Month: April 2022

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Music | Google Podcast

Background

Mint bonus episode: I was invited to speak at NFT LA on all things about the creator economy and lead a discussion with Jesse Tevelow of Praise, Alexandra Hooven of Rally, and Noel Borges of Mintblack.

In this episode, we discuss: 

• 00:00 – Intro 
• 02:12 – The current state of the web3 creator economy
• 06:28 – Should creators strive to build virality or a niche group of true fans?
• 14:22 – How to transition your web2 audience into web3?
• 22:02 – What data can creators unlock via NFTs and other crypto assets?
• 35:47 – Outro

…and so much more. 

I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

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Yeah, I guess moderators here, what a good-looking crowd? Yeah. Check, check, check, check. I want the mic working. Yeah. Check, check. Hello. All right. How are we doing? Can make some noise? Yeah. Give it up for edge of NF T for a killer conference bringing the LA community together and all of us together. How are you guys doing?

Jesse Tevelow: I’m good. I got a lollipop.

What flavors is that?

Jesse Tevelow: It’s a bubble gum. Bubble gum, I think.

All right. All right.

Jesse Tevelow: I’m feeling it.

Intro

Guys. Before we get started really quick. This is all about how the creator economy NFT is intersect? How many people in the audience are actually creators, by show of hands? All right, three fourths? Is it like video creators, tick tock creators, by show of hands. Video creators. Bloggers, Twitter, shit posters. All right, not too many. Well, I’m excited to be here, guys. Pleasure to be on stage with you. Just dive right in. Let’s start with a quick bio. Who are you guys? What does the world need to know about you? Keep it short. 30 seconds. We’ll go one by one.

Jesse Tevelow: Hi, guys. I’m Jesse Tevelow. I am the creator of a community called praise and praise piles. And I’m going to talk more later, so I’ll leave it at that.

Alex Hooven: It’s awesome. I wasn’t familiar with praise. So, I’m excited to hear about it. But I am Alex Hooven Hooven. I am director of strategic partnerships and growth at rally. And on the other side of the coin, I’m also oversee governance and operations for a Dao called Friends with Benefits here in LA.

Noel Borges: Hello, everyone. I’m Noel Borges Burgess, one of the cofounders of mint black, I have the pleasure of working with an incredible team of folks to work with creators like Jim Jones, who was the first hip hop artist launching NFT, as well as a social token and Nicole Buffett, excited to be here.

The current state of the web3 creator economy

And then I’m Adam Levy, I host a podcast meant basically document the pulse of where crypto meets creators, teaching creators how they can use these crypto primitives to build, monetize and own their audience. So, without further ado, we’re here to hear you guys talk. Okay. I think a good place to start. We’re talking about all thing’s creator economy here. What’s the current state of the creator economy as it pertains to web three? How do you guys see that?

Jesse Tevelow: Are we going down the line?

Yes, down the line.

Jesse Tevelow: Down the line? All right let’s do it. Creator economy? Let’s see. Where do I start? Web three is all about community. So, it’s pretty much the core for me, you know, it’s kind of synonymous community verse creator, I think producers are the leaders of the future. So, creator economy is about being creative, being you, being authentic, being genuine, finding your true value. And, you know, in this web three world if it’s like, people are like, oh, what why is this art valuable? Because I think it is, because I said it is because someone else thinks it is. So, it’s a much more just open environment, and creators are going to be the leaders of the future. You know, our currency is going to flow to creators, I think a lot of currencies are going to flow to creators. And it’s just exciting times, because I think we all feel this vibe happening here. Certainly, if you’re here, you can feel it. And it’s, I think it’s the age of the Creator. So, let’s go.

Alex Hooven: Age of the Creator love it. The question was?

The current state of the creator economy in web three, as we stand today.

Jesse Tevelow: Oh, I think the state of it is awesome. Sorry.

Alex Hooven: The state is awesome. I think what’s so incredible about the Creator economy and how its intersection with web three is that all the tooling and primitives that are being designed right now in web three are really just allowing sort of that relation, that precious relationship between a creator and the fan, to be able to have this symbiotic relationship where both the fan and the artists can be capturing equal value that they are both providing, without having any middleman in between to sort of disrupt that. So that’s what I think is great.

Noel Borges: Amazing, I love it. First of all, before I want to shout out Adam and mint, every Sunday at 3pm, I’m looking forward to your email, if you’re not subscribed, you definitely should as he captures everything from Dallas to NFT social tokens. It’s really the best podcast.

Thank you, sir.

Noel Borges: So definitely check it out, within the sole creator economy. So, I think there’s economy 2.0 or creator economy 2.0 And there’s a creator economy 3.0, which I’ll consider web three. So, in the social token space, we talk often about moving from web two to web three, and we liken it to going from hashtags to cache tags. And we see the future in which is now we’re embodying our future self now. So, what does that look like? It looks like creators, having, as mentioned before a symbiotic relationship with their fans. And more specifically, we’re capturing value of the personal brand. So, they are creators. Up until now, the relationship is such that a tick talker or an Instagram influencer will perhaps sell a product or service or an experience, the fan will purchase it. Creator receives money, fan receives product or experience. And that’s usually where the relationship ends. Within web three, the fan receives experience and as well as the product. And more importantly, they now have the potential to share in the financial gains by reselling that NFT. And by the way, when that happens, the creator also generates additional revenue. So now their interests are aligned. And that’s where we’re moving from web two to web three. And regarding hashtags to cache tags, it’s this idea that within Instagram and TikTok, it’s about popularity, right? It’s about gaining as many followers and attractions. Within web three, it’s about community. It’s not just about followers, it’s about building community, and monetizing that community in a way that’s not just beneficial to the Creator, but also beneficial to the token holders, whether it’s an NFT, or a social token.

Should creators strive to build virality or a niche group of true fans?

So, should creators strive to build virality or to build their like 1000 true fans via NFTs? What’s better?

Jesse Tevelow: Yeah, I mean, I, I wrote a book about this. It’s called the connection algorithm. And so, I just, I think that everything is about humanity. And if sometimes we get lost in the technology, sometimes it’s hard for so, you know, for us to socially and culturally keep up with the technology. But you know, I just think that, you know, I just think it’s really important for people to understand that, again, it comes back to the community, that community is the most important thing, and that people are going to gravitate toward that. And so, it comes back to like culture. And so, I look at one on one connections. I try to figure out who I am. And then I try to figure out who’s gravitating toward me. And I try to have real relationships with those people. And I go one by one. And I asked that person who do you admire? And then they tell me, oh, I admire this person. And then I, and that’s literally like how I’ve grown my entire platform. And it’s funny, because like, three weeks ago, we didn’t have any community to speak of in web three. But I’ve been building community for so long, real community and real connections and real relationships, that, you know, we had no Twitter, no discord, no email lists, less than a month ago, now we have 30,000 plus, in that environment, and we didn’t spend a penny on advertising. We did that. Because, like, you were just saying, man, like beautifully said, eloquently said, you know, it’s a circle, like the community is getting value from itself. There is no product, there is no leader, there’s just a community. Right. And then there’s currency that is attached to that community in the form of a token or NFTs, or art, or whatever, something in IRL something in the metaverse, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a community of people. Okay, like, the community that you were born into was, was controlled by a government, you just popped up, you spawned onto the land. And then they were like, these are the rules because you’re in this box of the land. Right. So, make real connections with real people. Don’t worry about the boundaries that you think are around, you just find people that you love. That means something to you, that are doing something that you like to do, or want to do or are doing, find out who you are, and then that value will start to literally manifest. And the cool thing is that you don’t have to worry about the fucking lines on the map anymore. You can just share your value.

Noel Borges: Just see if I can say I think the real secret is your swag. You have a pink lollipop with the glasses. I mean, you’re, I think that’s what attracts everyone to you.

Jesse Tevelow: Well, that’s deliberate because i don’t really give a fuck anymore. So, I’m like, this is me. So, you want to hang out or not? Let’s make some money.

Let’s go. Alright. So, the question was, again, build for virality or built for an intimate base of people. Right, that may or may not end up being your collectors. Like how do you guys think about that?

Alex Hooven: Yeah, I think, I think it’s interesting. Like, if you look at sort of the entire crypto landscape, whether it’s a platform or an exchange like uniswap or a big successful NFT project, like board eight Yacht Club or any things similar like that. I think What makes them successful is the community around it, not the morality. And so, I think especially when you’re talking about, you know, a creator, or some sort of any kind of artists, that’s going to introduce a token, whether it’s a fungible token, like a social token or an NFT, you know, the success is going to be sort of a parent by the community that supports it, not the virality, the community is what drives the virality. So, I think, you know, when we think about a pop star, or any or a sport, the athlete or whatever, who wants to introduce a token, I don’t necessarily think an athlete with millions of fans necessarily translates to a community of people. And so therefore, if there’s not any sort of unifying ethos, or philosophy or mentality around why we’re introducing this token, what the goals of this community to build together and share an ownership of this community, there’s not going to be a tremendous amount of at least an instant success. And so I think, a community that’s been established, so you know, that could be a media company that has a passionate group of existing subscribers or a community like praise, where they’ve already sort of fostered this idea of like, why they’re in this together, they’re way more set up for success than just your average athlete or musician that just wants to introduce a token for the sake of introducing a token. So yeah, I think it’s more about creating that community first and less about the virality and I think the virality will come and success of the community.

Noel Borges: Absolutely. I think virality is more. So, web two, and creator economy 2.0. As we see it today, I think community building is at the heart of web three. And, as mentioned, the goal isn’t to just get more followers, but to create raving fans, and how do you create raving fans? I would prefer to call them token holders, right, and build this community where everyone is aligned and sharing in the upside. And the follower doesn’t just see their contribution to the fan by just liking or posting or commenting or liking or commenting or sharing. But now they get to purchase a product or an experience when the account when they collect, let’s say an NFT of a creator. Or if they purchase the social token of a creator, that gives utility. And I think utility is at the heart of community building, where there’s more than just collecting it, collecting it is Cool. And I think we’ve seen a lot of that over the past year, I think we’re seeing the shift where creators whether it’s folks on Tik Tok, Instagram, or celebrities, right, Jim Jones, for example, the goal isn’t necessarily to just create more fans and have this one two-way relationship, this one-way relationship where the Creator generates revenue from the fan. But rather, everyone is aligned, everyone is communicating, the fans now get to communicate with one another, rather. So, the community gets to interact with each other in let’s say, a discord by holding an NFT of that in that particular creator. And so, the goal is less virality. I think virality is a byproduct of community building, not the other way around.

Jesse Tevelow: Yeah, I was asking if I could add on that, you literally just hit it right at the end there. So, it’s like, I don’t want people to misinterpret like, virality is awesome, right? Like you want virality. So, I’m not saying virality is bad. I’m saying that it doesn’t start there. You’re not it’s like, you don’t just like have an idea. And then it’s so good that it’s viral. You build something slowly, like we’re talking about to the point that it’s solid, and then you turn on, you know, you put the foot, your foot down on the gas, and that’s what we did. And it’s like, it’s a hype cycle. So, like, you want to leverage that still, you know, you’re still trying to it’s a competitive market. It’s a hype cycle. You know, you got to look at all these elements. But the problem is that people don’t see the forest for the trees, and they just try to go all the way before they build it up. You know, I’ve been working on something for a year. And then, whenever you see an overnight success, it’s never an overnight success. Never, ever like It’s lightning in a bottle if that happens, so.

Alex Hooven: If it isn’t a scam.

Jesse Tevelow: Yeah, and it’s yeah, it’s 99.9% also a scam. So, there you go, whatever that equals out to so yeah, that’s just use virality is good. Just stick with humanity first.

How to transition your web2 audience into web3?

