first, listen to the song:

What should onchain music’s north star be? What should onchain musicians aim for? What is the role of a music platform in determining these? What are mints good for?

This review is as much about the current state of onchain music and trying to ponder on these questions as it is about the song itself. Malik Naim has the most mints (36,012), the most unique collectors (3,949) and is second in total volume (10.29 ETH or ~$18,000) in the past 30 days on Sound, onchain music’s largest platform. In fact, he has more mints in the past 30 days than artists #2 through #9 on the chart combined. Yet his music is terrible. So what is really going on?

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. In an attempt to showcase onchain music’s growth and attract more users, Sound’s interface has progressively evolved towards focusing on quantifiable charts: viral sounds, top artists, top collectors, top curators, etc. These charts seem to be mainly be driven by a combination of two onchain metrics: number of mints (sometimes as a proportion of available supply in the case of limited editions) and ETH volume. The onchain world is one of pseudonymity, of wallet addresses instead of people, which enables a person or group of people to trick these charts fairly easily. Add the fact that most onchain music mints have moved to L2s like Optimism where gas is negligible (finally!) and we get near free mints, and you have a perfect storm for bad behavior.

Making it to Sound’s front page is sought after by artists, collectors and curators alike; some are willing to cross blurry ethical (and potentially legal) lines to get there. Such is the case of Malik Naim: his top 10 collectors, which account for roughly 24,000 of his mints, are pseudonymous addresses that have collected only his and Kamre Haze’s (another metric gamer) songs, often minting 2,000+ editions of a single song. We are sure that this pattern would continue if we looked at the rest of his “collectors”. What we can conclude from this is that these collectors are not real fans, they are probably not even real people. This is most likely a poorly executed wash trading scheme by Naim to game Sound’s charts in an effort to boost his metrics and reputation as an artist and get other users to mint his songs.

Currently, Sound does not appear to distinguish between a wash trader and a real collector. If we look at the top songs by mints for the past 30 days, 6 out of the top 7 are from what appear to be metric gamers with Malik Naim being 4/7. Sound recently changed their model from a % of volume to a fix fee in every mint, which means not only are they not currently doing anything about wash trading and metric gaming but they are directly incentivized to allow this kind of behavior.

I guess we should talk about the song itself. Letters To My Degens Pt. 2 is everything you don’t want in a song: cringe crypto-based puns, poorly-rhymed verses, unintentional unrhythmical rapping, an amateur beat, and some holier-than-thou gratuitous criticism on the state of web3.

Musically, the song is made up of a single ascending three chord loop (Ab → Bb → C), which does match the vague intended message of looking past hype to focus on community and uplift the future generations. Throughout the song, Malik goes back and forth between trite critiques (e.g. “silly PFPs”, “these are not frens, they don’t care about your Lens”), meaningless accidentally ironic commentary (”we could ruin this world if we don’t change now”), and actually stumbling onto some truths (”people aren’t investors, they’re just customers”, “I wonder why all blue chips are run by white men”) about the crypto industry.

We could go on about how only making timely references about blockchain trending topics does not make good music, but this song, and Malik Naim as an artist, simply does not deserve more analysis.

Unlike Malik’s hypocritical criticism, this review became more about our disappointment at the trajectory in which onchain music is heading if we continue down this path. If this direction continues, the ones that will benefit the most from the current system are game-the-system-artists like Malik Naim and platforms like Sound. Real artists are confronted with an impossible challenge of trying to find collectors who value their music while swimming against a current of free mints and wash traded leaderboards.

This is by no means an easy problem. It is also not unique to the music industry, onchain wash trading is as old as the first NFT, and there is no obvious solution for it. Sound.xyz has been an instrumental part of growing onchain music to get us here and will continue to be, their team is executing amazingly. We are absolutely thrilled about our chances at enabling a better path towards financial sustainability for artists through onchain music. All of these statements can exist at the same time.

We need to do better as a community to acknowledge when things are not working and to demand where we want the focus to stay on. Plainly, this direction is unlikely to put more money in artists’ pockets over time and it is quickly driving collecting music towards a race to the bottom, which feels way too familiar. Facebook ignored the consequences of introducing the “like” until it was too late, and now we have an attention-addicted society craving for virality. We hope Sound and other onchain platforms can acknowledge the second-order consequences of enabling gamified mints in a pseudonymous world as a key metric now while we still have time to fix it.

musicurator

More on the song:

Date of mint: August 12, 2023

Mint details: 3.37 ETH, 18,300 mints, Optimism

Current price: last sale 0.00095 ETH (August 30, 2023)