drake diss. There was a salsa remix and a Gregorian chant. A couple played it at their wedding. And, of course, the brands made an appearance. A winner has yet to be announced (understandably so, a lot of the music is very good).
The History of Crowdsourced Remixing and the Rise of Interactive Co-Creation
“BBL Drizzy” and “Man In Finance” may occupy differing spheres in the cultural zeitgeist, but both Song of the Summer candidates are products of massive online crowdsourcing. Music created through online crowdsourcing isn’t necessarily new. In 2010, DJ Shadow launched the DJ Shadow Remix Project, inviting his fans to remix, mashup, and cover his music to pay tribute to his 1996 album Endtroducing. Remixes and covers were a major part of the blog and SoundCloud era of the early 2010s. Most recently, TikTok, being an audiovisual social media platform, is a machine for viral sound remixing.
What makes this era of online remixing different from those of the past is that rather than fans and netizens referencing songs that have already been created, they are invited into the creation process. Both Boomin and Broni released an unfinished element with the intent for their audiences to turn that element into a finished song. The audience transcends their traditional station as passive consumers and fans to active co-creators and collaborators alongside their favorite artists. This is especially true with the BBL Drizzy Beat Giveaway, where participants not only get to asynchronously collaborate with a top producer and benefit from the visibility that comes with it but also get to claim their small part of pop culture history.
Benefits and Opportunites of Interactive Creation
Interactive creation has clear benefits for large artists and creators. It can be a powerful discovery engine and mechanism for community engagement. Fans who are creators themselves have an opportunity to build their own platforms with the help of their fellow fans and artists they look up to. Artists get to build on their lore and further engage their communities. I predict that we’ll see more artists and online creators co-creating with their audiences because it’s an impactful, low-cost form of marketing. That is especially useful as corporate marketing budgets that fund celebrity and creator brand deals have started to dry up due to interest rates remaining high for the foreseeable future.
What does this mean from a founder or VC perspective? There is an opportunity for blockchain-based solutions tailored for online creators. Interactive co-creation, like all forms of online creation, can get messy on the IP front. Using someone else’s work without proper attribution is, unfortunately, the path of least resistance on the internet because there are few embedded solutions that acknowledge creators’ ownership, stated terms, and compensation requirements. Blockchain technology, with its immutable ledger and programmable smart contract, is uniquely able to address this problem.
As an investor, I’d look into Story Protocol and Lukso. They are both creating decentralized, embeddable solutions that enable creators, artists, and fans to easily interact with works they love in a way that’s fair to the original creator. I think both companies have a good chance at scaling since they are building blocks meant to support multiple consumer-facing applications. I’ll go deeper on this in a future post. Overall, I’m excited about interactive creation, the opportunities it can create for web3, and how it can make a better, more interactive internet and cultural landscape.