So, because the panel is only 30 minutes long, there’s different types of creators, right? There’s music creators, art creators, video creators, bloggers, all sorts of creators. And I guess in the context of which creator pertains to like if you’re a musician, because the hottest thing right now are music NFTs, like everybody’s trying to buy music NFTs a lot of people are talking about music, NFTs. If you look at a music artist, is like number one source is kind of like getting virality on Spotify, on Apple Music, right? And then trying to use NFTs and social tokens as that primitive to kind of bring his fans together to monetize his fans separately from Facebook, separately from Spotify, in all that, so I think it’s very relative, right? Another thing I want to ask you guys is because I host a podcast like, thankfully people listen to it I get hit up by agencies who manage craters, okay? That have existing audiences that have existing followings that want to integrate these primitives into their day to day, right? Have their fans by their NFTs, build a fan base, a token gated fan club, whatever, whatever the buzzword is, how can an existing creator who already has virality tap into web three, what is the funnel look like? How do they get started? Okay, do they issue a social token? Do they issue NFT? And once they have that asset, how do they actually funnel in their audience from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok into telegram or discord to create token gated communities, right? A lot of people, a lot of creators in the Creator economy have already quote unquote, made it in web two. There’s, there’s a lot, I’m not saying everybody that want to use these primitives to kind of transition I think rally, by the way, is a good example of that, right? Using these primitives as a way to create some type of token asset to reward incentivize their audience. So maybe Alex Hooven, you can start with this one. How do existing creators web audiences transition their fans from web two into web three?

Alex Hooven: Yeah, so I actually think there’s like a giant misconception and like, sort of what that barrier is, in terms of bringing your audience along into web three. And I think the way that people need to think about it is less about okay, there’s, I have all these new tools at my disposal, how do I plug them into my community, and it’s more about actually just taking a look at your community and knowing what they, what they want, and how to engage them in ways that you are already doing that. And just thinking about how you can use tokens, whether they’re NFTs to just add more value in those spaces that you are already engaging in and adding value to your fan bases. So, rally specifically, just for everyone, if you’re not familiar is a social token platform, it is a sidechain of Ethereum. That does allow any artists or community organization to mint a social token as a means of starting a micro economy with that fanbase. What is a micro digital economy mean to us? It means sort of pairing this idea of fungible currencies, so social tokens with non-fungible tokens. So, NFT and what we really focus on is figuring out how you can integrate NFTs and add value to your communities in a way that provides utility and not scarcity. So, we’re not really focused on, you know, one of one drop where you can, you know, have high volume, high value auction items, and it’s more about how can you use NFTs as tickets? How can you use NFTs as badges, keys, access to things, and really just figuring out what that utility is? And so I think getting started is more looking at your community, looking at your roadmap of like what you have going on over the, you know, next six months to a year and saying, How can I actually just sort of take this technology, this from, you know, fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens, and actually integrate it into what I’m already doing, and ultimately be providing your fans more value, right? So instead of saying, okay, I’m doing this live stream, and I’m going to sell tickets, maybe those tickets are NFTs. And, you know, instead of just paying a sunk cost of $50, for that ticket, you’re not providing them with an asset, which they can, you know, carries that intrinsic value of the content that they want. Or they can just, you know, sell it on the secondary market, if that’s what they choose to do. And you’re both participating in the value of that transaction. So yeah, I think it’s, it’s less about saying, Do I need to do an NFT? Do I need to launch a social token, and it’s more thinking about what the community wants, what you’re already doing, and what you can plug into with those two options?

Noel Borges: Amazing. I love it, I think, as creators who currently have virality, let’s say, for example, this is in conversation with Kimmo who has 2 million followers, she’s here, shout out to Kimmo and Samir who has 4 million followers on TikTok. So, as we are speaking about, how do we not just monetize your fans, because that’s a one-way relationship? How do we give more value to the fans than you receive? Right? And I think so long as the creator is thinking about giving more than we take, that will be a sustainable con, there will be a sustainable growing community. And whether it’s a social token or an NFT, it’s likely to thrive, I think, where we see the Creator, whether it’s an Instagram or TikTok influencer, or as a celebrity, only thinking of it as a one-way relationship, how much money can I make? I think regardless, whatever they do next, it’s already a lost cause. And it’s, it’s going to end up being a whirlpool, and no one’s going to win. In fact, they’re going to burn their following, right. So how do we, from the beginning of the conversation, think about how do I give more value to my community and some of the examples we’re speaking about with Kim and Samir, how do we allow fans give access that they may not have gotten before for example, being able to meet in person have in person IRL events where upon so now that wasn’t something that unless you’re a close friend of the Creator who you celebrate chemo as a fitness influencer, if you happen to be at the gym, you might be able to meet with her. Otherwise, how is it possible to have a zoom one on one meeting, or setup? If you DM her, you’re one of 1 million people in her DMs, she’s probably not going to respond. But if you purchase one of her NFTs, you might you’ll have the opportunity to have a video chat with her. Same with Samir, you know, folks are admiring his cars, and he’s a car enthusiast on tick tock. How do you imagine the ability to ride and ride shotgun literally and figuratively with Samir for a day? Well, now you can buy purchasing one of his NFTs and now you get to see a community that is more engaged than ever before. And so, this creates that medium to create a more intimate experience, whether it’s in real life virtual, and the relationship doesn’t stop there. Because the person who collected the NFT of Samir, Samir is incentivized to continue to provide value to the token holders by potentially air dropping his Samir coin. So, he now has the social token, he creates an airdrop it to folks who are in possession of any of his NFTs. And so, we don’t see it as an either or whether it’s NFTs or social tokens, we see both ends, we think they work in harmony with one another. The way we see the current landscape at mint black, which is a social token platform as well. We don’t just focus on social tokens, we see the trajectory of where crypto was, where it is and where it’s headed. Where it was, was NFTs then Metaverse, now Dao’s we see the next frontier being social tokens. And social tokens will tie it all together will bring all of those four pillars within the crypto economy in a way that works in harmony with one another.

What data can creators unlock via NFTs and other crypto assets?

You know, you brought up ticketing, it’s one of my favorite use cases for NFTs. I’ll share a quick story and the next kind of like conversational I want to talk about his data, what kind of data can creators tap into that they otherwise would have had through social media platforms? So, if you issued tickets, let’s say you do like a meet and greet. Okay, a lot of creators do meet and greets. They try to meet their fans, they issue tickets as NFTs, teach them how to open a meta mask. One of the coolest things or one of the most successful creators, they actually create videos on how to open up a meta mask, how to buy your first Ethereum that comes from them personally, that creates more of a level of comfort, right on how to actually do these things. So, there’s this creator, her name is Queen George. Okay, she basically did a NFT concert at Eth Denver, I think a couple months ago, excuse me a couple of months ago, and she issued free tickets for people to collect to then watch her perform. Now the cool thing about that is that she got about 200 collectors off the bat. Okay, they all minted one of her things for free. So, she gave before she took. And then on top of that they came in, met her in person, watched her perform live and then had the option one to join her discord and to mint, one of one music NFT on the spot. But the cool thing about that, why it’s so unique is now she has about 200 collectors who collected her stuff and also came to watch performed. There should be a way basically for her to understand who her collectors are, it extends beyond anonymous addresses. She now can see okay, are any of them in FWB? What percentage of them? What things do those people vote on? Right? How much money do they have in their wallet, she starts tapping into data points that she otherwise would have never had, thanks to these collectors. So, she might realize, wait a minute, 75% of the people that showed up to my concert aren’t FWB, it may be worth to do a collection or some type of collaboration with FWB. And now she’s growing her audience in web three. How do you guys think about data on chain? And how can creators tap into data when they issue their NFTs and kind of build more meaningful communities around their collectors?

Jesse Tevelow: Who is it going to me first?

Whoever wants to take it?

Noel Borges: Awesome. I’ll go so I think what was mentioned with brands earlier, how I think it goes this is, the data point is not just important to creators, but also to brands. where for example, let’s say Kim has a relationship with a brand, a fitness brand who wants to do a collab, if there are let’s say 1000 collectors of her NFT and she can see that these creatures we can Airdrop now let’s say that brand wants to create enemies, you can Airdrop it to her current collectors. And over time, we’ll be able to look in the wallet and see which fans are the ones who are likely to buy product A versus product B. And as mentioned a moment ago if they’re 50% of them are holders of let’s say a since 3000 generative art collection, therefore which is an upcoming collection with the Danielle Lesley, she’s launching shortly. If similar to like a world of women, for example, if they’re in possession of that NFT, we know that that’s someone who’s passionate about women’s empowerment, right? And so those NFTs that are in the wallets of a token holder, says something about the person, Danielle is very intentional with the NFT she collects, right? Because it’s a representation of her brand. So, when you look at her collection, now, she has a world woman, she has a board, he has some blue chips, but more importantly, she has NFTs of collections. And with that causes that matter to her. So, we can see what matters to the individual that perhaps in web two, you wouldn’t be able to see that because this is all public.

Really quick. That’s the ownership economy, right? When you talk about creators owning the platforms that they participate on, this is data that they might have not otherwise been able to tap into. Right? And to learn more about who’s their audience who’s doing what with them? Who’s engaging with them? When you have these addresses, and everything is transparent, and you can tap into this data, you’re able to unlock insight that you otherwise wouldn’t been able to kind of explore.

Alex Hooven: Right? Yeah, I was just going to add, like, I think that’s just the huge part about web three is this idea of ownership. And like, the question I posed to a lot of creators is like, okay, if you were to wake up tomorrow, hypothetically, and YouTube or Spotify or Instagram or wherever you’re, you know, you know, interacting with your audiences, the most magically disappeared? Would you feel like you still had meaningful ability to connect with your audience? And I think most people would say no, right? Because you don’t have ownership over that data. So, I think the most exciting thing, just to I mean, everything that you said is correct, is that you truly have the, through decentralization, you truly have ownership over your data, and you can do anything you want with that data, no matter how, however way you choose to synthesize it.

Jesse Tevelow: Yeah, I agree with both of you, I feel like we’re also aligned on this panel. And you know, I guess I don’t know. For me, I feel like it’s, it’s definitely a situation where you’re trying to look for what is the culture and to me, it’s the model is completely flipped, like the power has shifted from the corporation to the individual, right. So, when I think about that, in the context of data, it’s like a whole different thing. It’s like, when you think about data, you think of corporations, but now it’s flipped, the data is yours, it’s the individual. So, it starts the core, everything is center is you. So, the future is all about you. And I’m kind of on a mission to change the connotation of the word selfish, because I think it’s a really positive word, I think we all need to be more selfish. And I think we’re all starting to realize that we’ve not been selfish enough, the corporations are selfish, the institutions are selfish, like, we’re just literally like living miracles. So, like, let’s just own our data. And I agree with everyone on here, you know, it’s what they’re showing, we’re all showing the world is that this is where we want to spend our money on self-expression, on art, you know, the data is showing us now because it is decentralized data, it’s real data, the data is coming from you. And you and you and you and, it’s coming from us now. It’s not coming from the corporation. So that’s why the web two folks are like, I don’t get this, you know, here’s all my data, here’s all my numbers. Okay, here’s how NFTs work. Okay, I’m gonna plug this in, and then I’m going to raise my bottom line by this. It’s like, guys, that’s not what this is about. So, if you have a long-term view, then you got to really like literally to turn the concept of data on its head upside down and start thinking about it that way.

And again, why I’d suggest doing stuff for free, giving things out for free, just get something to collect something, right? Get someone to just commit that action. And I think you’ve already like enter the funnel, like a top-level funnel to kind of building like a minimum viable community in web three.

Jesse Tevelow: Yeah, they’ll come to you like, you’re literally, your people will come to you, and then you monetize.

The coolest part about web three is that in web two, where the products of the platform right, like we rent, everything, you know, many people on my Tik Tok feed, they disappear because Tik Tok decided to like shadow ban them or like remove their account for whatever reason. And they have to build their millions of followers from the gecko. They rented their audience, right? In crypto, you now own your audience, right? You co own now, the platforms that you belong to, that you participate on. And you share the upside as they grow. Right? You want to add something.

Noel Borges: I want to add on to that. We see. Web two, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube as one layer and we see social tokens, the NFTS as a layer that sits on top of the various platforms. So, if you are in possession of a Samir NFT, you can now gain access and benefits to his brand, whether it’s on Instagram or TikTok, or YouTube, wherever you find him. You can all have this shared common interest that goes beyond just the relationship on that respective social media, as mentioned, if you’re Tik Tok shut down or if you were shadow ban, how do you communicate and interact in a way that’s separate from these platforms. And we see social tokens and NFTs as the medium to do just that. And it sits above all of the various social media, all the all the various social platforms.

Go ahead, Alex Hooven.

Alex Hooven: Yeah, I was just gonna say and by the way, like, it’s so possible for these platforms to just shut down, I remember when Facebook was down for like a day like that actually had tremendous impact on small businesses that operate on Instagram. But I just wanted to add to something that you said about just I think that web three has kind of flipped this idea of like, the traditional web two tech notion that, you know, you build the platform of the product first, and then the community will come. But in web three, it’s actually built the community and incubate the products from there through the ownership of your data. So, like, an example of that is FWB where, you know, there is now I think, about 2000, about 6000, token holders, but 2000 active members. And you know, we were throwing events at different conferences and trying to find a way to get our members in through like a token gated mechanism, and we couldn’t find a solution that works for us. So, we then, you know, voted internally, to allocate some of our treasury budget to just build our own product. And now we license that out to other Dao’s and other platforms. So, it really is that notion of like looking at your data that you own and seeing sort of the white spaces, and then building things for the community because of your community needs it. There’s obviously others that needed to.

Jesse Tevelow: it’s like your community is your team and your team is your community. It’s all the same thing.

Noel Borges: Well, we’re in the same hat. And by the way, I love that line. And we got to repeat it again, for the people in the back, the token, you build a community, and the product will come versus the other way around.

Alex Hooven: Yeah, exactly.

So, it’s like the model in like web two is like build a minimum viable product, right? find product market fit, and then scale. The web three, it’s built a minimum viable community, find people that align under a common theme under a subject, bring them together, issue an asset of some sort, whether it’s a membership pass, right be an NFT, some type of ERC 20. That’s a speculative asset, whatever it may be. Give them upside that as the community gets stronger, grows builds, they share that leverage with them. By the way, I was a victim of the first event that happened that then led to building the event platform.

Alex Hooven: Oh, in Paris.

Yeah. Paris. Yeah. Throwback. Yeah. I want to leave an open the room for questions. If anybody does have any questions. Does anybody have questions? Show of hands. Do we have time for questions? Yeah. All right. I’ll come to you. Let’s do it.

Speaker 1: Hey, how you doing?  Hello. I had a question about as far as doing free NFTs. How do you how do you set that up? Because from what I know, I have very limited knowledge of a lot of things in the NFT space thus far. It’s a lot of cost that goes into everything. How do you set up something to give for free? Do you have to like to choose a certain blockchain like might not be able to use Ethereum? You might have to use something different in order to get that out there because I want to give something away for free, but I’m not sure as to how to go about doing it.

Noel Borges: I’d recommend the marketplace drawstrings on one of my partners. Kenny was one of the co-founders of drawstring is built on near it made it easy for folks to give away. And as pretty much gasless where you can create NFTs, you can Airdrop it, send it via an email or a text and folks can redeem it. We’re doing, we’re using drawstrings for a drop we’re doing with Julianne Moore, where if you’re in possession, if you bought purchase one of her NFTs, a collab we did with Nicole Buffett, it’s as simple as sending an email, someone clicks the link, create an account and the NFT appears in their wallet. So therefore, there isn’t necessarily a payment that’s required.

Alex Hooven: I’m also just going to quickly show rally because rally is very much just an out of the box economy and that you can just create an account, sign up and all of the tooling, the smart contract language is all done for you on the rally side chain. So, it’s as easy as just making an account and you know, uploading your art asset and then being able to drop it that way. There is no gas on the side chain. And I think you know, that’s actually a key thing to touch on is that rally was built with sort of the fan relationship in mind and in thinking that, you know, these people that are creating social tokens or NFTs on the on rally, probably have a community and probably have some sort of reputation on the line and you know, you want that first expand experience in crypto to feel safe and secure. And, you know, for us, that means no gas fees so that people don’t feel like they’re getting sort of Taking advantage of when they’re making a transaction. And so that’s a big thing for rally.

Jesse Tevelow: Yeah, I’ll just quickly say plus one for rally. I mean, that’s like for what you describe probably one of the best, if not the best options. And then the second piece to go along with that is do your research, right? Because there’s not one answer ever. It’s like, what is your specific goal, and then, you know, in touching on gas, like, totally agree like rallies, good for what you just described, because of that fact that whereas, you know, on Ethereum, you’re gonna pay for gas, if you don’t know is almost like a tax for bandwidth or throughput through the system. So, but then you’ve got Ethereum has a big community, right? And they’ve got a lot of, you know, eyes on them in this. And so, you just got to, like, really think about how you want to, those are just two examples that you could use out of, you know, 1000s. So, but you know, so, use rally.

Outro

So, I’ll add one thing, and we’ve got to wrap up. So, I can’t do any more questions, but obvious pull ups, which are basically like free NFTs, I’ve growth hack my newsletter to 1000s of subscribers, because of pull ups. It’s like a hidden secret in crypto. The best way, in my opinion, I haven’t tried rally stuff, I’d love to try it. But from my personal experience, a lot of people that throw events, they use pull ups to kind of just give something for free just for attending, right? And then from the, so pull ups is, it’s a proof of attendance protocol. So, it’s basically its own like mechanism to reward people for showing up at an event or doing an action. So, at the end of every season, I basically give out listener badges, speaker badges, and I give sponsors NFTs as well, via pull ups, right? And it’s just a fun thing people love, and people go crazy for them. So, it shows you if you can give something then you’ll get something in return. But I think that’s where we got to end off. You guys want to plug yourselves really quick. And then yeah, thank you.

Jesse Tevelow: I’ll just plug you man good job. Amazing moderation, dang sure is amazing conversation. Everybody can find me so thanks for being here. Love web three of all you guys keep doing what you’re doing.

Alex Hooven: Yeah, I mean, if you’re interested in, you know, figuring out what a social token economy could look like for you feel free to come see me after this. And follow rally on all our social channels for more.

Noel Borges: amazing. Check us out at the exhibit booth, mint black and as well as on our socials. We have a number of exciting drops. As you mentioned, we’re doing Jim Jones performance where he’s also dropping an NFT live right after Steve Aoki. So, if you’re still in the building, make sure to check that out. It’s at 6pm and Steve Aoki speaks at 5:30 as well as we have an exciting NFT drop that Julianne Moore did, where she created a, she created NFTs of her wearable of her dresses where if you auction when you receive a gown, and we ran the world first NFT commercial during the Oscars, which would have made the headlines if it wasn’t for Will Smith. That said, you will not even know that it happened. And shout out to Jessie, I need a black lollipop. Thank you.

You guys can find me at @Levychain everywhere on the Mint podcast, if you search mint Adam Levy. You’ll find it everywhere. Thank you, guys.

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Music | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 4 episode 34 welcomes Matthew Chaim, who’s the founder of SONGCAMP and ideator of CHAOS, a 77-person collective building towards a headless music artist.

In this episode, we discuss: 

• 02:08 – Intro
• 07:58 – Why Music Needs Web3
• 09:47 – How Has Crypto Influenced Your Creativity?
• 12:39 – What is SONGCAMP and CHAOS?
• 26:50 – Patronage-based NFTs vs Ownership-based NFTs
• 34:28 – What to Expect From Matthew Chaim in the Future
• 40:38 – Outro

…and so much more. 

I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

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Support Season 4’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co

2. Polygon Studios – https://polygonstudios.com

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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How are you doing?

Mathew Chaim: I’m good. I’m good.

It’s good to have you on.

Mathew Chaim: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

You got it. How’s your state of mind? How are you feeling?

Mathew Chaim: I feel busy. I feel overwhelmed. I feel excited. Today, it’s been a good day. I kind of didn’t like work as hard as I do every day. I had. I’m getting married in the summer. So, I did some wedding prep stuff this morning

Wow, Nice.

Matthew Chaim: We’re out of, you know, Discord, Twitter land for a few hours there in the morning. But yeah, most days are full throttle.

Intro

All right. So, I always like to start these conversations, kind of understanding who the guest is. Okay. So, for starters, who are you, Matthew, what does the world need to know about you? But more specifically, how did you get your start in crypto?

Matthew Chaim: Yeah, so I’m a musician, first and foremost, from Montreal, Canada. And yeah, very, was focused on my music career, just like putting music out under my own name, Matthew Chaim for about five, six years and ended up moving to LA and doing kind of the songwriting thing there put out an album at the end of 2019. Yeah, just focus on my music was very creatively satisfied, out there. But I also went to business school back in the day, I thought I was going to be like, in the entrepreneurial world, but then music kind of swallowed me whole. But there was this kind of other part of my, I guess, mind that felt a little atrophied out there, wasn’t super challenged, if you will, kind of was just full deep in sort of like the art which was, which is also incredible, like, no shortage is there. But when I got back to Montreal, I came back when the pandemic hit, thinking I was staying for like three months, but then like, the world changed, and so did my life. And I’ve been in Montreal ever since. But when I got back here, I was quarantining in like this hotel, there’s nothing else to do but go for walks. And I was a block away from an old friend of mine, who I knew had been working in this thing called the Ethereum since like, 2016, but I didn’t really understand what that meant. But we started just taking walks, we would walk our dogs together, because there’s nothing else you could do at that time.

Which, by the way, is my favorite form of exchanging ideas and having these conversations is on a walk. But I.

Matthew Chaim: I would agree.

Yes, I digress continue.

Matthew Chaim: Would totally agree with that. And these were very fruitful kind of exchanges of ideas. He started educating me on what he was doing. And at the time, he was working at Loop Ring, which is like a layer two, exchange and protocol. And so, it was a very interesting sort of, vantage point, like an interesting angle to sort of tear the fabric into this new world via like, layer two technology, Merkel proofs, all this ZK roll ups, like, very kind of down in the piping stuff, which was super interesting. And I could feel the sort of passion and excitement he had for this new world. But I was sort of interested as a musician, as an artist, like how does this stuff kind of come to the surface? How does it meet culture and the things that I care about? And then one day he told me about this, like art online that people are buying and selling and I, you know, my mind went on tilt. I was like, what are you talking about? And of course, he was talking about NFT’s. And when I fully kind of was just immersed in curiosity as to like what this space is, and that’s what really like, pushed me down the rabbit hole.

What year was that again?

Matthew Chaim: So, this was in 2020. This was summer 2020. When we first started talking about this stuff, and I first started getting interested and then like it was kind of like waves of like deep interest versus, still You know, I was like kind of really focused on my music thing and trying to, you know, my shows were just starting to really happen when the pandemic hits. So that kind of got crushed. And I was like focusing on a new record and all this stuff, but I kept being pulled in and I was looking, I was remembering I was looking for like, I was like, hearing about Dao’s and NFTS, I was like, where the music Dao’s I found, you know, Dao records and stuff like this, I was just like getting a taste. And then it was really in like October, November of 2020, that like full plunge sort of thing.

So, you and I have a very similar intro to crypto, at least on the intro side. So, I’m a drummer, I typically have a drum set behind me, but I’m In Miami right now with some family. But I got my start into crypto one kind of seeing bitcoins price at 20k. And that catching my attention back in 2017. But what kept me in the door was seeing what companies like media chain were doing, which is Jesse Walton, some very, very, and his project got acquired by Spotify, around 2017. I was like, wow, he’s actually helping musicians. I’m a musician using this technology to better their life. Right? That was interesting to me. I’m not really interested by money. And I really like a financial person, I get numbers, but that’s kind of like what kept me in the door, kind of similar to you. So, once you got Eth built by your friend, told you about the projects he was working on, from I’m 2020. What was the next step? Like, how would you get involved from there?

Matthew Chaim: Yeah, so I guess like, yeah, just through that, like really just following my curiosity, and it was at the time, yeah, kind of both, like hearing a little bit about Dao, but it wasn’t like kind of where it is today, of course, and it was, you know, and, and also, on the NFT side, the visual side was really blowing up. This was in the time when like Bebo was starting to have like, this $2 million moment, then the, you know, $69 million, early next year, but so I was seeing all this visual art NFT but there was like, not this much things happening in music NFT space. And I remember he had sent me a podcast, much like this one, an episode of into the, I think it’s called into the ether with RAC, and this is when he spoke about his launch with Zora at the time, which was still kind of the old marketplace that it was before the protocol of today. And he did his dollar sign tape project. And that was my first Oh, like musicians are really experimenting and playing the space. So, I started following RAC and people who are like really experimenting at the edges. But I was like, there’s not so much music stuff happening. This was also right around the time that Zora was like starting to tease this big kind of change. And it felt like this like cultural gravitational pull of like, it felt punk, it felt like new, it was exciting. And then that sort of, to me, me, like Zora, and like Zora on Twitter was that sort of nucleus. And then around it came mirror and catalog and forefront and see club, these things started popping up into my world. And I was like, oh, this is a really interesting corner of the internet. I want to play here and especially catalog caught my eye. So, I was spending a lot of time in the catalog discord being like, what are you guys? When are you launching? Because I wanted music NFTs stuffs to happen.

Why Music Needs Web3

Oh, so why does music need web three? Let’s start with that. Why are you, why were you so excited around that? Like, what was the aha moment for you?

Matthew Chaim: Yeah, the way I boil it down. And this is maybe a bit more of like a personal reason over global as a musician who also just loves to play across the gamut. Like I like to wear all the hats I like to like to hold all the paint brushes. For the most part, like I’ve always been like kind of self-managed, mostly independence on one, on one album deal when I was out in LA to basically pay for my life to live out there. But for the most part, like and signed it mainly because I was with like kind of friends that I’ve met there and could just like be in control of everything. And it was a short sort of situation, I love to just be in the kind of driver’s seat across the gamut and really play in sort of the release mode of this thing. But you’re sort of playing in this world, you’re playing in this box of like, this is how you release things, release things to these platforms. And this is what you get for it and then here I saw like, oh, suddenly, this sort of like Canvas is extending past the making of my music and the making of the artwork and the teasers and the whatever, and the Instagram Stories, blah, blah, it’s extending all the way to how I distribute this music, through what means, to what mechanisms and how I monetize it. And I could actually play like, within the value realization of it, I could play within the story around its actual file scarcity or history, there was just like the Canvas was extending all the way down into the piping of the thing. And that really excited me, I was like, oh, I want to, I want to like grab some paint brushes and play there too. And I couldn’t do that in kind of the web two or the current system, because it’s sort of like this is the way it is you know, and there was less mobility there. And so, it’s been a lot of fun kind of being able to play in that part of it. 

How Has Crypto Influenced Your Creativity?

So, as a creative what has your mind been open to an unlocked because of these NFT primitives, because of these social token primitives, because of token incentives, mechanism designs? Like, how has your creativity shifted from music creation process, from a people organization process, from a curation process? Because I feel like those keywords very much like resonate with you, just seeing your work, seeing what you do online. So how has crypto kind of influenced and inspired more creativity that you otherwise would have had before?

Matthew Chaim: Yeah, I think like my mind goes in two different directions. One is like my relationship with my art. And the second is more, I would maybe boil it down to my relationship with other artists, primarily. And the first one being sort of like, I’ll give you an example when during the pandemic, even kind of in 2020, early 2020, really one of the starting before I even fell down this rabbit hole, I was making a lot of music. And for the first time, really a lot more music on my own completely, I always worked with producers. That was why LA really resonated with me because there’s so many creative producers to work with there. But I was never really like creating the music that I was writing vocals and melodies and lyrics to. But then suddenly, I was like, forced indoors, I was picking up the guitar a lot more, I was creating a lot more stuff on Ableton myself. And it really felt like intimate work, it felt like my own work, because I was creating the whole thing, I was creating the seed of it and letting it grow. But from a production quality standpoint, it was definitely lower than the stuff that I’ve released. Right, it’s like, it’s much more rough draft D. But I kind of liked that, like, I kind of liked the demo quality of it, it felt very intimate. But I would never consider releasing it on Spotify, it’s not like branded enough, it’s not going to get the playlist, it’s not going to do well. And suddenly, here, I could actually carve out that intimacy and actually express that, rather than just like be able to experience it on my own, I could express it by saying this is important to me. So, an example that is I put out songs on catalogue as one of ones. And really, you know, I could set the value of that, whatever I want. And sometimes people really resonate with that, it could just be one person who actually feels the same way I feel about that song. And they can express that by collecting that for a higher, higher price than actually sacrificing more than a like or whatever. So that was like a really powerful thing. For instance, right now I have a song on there that I would probably never put on Spotify. But it really matters a lot to me, it has a lot of like meaning in myself. And so, I put it up there for 100 Eth. Because that’s what it’s worth, for me. And it could sit there forever. And maybe someday someone will click it. And it’s like, yeah, that’s like a life changing song for me. So, the expression of someone else’s, you know, resonance with it should be as life changing. For me sort of thing.

What is SONGCAMP and CHAOS?

Got it. So, one thing that stood out right now your relationship with your music and other artists kind of changed and evolved with the introduction of crypto and NFTS, etc, which kind of brings us to the project that you’re working on right now. SONGCAMP, and the songwriting camps that you put together through SONGCAMP, and now this new collective called CHAOS, which super sick, first thing off the bat, I gotta mention two things, okay. First thing is a branding. Beautiful, like, ah, chef’s kiss, beautiful. Second thing is now you guys have started releasing these Twitter spaces, or these radio collectives or high-quality production, that kind of reminds me of, like, how I built this, which I told you privately, it sounds amazing. So, you guys are already making a really good splash online. I’m curious to hear, what is SONGCAMP? Okay, what is CHAOS? And tying it back to you saying how crypto has helped you better appreciate in a better relationship with your work and other people’s work? And then kind of falls into that. So, kind of show your point of view on that.

Matthew Chaim: Yeah, yeah, that definitely goes those other points that have like, have like my relationship changing with other artists? Yeah, it was around that time, like at the beginning of 2021, when I was first playing in the space and catalog was coming and dah, dah, dah. where I was like, I really craved this connection of like, let’s bring together sort of these web three curious musicians just have a place to do things. So, I threw up a discord in March of 2021. It’s hard to remember, March of 2021, called SONGCAMP that was like, here’s a place for music, and the new internet to crash into each other. And really, it was just like a place to bring together musicians that I was starting to meet. And like, let’s go do stuff together. The reason I called it SONGCAMP was because I experienced incredible growth, both creatively and just as a human being through songwriting camps over the years as a musician, as a songwriter, especially at songwriting camp I went on in 2017, really opened the doors for me both on a networking standpoint, and just creatively because I was really working with only a few people here in Montreal, didn’t have as much like exposure to more artists. And suddenly, I was thrown into a sort of structure of like, you have to make five songs in five days with all these people, and I’m like, whoa, that’s not even possible. That’s not human fossils too fast. But we did it and it was incredible and so many bonds were formed. And so, I started to feel that like communal aspect, with other artists that I didn’t really feel before, like, you know, I had close friends here in Montreal, but I didn’t really feel that intensely. Even in LA, it’s sort of more just like spread out, and everyone’s doing their own thing and, and you have your sort of team and whatever. But like that sort of campy feel really was resonant for me. So, it’s like, wanting to create that sort of in some way here, but just in a way where we can like, yeah, not only just focus on the songwriting part, because those songwriting camps, just focus on that. And then none of the music ever comes out, let’s just extend all the way down to the canvas and actually put that music out, too. So that’s where the real impetus came from. And, and the result of that have been that sort of community feeling, again, incredibly strong way. Like, I’m sort of everyday sort of blown away with like, the sense of like belonging that people are experiencing, coming together and running these camps, these projects that we’re doing in sort of collective creation, and like really experimenting at the edges of music and web three together as artists, and camp CHAOS being our third and most recent project that we’re smack in the middle of right now.

So, curation is a superpower I believe in, I will die on that hill, if you can curate the right minds together in a room and give them something to do. That’s like productive in that positive. Really good things can come from that. Right. Hence, that kind of boils down to what you’re doing at SONGCAMP. So, walk me through more of your curation process. So, can anybody join a camp? What is a camp? What does that look like? How often do they happen? How long do they last? What’s the goal of the camp at the end of the session? Like walk me through that a little bit more to.

So related to how do camps come together. So, camps being sort of, you know, SONGCAMP is more than camps. Now, especially we have like this growing community and all these different little projects happening here and there. But really, camps are sort of like the flagship experiments, call them. And they’re pretty big in scope, and ambitious in what they want to achieve. Each one looks different, but it really takes some sort of hypothesis and wants to experiment at the edges of music and web three, do something different both in the way that that music is created, and then how it’s released in these, these new formats that these nascent technologies and web three are allowing us to, to experiment with. So, we’re running them at a cadence of two a year, we ran two last year. The first one was camp Genesis, which was like a very small project compared to these with 12 or 13 people total, and looked a lot like a songwriting camp, like the one I had in Nicaragua thrown online, globally, you know, coming together and a discord creating music over two weeks, and then releasing those as one on one and NFTs. You know, music NFTs, which at the time in like May of last year was our, was still playing at the edges, right, it was so new, releasing kind of music NFTs. Then we ran our second one in the summer of last year called Camp Elektra, which was a bigger project songwriting camp again, but this one, also creating a sort of pop up production house around it, and bringing sound designers, visual artists, voiceover actors, all storytellers together and creating this world, this planet called Elektra, where music is energy and it is dying, and we’ve been sent there to save it with our music. So, creating this sort of story, this world building, this lore, through which the songs created in the songwriting camps could sort of spread out and the audience would have had this immersive experience and interactive experience with that project. So that was sort of like the big game there was kind of creating this game. And then this one, a much bigger one, that that one, so it went from 13 people. Second one was 42 people. This was 80 people. And this is camp CHAOS.

Wow. That is chaotic.

Matthew Chaim: Yeah.

It’s crazy.

Matthew Chaim: Okay. So yeah, so camp CHAOS. 80 people now we’re 77 few had to fallout here and there. But we’re 77 artists. And when we say artists, we call everyone who’s working on a camp and artists, even if you’re on the operation side, there’s 45 musicians. And then there’s visual artists operatives, a dev team, and then also this Lore team, which inside the Lore team exists CHAOS radio. The other thing we’ve experienced, especially with our last camp Electra was we realized, like, the actual process of creating this art is art, right? For a lot of artists who here like what’s the most exciting part of like being an artist, it’s sort of like the process of creating whatever art you’re making. And now because we’re creating it online together, and like communicating online, co-creating, like, we’re actually capturing that process that so often happens more in the room, we’re capturing it. So, we’re actually able to create art with the process of making art. So, we’re calling that immersive digital theater. And CHAOS radio is sort of an experiment in immersive digital theater, and it’s like, how I built this which is it’s documenting what’s happening in camp in real-time through our calls, our you know, our chats, our interviews, our voice memos. As we’re making stuff. We do weekly murmurations, where we as a group on our camp-wide calls, create some sort of thing together, we all answer a question on our voice memo together, we all take a video of the same thing together. So, like creating this art of the process of camp that’s coming through this, this like podcast-like format called CHAOS radio. So yeah, there’s a lot happening in camp CHAOS. I haven’t even mentioned I guess what camp CHAOS is, which it is. The intention is to create this headless artist, this headless band cult.

That’s, that’s the coolest part, right? Like the headless artist, I think that’s super cool and very relevant to what’s happening in crypto as a whole with all the pseudo-anonymity, and a lot of these narratives and ethos that come around producing something or being someone online without really knowing who you are online. But the fact that there’s 77 people behind this project genuinely baffles me, yeah. How do you organize how do you orchestrate 77 people? How do you, I guess, like, pay everyone and align incentives? Like, how do you do that? Yeah, does that work?

Matthew Chaim: So, we learned a lot from Camp two, from Camp Electra, that we were able to integrate into this camp that helped us answer those questions. Because 42 people’s a lot too. And if you can, if you can believe it, like, now we’re double that. And this camp actually feels like less people than camp two, because it’s more organized. And there’s just like, less, there’s almost ironically, less CHAOS so far in this camp than the previous one. And that’s because like, Yeah, we really got to see what happens when you crash so many people into a project together and like, the sort of blind spots. Yeah, so a few things. One is like, I like to call them containers, we have containers of time, containers of space, to give this sort of entire project orientation and give the people in it a sense of orientation. So, containers of time is really like the time we’re doing this in and we’re doing this camp in eight weeks. And in camp, we’ve given that time lore. So, every two weeks is called an act. So, we’ve act 1, 2, 3, and 4. So, there’s sort of this breakdown these chunks of time, that people can sort of orient themselves in that this is like the project CHAOS, which is sort of needed in this sort of digital ethereal space, you need to give people the sense of containership to say, okay, this is the thing I’m in. And then the other thing is like, you know, containers of space is like we’re doing this on Discord, we’re doing this on Zoom, we’re doing this on these channels. And you have a team, this is your team. This is the thing that you’re a part of, this is the role you’re playing in this network of, of rules.

So, in camp, we have six main teams, we’ve got CHAOS music, CHAOS visual, CHAOS operations, CHAOS lore, CHAOS economics, and CHAOS. Because to get to your second question, and CHAOS, what did I miss? I missed one. Dev build, how can I forget, a big one. And so yeah, to dive into the economics part, that was a huge lesson in the last camp, not that this one’s perfect at all. There’s definitely imperfections and blind spots and this one, but it’s working better than the last one. Because here’s what we’re doing, we’re leaning into the fact that this is a network that this is, we’re creating these headless artists called CHAOS, we’re becoming one. And because of that, we’re treating the economics the same instead of every artist, or creator, or Dev, or what have you being connected to the value of the exact thing that they made, we are all exposed to the value of the aggregate. So instead of like I wrote a song with you and one other person. And that’s a part of this project. And we’re splitting a third, a third, a third of that song. 

Yeah, well, the one I forgot was CHAOS Dev. But yeah, to jump into like the CHAOS economic side of things and how we’re sort of incentivizing this network. The thing we learned from last camp was you know, we’d created a big project with a lot of people in the previous camp, but the difference was artists were exposed to the very art that they had created. And we created these pies of value. You know, these revenue pies. that were split amongst artists who were part of each disparate piece. So, in essence, we had to create all these different pies with all these different artists, some artists working in different like teams, right, we’ve visual, and maybe music, putting together an audio-visual piece. And now suddenly, teams that aren’t even really collaborating, now have to figure out a split together. And there could be 12 people who’ve contributed to that thing, it got intense, it got chaotic. People, you know, teams have different cultures. And now you’re trying to blend these cultures to figure out something, as you know, fragile and vulnerable is a conversation around value and art and money, like, so it got messy. And through that, we took the learnings and integrated a new path where we are all creating one split, this entire NFT project will be one split. And we’re dynamically splitting that over time via these different mechanics to create this thing that we’re calling CHAOS value flow. So, we have this whole CHAOS value flow system that runs the length of camp, that’s broken up into four cycles that map to the acts I told you about. So, two-week cycles, in which we are self-selecting certain amounts of value saying this is what I did, this is how much we deserve. And we’re also giving via coordinate. And this all kind of gets aggregated together for people to get a share in that eventual one big split.

Got it. Got it. I’m so excited for this to come together. Personally, I’m going to be minting this or at least trying to mint it. Because there hasn’t been a project like this in crypto just yet. You’ve never seen like so many people come together at least under this medium of music, right and actually put their heads together and push something out. At least I haven’t seen anything. Have you seen anything like that?

Matthew Chaim:  No. I don’t think so.

Patronage-based NFTs vs Ownership-based NFTs

Yeah. So that’s why part of the reason why I also wanted to have you on is because it is a unique project within itself. But also, to that you bring a lot of information in like opinions, I guess on the current state of where music meets web three. Right, and I’ve had, I think I’ve done, this is gonna be the third episode 34, the last episode of season four. And we’ve had everyone from Blau on the mint songs guys on, the catalogue guys, we’ve had Verta, Cooper. We’ve had Daniel, Allen Grady, the list goes on and on and on people. Yeah, different people innovating in the space. And one thing that I want to get your take on Matthew is your thought around the two, I guess types of music, NFTs, patronage based NFTs, and ownership based NFTs and correct me if I’m if I’m missing another type. But that seems to be the two major types that are kind of prevailing, the ecosystem right now that you’ve seen a lot of artists kind of like experiment with? What are your thoughts between patronage based NFTs and ownership based NFTs, I remember you also tweeting if ownership based NFT’s are like a meme to an extent, right? So, I want to get your take on that for a minute.

Matthew Chaim: So, patronage NFT’s versus ownership NFTs, I guess to just like define those, I guess you mean ownership and NFTs being attached to some nominal owner?

Exactly. So, like what like, I guess like streaming royalties coming back to the NFT. So, you sell like actual IP rights, or at least fractionalized IP and patronage based NFT’s is merely collecting to collect a collectible, right, like an audio NFT, music NFT for that matter, right. am I defining those correctly? You think? Do you think there’s a better definition?

Matthew Chaim: Well, I guess my initial thought, is, like my initial reaction when you say that, is like, I would say, I don’t see a difference. In let’s say, maybe the way you define patronage NFTs, I would call those NFT’s ownership NFTs too, I don’t necessarily see those as separate, like so on the ownership NFT side or like the, you know, exposed to some level of IP or what have you. It’s, you know, we’re starting to face this like, from a real standpoint now with CHAOS, because we are exploring, like, what would it look like to actually bridge some if not all this music over to web two with like, headless artists that was born in web three, it could be pretty interesting. We’re calling it operation Trojan horse, because we’re gonna, like, create these artists, that’s all web two and Trojan shit. But really, if you look underneath, it’s like these headless artists of certain people. So, we’re exploring that and like, yeah, how do you split IP in this world that we’re really kind of playing in a very untraditional way. A lot of interesting questions. But I guess fundamentally, where I go is, I think at a base level, like, the exposure to intellectual property or royalties, from like, a web two side gets a lot less interesting to me. As an artist who’s sort of, like been exposed to those with my own music, like, you know, I know if a song blows up, like you can make a lot of money off that stuff. But like, you know, I think there’s a lot more value to be created here for a lot of a longer tail of artists and a lot more interesting way. But even when you get to the fan side of things, like as a fan, like I don’t really even need or want to own my, like favorite artists like a piece of their pie, I think like, I can own something that’s actually soaked in more lore, if you will, like it’s, you know, actually, the actual art or it has something to do with, you know, it’s like this product of what they created, be it, there’s like, what you might call what you refer to as a patronage NFT.

To me, I’m still like, exposing myself to the investment side, where it’s like, I’m still, if I’m early, and there, they blow up like this, the value should carry over of this thing. I think like this goes to a grander conversation to me around what ownership means. I think the idea of, you know, this 100% pie for Master rights, for intellectual property, for a company’s value, for all these things, and that we’re splitting that up in this ownership NFT, token, share, whatever, that’s a story. It’s the, you know, fundamental story that our current capitalism kind of world lives on. But it’s a story no less, it is lore, right? We’re saying, okay, these 100 things represent 100% of that value. So, if I have one of them, I own 1% of that value, even though I can’t exchange, I can say, here’s 1%, and like, give it to me, or whatever. And a lot of those cases, to me, there’s better lore with what we’re getting with web three. So, to me, I’m more interested in owning something that is sort of has that creative, sort of, like resonance baked into it. And that’s the sort of fun, like, primary lore of it, versus it being the sort of economic lore, I think fans are more want to be exposed to the cultural side of things rather than the economic side of things. And that like, paradoxically makes the cultural thing the economic thing. I kind of jumped around all there, but oh.

So, do you think the cultural investor is different than the economic investor? Just based off your explanation and using the words like the keywords that you’re kind of bringing up?

Matthew Chaim: Yeah, I think they’re really crashing into each other in a way that I haven’t seen before. The example I would bring up is like, I participate a little bit in noise Dao

Okay.

Matthew Chaim: I’m also like, like not, I’ve never really been an investor or anything like that before this world. And now.

Which is, which is important to know, as well, right? Because I guess that would make you so much different than I guess the economic investor for the most part.

Matthew Chaim: right. And in so many ways, I’ve like converged with investors, call them collectors now. You know, who are coming in from for maybe economic incentives, cultural incentives, maybe both but converging in this space in a way that we didn’t converge before at all. Right. So, I think, I think they are emerging in a lot of ways. And I think like the artifacts of value, like, we’ll be merging too, and I think like, like skeuomorphism, because is a very powerful tool, right? Like, it allows us to understand things in a new world, and this is very much a new world. I personally am like more interested in that, like the skeuomorphic nature of sort of owning something that is more akin to a CD, then to own something that is more akin to a contract that says, I own point, whatever of this thing. That’s like, in our world, right now, no artists are trying to own the ladder thing really, right. But like in a previous world, a lot of people were interested in owning CDs. And they did hold this like cultural wait to have your CD package like that, or your Pokémon card package or whatever, these things. And now we’re actually in a world where those things exist. And there’s so much more liquid. So, like that, yeah, that cultural lore and the economic lore are really merging. And I think the things to adopt on the front facing UI of it, if you will, is the cultural stuff. So, to me that’s like, CD rams is like fun and interesting and kind of like, nostalgic. Yeah.

What to Expect From Matthew Chaim in the Future

It’s very, it comes down to Preferences. In my opinion, I’ve had so many different takes on this season as to how people think about the different types, whether one type is defined one way or the other way. I think it really comes down to the individual, of course. And I think it’s important to know, like you said, you weren’t like the investor type prior, you’re more of like the cultural type prior, but now you’re seeing both worlds converge, and you can’t be one without the other from what it seems right? So, I appreciate the hot take, you know, and it’s interesting to kind of, when I put out the Blau episode. That was the first time I got like Criticism Online, which is good. Yeah. But like, but like I’ve gotten criticism before, but to that extent, right, people kind of understanding and thinking about what is like an IP royalty-based music NFT versus just a collectible NFT that sits in your wallet, right? And what that means what the difference is, what is ownership really, as a, what is ownership in general and crypto? What does that mean? That’s a gray area within itself, right? Yeah. Because the real world doesn’t really translate yet to the digital world. To an extent or I guess, the crypto world. For the most part, there’s a lot of gray areas. So, I know we’re wrapping up on time over here, you know, I want to ask you like, what can we look forward to in the next couple months? Like what should we expect from you individually as an artist? Because I own, you’re golden. Your golden from sound dot XYZ. And also, from sound as a whole, excuse me from SONGCAMP and CHAOS?

Matthew Chaim: Yeah. Totally. So well, yeah. As an artist, my girlfriend’s decided to make a coffee right now. As an artist, yeah, I mean, like CHAOS. The project has sort of eaten my life whole, SONGCAMP generally eaten my life whole, but I sort of am trying to stay tethered to my own, like personal creative endeavors. And, yeah, I don’t know my plan kind of sprinkled throughout maybe the year. But I do have this sort of like, vision to release a body of work in December, I’m sort of giving myself like the whole year to like, reach that goal and kind of give small bandwidth to it on a consistent basis as we go and embark on all these crazy stuffs, we’re doing in SONGCAMP. So yeah, hoping to have something interesting. On the music side, and on the mechanic side for a personal project in December. But yeah, kind of all the way from now. Until then, it’s kind of all SONGCAMP. And right now, is CHAOS. For CHAOS. We’re planning. Yeah, we’re actually in our third act right now. So, we’re on week six of eight of this of this project, we’re creating, there’s maybe going to be a few hidden songs, but there’s really 45 songs being created through this, the first six weeks. And yeah, after those first four weeks, 30 of the songs have been delivered in their mastered form. Incredible music, like you’re like you spoke about curation as a superpower. It is. And we have the results to show it, we’re, we just heard the demos for this last kind of batch. And then in a week from now, there’ll be delivered in their final mix form. So, we’ll have 45 songs at the end of next week, which is crazy. And we’re going to be releasing a really interesting NFT project in May. And kind of going to your last question in an interesting way. One of the ways we’re playing with NFTs, for that drop, is we’re doing a few interesting mechanics. One is that we’re selling packs. So, you’re actually going to be able to collect a pack of four music NFTs, and you can choose to open that pack or not kind of go into that collectible card.

Really cool. Okay.

Matthew Chaim: I’m hoping some packs closed for years, I’m definitely gonna mint to pack and never open it. The songs are randomly, so of the songs, you’ll have, like sort of PFP generative style, a visual art in the sense that every single visual piece will be unique throughout the collection, but the music will be, you know, edition pieces of these 45, 50 songs. But yeah, and they’re randomly chosen the visual layers and what audio you’re getting, at the time of opening the pack, not at the time of minting. So that’s kind of cool. Like some things just never get opened if these packs stand in condition. So that’s one way we’re playing with things, the other way and this kind of goes to your question earlier about sort of IP stuff or whatever. I mean, it’s not really IP, but how we’re actually dealing with the value flow, what it was. For the campers, we’re actually creating 1000 what we’re calling supercharged NFTs. So, in this project of music, NFT’s that are coming out that people will be able to collect, there are 1000 being held back that are only distributed to campers based on the amount of this project that they are going to own at the end of the eight weeks. And those actually are supercharged with liquid split technology. This is a new thing that we’re doing in camp, the O X split team and what it actually does, it gets big brain for like final minute here, but what it actually does is the value of this project will flow to a split, an O X Split. Protocols.

Contract. Right?

Matthew Chaim: Right. Yeah. And that contract will be determined by those 1000 NFT’s and what wallets they sit on. So essentially what we’re doing is we’re creating kind of like liquid master rates on a web three level, if you will. Let’s say I own 2% of this project, I’ll therefore own each NFT, there’s 1000 Each one’s worth point 1%. So, I’ll essentially have 20 NFT’s which equal to 2% of the split, I can then transfer you 10 of these NFT’s and now your address will get 1% of the split. So, my master rights are liquid. So that’s kind of like a really exciting part of the product.

Really cool. Yeah.

Matthew Chaim: So that’s what to look forward to in May. And after that, we’ll see man.

We’ll see.

Matthew Chaim: we’ll need a little break.

Outro

It’s good. It’s good. It’s good to have you on, thank you for making the time. We’re gonna have to do another one of these sometime soon when the project is out. We got to do a recap at some point so before I let you go, Matthew, where can we find you? Where can we find SONGCAMP? CHAOS, yourself your music, just shelled it away. The TLDR go for it.

Matthew Chaim: So, CHAOS.build is the website to go to for CHAOS. And then I guess I’d point, yeah, people that on Twitter, Matthewchaim on Twitter, songcamp_ on Twitter. And then we’re up in the discord every Monday, SONGCAMP happy calls, that’s our bread and butter.

Amazing. Thank you so much. I will have you again soon, man.

Matthew Chaim: Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Music | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 4 episode 33 welcomes Benny Conn, who’s a developer at Gallery.so and co-founder of Beat Foundry, an NFT platform for entirely on-chain generative and curated music. Benny is back for a second episode on season four of Mint mainly because I love what the team is building at Beat Foundry, his energy and passion for music beams every time he talks about what he does. It’s genuinely contagious.

In this episode, we discuss: 

• 00:00 – Intro
• 09:56 – What Rights Do You Get When You Buy a Beat Foundry NFT?
• 17:19 – Benny’s Thesis Around the Consumption Layer As it Pertains to NFT Editions?
• 19:25 – What Traits go into Valuing Music NFTs?
• 20:44 – Should Artists Prioritize Social Media Virality or Web3 Collectors?
• 22:44 – Benny’s Favorite Music Artist in the Space
• 23:21 – From a Collector’s Point of View, What Makes One Music Artist More Valuable Than the Other in Web3?
• 26:50 – How Did the Collaboration With Oshi Come Together?
• 31:33 – Why Does the Music File Itself Need to Be On-Chain?
• 37:27 – Benny’s Biggest Challenges With Bringing This Project to Life
• 41:08 – Outro

…and so much more. 

I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

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Support Season 4’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co

2. Polygon Studios – https://polygonstudios.com

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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Intro

Benny, welcome to man. Thank you for being on. Welcome. This is your second time now first time was Twitter spaces. And now we’re doing an actual, intimate session. Thank you for being on that. How are you?

Benny Conn: I’m doing really well. It’s great to see your face and my face this time. I’m looking forward to this.

Yes, before we had the barrier of Twitter spaces, but no more. Here we are. I want to dive right in. Okay. For those who didn’t maybe check out the first episode, which I highly recommend you do. We basically cover the first drop that beat foundry initiated, which was super dope, I collected a few myself. Can you tell the world who are you, Benny? What is what is the crypto community to know about you? But more specifically, how did you get your start in crypto?

Benny Conn: Yeah, so I’m Benny. I’m a software engineer and founder of beat foundry. And I’m also a jazz musician. So originally, I actually started playing jazz in high school and playing jazz trombone. And I wanted to take that into a career path, it kind of seemed like the right path for me at the time, I’d been traveling a lot playing trombone, and I ended up going to Manhattan School of Music, where I studied jazz for one semester, before I realized that the lifestyle of jazz musician just really wasn’t for me. I wanted to pivot somehow, but I wanted to stay near music some way or another. And, you know, I’ve been interested in tech for my whole life. And I had picked up some software engineering skills a little bit before I dropped out and decided, you know, what I can probably couldn’t find some way to, to get involved in tech somewhere in the music scene. And so, I dropped out and happened to meet somebody who was working on what at the time was a side project. Gallery, which is like a music, or sorry, it’s just an NFT display platform. And next thing, you know, I’m working there, full time, it seemed like the right thing to do, I just dropped college entirely. And, you know, thinking about ways to get involved in the NFT space, you know, kind of because gallery was not necessarily tangential, but not making NFT’s directly gallery is not an NFT project, I wanted to figure out, you know, kind of understand the context behind what we were doing. So, I tried to put myself or try to find a way to get involved in the space directly. And being a 19-year-old college dropout, I did not have nearly enough beat to start collecting NF T’s. So, I decided that I would make my own and being a musician, I thought that would be the perfect path is to find my own music NFT space. And from there, I found my way to beat foundry. So.

So, dropping out is no joke. Okay, that’s a that takes a lot of balls. Honestly. What, what, what kind of led to that? Like, what led to like, talk to me about the final weeks in college, where you’re just like, fuck this, like, I’m out? How did that kind come about?

Benny Conn: Totally. Yeah, it might have had something to do with COVID. Because, you know, we were we were at music school. And thankfully, I was allowed to be on campus, a lot of my friends, you know, had to stay home for at this point, this is, you know, pretty early on. And I was able to play with people. But, you know, I was just realizing, as I, you know, met all these musicians that I knew a lot of them before, but it was as if, you know, in college, you do have to think about like, hey, where’s this going to take me? In four years? I’m gonna be out of here, and what am I gonna be doing? And I can kind of see their perspectives on what they wanted to do. And every time you know, they would say, like, yeah, you know, I’m going to be gigging right out, I’m going to be, you know, at jam sessions at 4am, trying to get heard, and when somebody hears me, hopefully, I’ll get picked up and I’ll be playing those things. I’m just imagining, you know, that lifestyle doesn’t sound like something that I want to be doing, I want to have a little more stability and know, you know, where it’s gonna be the next, you know, what’s the next thing that I’m doing? Right? I’m not just gonna be like, okay, hopefully, I can schedule some gigs for next week. And, you know, there was a couple other paths in the music industry that I saw myself doing, but you know, at the end of the day, and I wasn’t like, for sure I need them. So yeah, dropping out, I was just, it was constant calling with my mom, you know, calling or talking to her friends and figuring out like, is this a path I can do, even talking to the teachers and faculty at the Manhattan School of Music that I went to, and a lot of them, you know, could see me going in those other directions and saw that as being a valid path. So, I just, I follow my instincts and decided that you know, dropping out, and also, being a jazz musician, too, you have to be very self-motivated and self-driven. And I thought, you know, what, I’ve motivated myself to get here I can, like, self-drive myself, to get somewhere else. I didn’t think it would be too much of a job, it was a fun challenge, honestly.

So yeah. So, what I understand you’re working full time at gallery and doing part time beat foundry. Right? 

Benny Conn: Yeah. 

How do you how do you divvy up your time between the two, full time job and a part time side hustle that has basically captured the hearts of like the, the music collector space and web three? How do you how do you balance the two?

Benny Conn: For sure, yeah. So, you know, I, my work would be Foundry is mostly, you know, one, talking to people, getting people on board, you know, getting the project out there and planning and scheduling all those things. And that kind of stuff can happen you know, all day long anytime during the day, thankfully, with my work at gallery, you know, it’s not like a nine to five, I don’t have to like be on a certain time so I can mix it up with the things I’m doing there. It’s all remote work. And the then the engineering side of the stuff that I do for Beat foundry, which is like smart contracts. And for a while I was doing the website as well. You know that stuff I can I consider myself I guess a pretty quick engineer, so I’ll just like pop it out in a couple hours later at night, I’ll get the things done that I told myself, I would get done for gallery later that night, I’ll pop some stuff out. But you know, doing that does require a little bit of sacrifice on the other aspects of life, you know, hanging out with people, sometimes it’s harder to find time to do this other thing when I’m, you know, working at smart contracts at 10pm at night, so yeah, and my weekend the same thing. So.

We love to hear man we love we love the side hustle, side hustle lifestyle. So, when beat foundry came about, what was like the Genesis idea or problem that you tried to solve or experiment, experiment that you wanted to basically go after? Like, how did that come about?

Benny Conn: Yeah, yeah. So, I had been looking at some other projects at the time. This was like September of 2021. And I had seen, you know, some projects, really nailing one thing, which was, you know, NF T’s give these artists a platform to release something that they find interesting that the collectors find interesting, and then support themselves by, you know, selling that thing, right, and then continue making art, right. And I thought that was super cool. And I think that’s just kind of a byproduct of NF T’s. And then seeing that work in the music NFT space, with the products that were around at that point was really cool. Because, you know, the music industry is something that even people not involved in the music industry know a lot about being, you know, little skinny, you know, they try to take a lot of value from the artists and it’s hard for artists to make a lot of money, really hard to hard for artists to get in. And seeing artists that are able to connect with even their niche crowds, right, the people that they’re small, even if it’s only like 2000 fans at the time, they can connect and build something, release something and make enough money to continue doing it right, continue growing, it just it’s much better cycle. So, I wanted to for sure capture that. But I also wanted to give a reason for, you know, the music to be an NFT right. And I’d seen a lot of people releasing music that they had either previously released on Spotify previously released on Sound Cloud, you know, releasing this song, again, as an NFT. Maybe later, they already wrote it, or they just released it both at the same time, one on Sound Cloud, one, one as an NFT. And maybe there’s even like 1000 copies of the same song. And I saw that, and I was just thinking, like, from my perspective, what I was, what I was getting, you know, I also couldn’t really describe what I was getting, you know, it’s like, I’m getting to own this one has something that a bunch of other people own the exact same thing, but also everybody has on Spotify, right. And it’s something that they really, they’ve already released. So, like, you know, it’s interesting to have, and I want to support the artists, I’m going to do it. But you know, it’d be really cool to have something even more interesting, something that’s like personal and something that actually connects me to the artist that makes me feel like, I’m part of this artists journey, right. And for me, that was coming up with some way to allow an artist release something that is unique per person. And the best way to do that, for me, or the way that I thought about it was generative music. Because, you know, in generative music, there’s going to be all these different iterations, each person’s going to get one that is completely unique. They only have it right. And that feels pretty special. 

So, but the issue with that is, you know, like with art blocks, you know, there’s these artists who know how to paint, but they can’t just go and make an art block straw, you know, you have to know how to code you have to know how to make generative art, right. And I was thinking, you know, I don’t even know how to make generative music, right. And I don’t want to learn how to do that. I’m a jazz musician, that just doesn’t seem like something interesting to me for the type of music that I enjoy. And other artists, I’m sure relate to me. So I want to figure out is there a way that we can make generative music in a way that any artist can get on board with it, they don’t need to learn anything, they can just make the regular music and we can make it generative. And the way that I discovered doing that was splitting up the song into various stems, maybe it’s the drum part, it’s the solo, it’s the lyrics, it’s a, you know, a little background part that’s going on splitting that up. And having the artist write a bunch of versions of each of those. And what’s cool is a lot of artists actually do that in their composition process. Anyway, a lot of artists will write three drum parts and me kind of picking out like, you know, which one do I actually want on the record, right, so we’re actually gonna have the write all of that up front, right, so all three drum parts, all of these, all the melody parts, all the lyrics. And on chain, we’re gonna mix and match them. So that you know, there’s a certain amount of total combinations, a certain amount of iterations that you can make, and each person is going to get one combination, right? So, when you get one, you’re getting this unique thing that the artist fully composed, right, every part of the song, the, from the drums to the lyrics, that was composed by the artist, so you know, it’s guaranteed to sound good, so long as the artist makes good music. And you’re going to own this one of one that is super unique, they compose it, you get to feel that connection with the artists being like, you know, you have this thing that they compose that nobody else has. And you’re you know, you’re that you’re then involved with the greater community of like super fans that also enjoy that artists who all want to have the same thing as you. So, it creates this really cool sort of community around the artist and you know, gets the artists community involved with them more directly than I think I’ve seen with other music entities. I think that’s kind of the idea behind having the generative miss.

What Rights Do You Get When You Buy a Beat Foundry NFT?

Got it. So, you brought up a couple points that extremely fascinating, okay, which is a, it’s like a topic of debate for a season four, we talked about patronage, ownership what it means to buy music NFT, what do you actually get when you get it? What does it mean when it gets diluted by via multiple edition one of one? What does it really mean? And you share a lot of the same sentiment that Justin Blau shares when he came on mint a couple episodes back, basically stating that I don’t know what I get for collecting music for the sake of collecting music, if it’s, if it’s not a one of one, for example, right. And I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna like quote him word for word, because it’s very much like a high-level paraphrase. But it’s very much the same energy that your kind of communicating right now. So, you’re telling me when someone basically collects something on Beat foundry, it’s unique within itself, it’s a one of one off the bat, right? Because the way the music is composed, the way that the stems are stacked on one another, the way vocals are basically integrated with the drum track in the sense, etc, etc, etc. So, what kind of rights you get what you get, when you buy a, beat foundry NFT, like, any IP ownership, is it fully ours to fuck around with? Do whatever we want? Like, how do you how do you think about that?

Benny Conn: Yeah, so I guess at this point, we have decided that it is fully yours, you can do absolutely anything you want with it, the artist, you know, that they’re gonna release their music in the other ways that they want to, but like in this format, in the beat foundry way, right, which to add kind of to what you were saying, which I think is even more special is that, you know, they were, these artists write music for the average, this is you can’t really, you know, use a song you wrote a bunch of years ago to, you know, release that on beat foundry because you haven’t read all the extra parts. So, you’re getting this thing that is nowhere else. And in our format, the artist agree that you know, yeah, it’s whoever owns it, or not even whoever owns it, literally, anybody who can listen to it, you know, anybody can take any information, whether or not you own it or not, and all the rights are there. It’s Yep. 

Okay, so I’m going to the beat foundry site right now, as we speak, I know, Oshii is doing a drop on the 16th. Right on the 12th.

Benny Conn: On the 12th. 

And there’s gonna be 808, if I’m not mistaken, right edition. So, 808 editions of randomly generated on chain music by Oshii was a legendary artist, tons and tons and credibility both in web two, and web three. So, you’re telling me when I collect one of Oshii things, I can then go listen on Spotify, if it just so happens that I get randomly selected with the best sounding auto generated part or a song, I can actually do whatever the hell I want with it, monetize it, use it in my podcast, have a Super bowl ad around it performing at the Grammys do all these things. And it’s mine. 

Benny Conn: Yeah.

808 versions of that song on Spotify, worth streaming and worth listening to? Is that kind of like, is that what I’m understanding?

Benny Conn: Yes, you’re definitely right. Although, you know, it’s, it’s a question of why, you know, like, at a certain point, I mean, obviously, you are bringing back, you know, things to the artists, I don’t imagine anybody releasing all 808 versions on Spotify, if they did, I would add all of them to my playlist, because I’m trying to listen to that, because they are all connected to Oshi, one way or another, people are gonna try to figure out who this is, if the person releasing it doesn’t say that already, you know, so. Yeah, I think given that it’s an NFT to like, enough of what Oshii needs to get from this, which is, you know, having his music tied to him, right, all the on-chain credits are there and all the lyrics are there. They’re his, and then, you know, whenever somebody trades this, there’s gonna be royalties and all that. And that’s what he’s getting from this, right. If somebody uses his music, that’s only good for him. Right? That’s, that’s good for us as well. Right. So.

You know, Benny, what’s your end goal with doing something like this? Is it just to like, play on the edge of what’s possible and creative for musicians? Is it to actually produce legit music compositions that could end up in top 40? Like, what’s the goal here for you? And also, what’s essentially the goal for the artists that you guys are partnering with currently, and will essentially partner with in the future?

Benny Conn:  Yeah, so we are talking, you know, we talked with a bunch of artists, and a lot of them are from different perspective, some of them have never even done anything related NFT’s, but they made it pretty large in the non NFT space, you know, millions of listeners on Spotify. And I’ve been just kind of gauging, like, where they see the value and beat foundry the most and for most of them, it’s creating something unique and interesting, that is going to connect with a, you know, the crowd that is most close to their center, right? They’re their strongest community, their strongest fans. And I think our goal is to just facilitate that for all these various artists, right? Because, you know, there’s gonna be the artists that only have, you know, have only released music NF T’s they’ve never released anything on Sound Cloud, never released anything on Spotify. You know, they’ve, they don’t have too many listeners, their music is, but their music is amazing. And they’ve got people who love it. And they want to connect with those people. Like we want to facilitate that for them, as well as the people who have, you know, millions and millions of streams on Spotify, who just want to release something to connect with the 1000 or so people who are in that top 1% of listeners right and truly love them. So, the first thing is yes, we really want to just release Something interesting and unique that’ll allow these artists to connect with those people. And then I guess on the other hand, I had something but I’m totally losing my train of thought. But.

So, it’s for the for the edge of experimentation, essentially, it’s like breaking the boundaries of what’s possible, experimenting, thinking outside the box, I still think back to my like, part of my questions like, could these songs end up in top 40? Could they end up being nominated for a Grammy. And I know, it’s only the second drop, and it’s the first drop with an artist, but I’m already thinking like, 10 steps ahead, because I’ve never seen like music being composed, in this way, this format, let alone on chain, let alone using software. You’re basically like really testing the boundaries for what’s possible and what’s not possible. And, yeah, I’m really curious to see how the how the songs will come out. And if they actually are enjoyable, if your thesis of stacking stems like that, and automatic, like, auto generating them actually produces a list able song and you’re smiling, I take it as if it is, right. It is it is to that extent.

Benny Conn: Yes. I mean, already, just from the samples, we posted on Twitter, you know, the just the short samples, you know, those are auto generated from all the various stems. And when I listen to it, like, first of all, you would never think it’s generative, you would never think, okay, there’s another version of this somewhere out there, if you just heard that, right. And, you know, I’m already trying to make sure that when I’m, I’m going to be there at the minute and getting like one of each song. Because when I when we originally got the samples from Oshii, when he just wrote the original four bass songs, because basically, the way that this works is theirs, you know, four bass songs. And then of those songs, there’s a certain amount of combinations that reaches 808. And right now, it’s actually even its 202, 202, 202, 202. And I’m trying to make sure that I get one of each. So, it’s like a little album of mine, right? Because these songs are seriously insane. Like, I wish, I’m going to try to find some way to be listening to this, like add it to my Spotify playlist or something just like will be in the mix. Because I need to be listening to these songs all the time. They’re, they’re really insane. And well, and you know, we’ve already, we haven’t announced any artists, we’re getting music from a couple other artists. They’re in the pipeline right now. And everything I’ve been hearing is unbelievable evolved different genres. You know, we haven’t, we don’t have any artists working in the same genre right now. So, it’s just it’s truly great music and the general thing doesn’t even get in the way.

Benny’s Thesis Around the Consumption Layer As it Pertains to NFT Editions?

I gotta tell you, dude, your energy is so contagious. I feel like I feel like beaming off of you. Your excitement is unmatched and unreal. Unreal. I love to see it. You know, part of minting all these collectibles and part of buying music NF t’s a lot of the conversation currently, as we go through the music, music cycle music NFT cycles, like okay, how do you actually enjoy these collectibles? Now, all these collectibles are sitting in your wallet, and they’re each worth X amount of money, whatever the community is willing to buy, buy it for. There’s multiple variations of them. How does the consumption layer tie into this? What is your thesis around the consumption layer as it pertains one to multiple editions? And I guess to music as a whole and web three?

Benny Conn: Yeah. So, I always say when people ask us about, like, you know, how do we think about royalties? How do we think about all these kinds of external problems that, you know, it’s not going to be up to us to find that solution. And this is kind of one of those cases where I would also say that, you know, the consumption layer isn’t necessarily like, our responsibility. But you know, thankfully, I work at a, I worked full time at a company that is kind of this consumption layer, right gallery, is that consumption layer, and there may or may not be like a little partnership in the works, or beat foundry Gallery, and all the holders so, but I’ll say, you know, like, the, these consumption layers, having this perspective of being working out this consumption layer, I know that this is a big thing that they’re thinking about, the music, NF T’s you know, music, in, you know, free web three, music is just the greatest or like the largest art form, or at least I think it is, you know, it’s a most people listen to music. So, I foresee that this music NFT thing will grow quite quickly, when, when, when interesting things are happening. And I hope beat Foundry is one of those interesting things, I think it is. But these platforms are thinking about this and I think, you know, with good enough curation, being able to create playlists and play through them and have a good user interface and the sound to sound good. And then I think, you know, I’m going to be wanting to have like a, you know, a gallery app with my playlist and be listening to that in my when I’m walking, so.

What Traits Go Into Valuing Music NFTs?

Interesting. Okay, got it. Got it. How do you think about like the types of traits that go into valuing music valuing, excuse me music NFTs? What is your thought process around that? Like, what do you look for? Because I know you collect yourself and beyond building you support artists, whether it be through beat foundry or independently. So, when it comes to actually valuing music NFT whether it be in addition, whether it be a one on one, whether there’s IP attached to it, how do you think about like, what’s your mental model around that?

Benny Conn: So, I am it I’m pretty simple person in that I just, it’s good music. And honestly a little bit of value for me in the art that goes with it. I think album covers are very cool. I think that’s been around for a while, I think that that adds to the experience having some sort of visual aspect. And it could even be a video, I think that’s interesting as well. But if the quality of music is really, really high level, then that, that creates all the value for me, I honestly don’t really think too much about the rights. I don’t think too much about, you know, what any special technological capabilities is has or whether or not this NFT is gonna be useful for something else in the future. I just want to collect great music, and I want to support the artists that make that great music. So yeah, pretty simple for me, and I’m sure a lot of people share my opinions as well.

Should Artists Prioritize Social Media Virality or Web3 Collectors?

Yeah, Benny, how do you think about like, how artists should be prioritizing their time should be should they be prioritizing their time to build virility on web two or building like an intimate collector base on web three, in which one’s more important, you think?

Benny Conn: I guess it would depend on the artist with for, which one’s more important, I think they’re both, I think they’re both very important, I think, you know, like some artists might need just to support themselves to have kind of a majority and one or the other, or, you know, if you have virility, you’re probably going to have also like a tight collector base, unless you’re kind of pulling the sort of industry plant kind of thing where you’re just making music that is a mass appeal, but doesn’t have anything truly interesting about it and isn’t going to be remembered in a year, then you might not have that that close collector group. So, I think, you know, at the core, you should always try to have that that core group of people that is going to support you, because that’ll allow you to just keep going. And they’re also going to be your best gauge for how well you’re doing and what you’re what you’re making and who your audiences right, because those are the people who listen to you the most. So, if you’re going to get to that viral stage, you know, I think you should definitely have the grounds to for the small tight knit community first otherwise, you’re what I said before, which is just like you’re making music that is maybe mass appealing, but not truly interesting not gonna be remembered a year because it’s just the hype of today, right?

Benny’s Favorite Music Artist in the Space

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. You know, we’re seeing we’re seeing with every new platform comes its creators. So, tick tock has its tick tock creators, Instagram has its creators, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. And now web three is starting to birth its creators, right? We’re seeing very strong instances of that. People really creating web three full like immersive experiences, and bringing value back to the collectors and how that’s really benefiting them financially and on an ownership level with basically being able to own the crater economy, monetize their fans the way they want to without having some form of middlemen in between and platforms like yourself, actually empowering artists to further engage with their independence and further engage with their creativity and give them that level of financial freedom that a lot of music artists and web two don’t necessarily experience. Off the bat. So, who are some of your favorite artists in the space right now music artists, particularly that are on your radar?

Benny Conn: Yeah. So, two favorites got to be oshi and Daniel Allen.

Okay. 

Benny Conn: Love, love them both. I think I’ve heard music from sober Rob as well, that’s really fantastic. Lac honey, he showed me some stuff recently, that’s absolutely amazing. Latasha always thinks she’s doing some interesting things. And those are, those are probably, I guess, my top five. I would say that’s my top five.

From a Collector’s Point of View, What Makes One Music Artists More Valuable Than the Other in Web3?

So, from a collector’s point of view, what makes one music artists more valuable than the other and web three.

Benny Conn: In, in web three, like I’ll say, there’s kind of two perspectives, there’s the in web three, and then there’s just the alone, like, what makes us more valuable. For that second one, I’ll say it’s kind of what I mentioned before, which is just the quality of, music and the quality of the effort that went into this. And then, like, if I actually enjoy the music myself, the second part of the web three is, you know, I see like, artists like Oshii, who are truly you know, he’s pioneering in every, every space right now. He’s done, you know, sound, he’s done catalogue, he’s done, you know, he’s working on his own thing heads Dao, which is super cool. Then he now, he’s doing beat foundry and he’s kind of pushing the space forward as well. So, like, I think that is really interesting to see because I, I can almost predict for somebody like Oshii that if I’m following him and you know, if I have his NF T’s that they’re going to, you know, be high value and that it’s worth owning, because he’s going to continue to be pushing the space, he’s going to do things that are interesting. And I think for all those five artists that I just mentioned, they’re you know, they’re all doing that, they’re all participating in the new things that are coming up, the new projects that are coming up, all the new technological ways to get these music entities out there. I definitely see that as kind of be like the web three appeal, I guess, who’s pushing the space because I can predict that it’s gonna happen more, they’re gonna continue to be at the forefront.

Are the models that music artists are engaging with today from building a creator Dao and bringing value back to their collectors via social token or issuing collectibles is one of the ones on gated curated platforms, and other activities that like music artists are engaging with from creativity from creating to, to making money, etc? Is this niche culture, or could this actually be mainstream you think?

Benny Conn: I think they’re a lot of what you mentioned is probably niche. And I don’t foresee it becoming mainstream.

Why?

Benny Conn: Because I think, you know, one, there’s a lot of, you know, the average person just wants to listen to the music. And that’s why I say like, the main mainstream thing being like, sure owning a music NFT might become mainstream, right. And people might not even think about it as an NFT, like, in a far future, it’s like, okay, I’m just buying music online, it’s just back to like, iTunes days, like, I’m buying this song online. And yes, it has a lot more advantages than when I was buying things in iTunes, like, it just follows me everywhere. And, you know, I support the artist, with it with a little more, and this is something really interesting that I find really cool, I think that is something that will for sure, become mainstream. But the things that are more like, you know, get involved, do something specific and bring, you know, like, with some Daos that I’ve seen, that allow people to vote on what the artists are going to make, you know, I don’t foresee anybody except for the small crowd that likes those artists, that the niche collectors, you know, getting involved in those kinds of things. Unless there was, it would have to be a very large-scale Dao where it’s like any artist, because if you’re just limited to like the five artists, you can choose to, you know, vote on right, then it’s only going to be those five artists, you know, they’re their big collector base, they are their strongest collector base, right? The super fans of theirs, right. So, in that way, like those things are going to be siloed, which is why I don’t really see it being you know, necessarily mainstream. And then like I said before, like there’s just there’s the added layer of, I’ve got to do something to make this happen. You know, there’s a lot of action there. And that’ll always be there. I don’t I don’t foresee it going away. But I think there’s too much action for the average person who’s just interested in music. If we’re talking about music NFTs, specifically, music, blockchain technology.

How Did the Collaboration With Oshi Come Together?

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about more of this upcoming drop, okay. The reason why I’m here today, which I’m so, I’m so excited about. I gotta tell you, I think it’s so sick. I heard the sample on Twitter, I’m like, Shit, this was randomly generated. Like, how and it sounds good. Like I could, I could actually, I could see myself listening to that, you know, what is the what is the inspiration behind the straw? What what tell me the story like, how did this drop come about? How did the collaboration with Oshi come together? Why oh, she has the first artist that you’re collaborating with? Kind of give me give me the entire narrative here.

Benny Conn: Totally. So yeah, with our, I guess I’ll start back with our last drop, which is the FreeNAS. And, you know, our, when we were thinking about that one, you know, we had all these ideas about how we could get the music on chain in the form of MIDI, to represent how the compositional content of a song be on chain. And then just like the actual technological feat of getting it all to be put together and making sure that the Midwest well, and all those kind of things. And, you know, we, it went as well as it could, and we’re super happy with how everything went with that one. But you know, the, the actual music itself was interesting. And it was it was, you know, it sounded good, but it wasn’t like the kind of thing I’m trying to listen to on Spotify, right? Like, I do enjoy when I hear them. They’re very, they’re very interesting. It proves the concept of okay, yes, this can sound good. But it wasn’t fully there yet. And when we were introduced to Oshii, and we heard his music, you know, I was thinking like, how is this guy, you know, and it’s because he just hasn’t released his, you know, too much music and these other platforms, and he’s kind of focused a lot of his energy into the web three space. At least that’s my perspective. How is this guy not like, you know, top, you know, top charts, artists like this music sounds unbelievable. I have never heard anything like it, I can’t even tell you what genre it is. I don’t know how to describe genre it is. His voice is so beautiful. I was just listening to music. And I’m thinking like, Okay, I need this, all my playlists, right now, I need to be listening to this. And when I was, when we were just, you know, thinking how can we get this with the lyrics, you know, because now there’s this new element, you know, the first drop with the green is we didn’t have any vocal element, it was all produced in logic, by just like, writing the notes out in MIDI. And, you know, now there’s, like, these audio things, you know, he’s going to be sending us a recording of his voice, and we have to be able to get that on chain somehow. And for us, we were, we were just trying to figure out, like, how we could do that. And next thing, you know, many actually includes lyrics in the format. So when you’re getting, like, let’s say, you download the MIDI for when you whenever you buy a bridge for the for this upcoming drop, you could put the MIDI into like GarageBand, and it’ll show above the notes that are show the lyrics that she was singing. And we, you know, it was just trying to figure that out.

And then and obviously, you know, figure out like, you know, now we’re working with a new artist, it’s not in house, you know, we’re truly going to be accomplishing what our goal is, which is to allow this artist to connect with a large amount of people and then you know, reaping the benefits of that and connect with their super fans. And then also bring in people just who are in beat foundry, not everybody was going to be buying one of these is an Oshii fan, maybe they just like beat foundry. Right? And they’re trying to stay and volunteer, but, you know, they like the music. They heard the music, right. So it’s just trying we, we’ve just been trying to think a lot about you know, how can we truly accomplish this with somebody out of house and that is, you know, You know, that kind of stuff made us put a lot of thought into, like total supply, you know, 800 nits, we’ve got this allow us that we’re doing before, right? There’s gonna be 404 people who can mint the day before. And all of Oshii’ s current collectors are in that allowed list as well as a bunch of offering holders. And that was something we really wanted to do to get back to the people that are his super collectors already the 100 or so people who collected NF T’s. So, and then, yeah, the songs themselves the fact that there’s only four songs, right, and for the arena’s, there are seven songs, kind of curating a sort of album vibe, and then all the art that goes with that, this time, there’s going to be more than just one piece of art per song. When you look at the screen, as you see, like, there’s various colors, there’s the black and white one, there’s the you know, blue and pink one. And every, within those various colors, there’s a bunch of combinations, but the art stays the same for the kind of global sound those give off. Whereas for this one, you know, each song is gonna have various different art, you might get one that has the same chord progression as another, but hasn’t, you know, really cool, like steel looking case, looks like a CD case that looks like it’s made out of steel, or one of them might be like more plastic looking, or shiny and kind of translucent, a little bit. So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that, a lot of thought that went into this one, we’re just super excited to be really seeing the quality of music that comes with this one, I think that’s just the most important part is that this is music that anybody can enjoy and listen to. And the generative thing truly does not get in the way that’s just a, that’s a feature that allows more people to connect and more people to  feel connected to Oshii. So.

Why Does the Music File Itself Need to Be On-Chain?

So sick, you know, one thing you keep bringing up, is it’s genuinely on chain. There’s also like commentary around music NFTs not being entirely on chain, or the media files actually on either on our weave or IPFS. Right, and it kind of just referencing back to the collectible itself. But why  is it important? Like why does the music file itself need to be on chain? Like what  do you get? What can you do when it’s on chain versus if it’s on IPFS or our weave even? Why was that so important to this drop?

Benny Conn: Yeah. So I do spend a lot of time thinking about these kinds of questions. The on chain option one has been probably the most thought that I’ve put into any web three philosophy question. And I kind of narrowed it down to three things that I think give anything a reason to be on chain. And the first one is going to be interoperability, so that you know, whatever is on chain can be interacted with through other smart contracts and other  things right other places on the blockchain, there’s permanence, which, you know, on chain, the blockchain is a pretty solid database. It doesn’t go away, you know, it’ll be here forever. So permanence is a very important one. And then the final one is like, responsibilities slash verifiability. Right? It’s like, can we, is there a reason why we need to verify something and prove it in some way, in a public way? Right? Because the blockchain is totally you can see what’s going on, right? There are reasons to prove like for defi, defi is the best example of that, right? You want all the rules on chain, so that, you know you’re going to make your money back when you pull out? Right? That’s like the best example for verifiability. Right? For beat foundry, I think mostly those other two apply. And the verifiability is something that could apply in the future when you know, if there was, if we were making promises, like, which is something we plan on doing, like, okay, when you put in this input, you’re going to get this song output, right. And that is something that we want to be verifiable. Because when you buy something, and you’ve been told, okay, I, you know, I’m going to put in my birthday, and it’s going to change the song, it’s going to change the output of the song. If that doesn’t always happen, it’s like, what did I just buy, you know, that that rule would be good to have on chain, that’s kind of the verifiable thing that might apply. One permanence, you know, having the composition of the song entirely on chain, right, this means that no matter what the best foundry is, no matter what Oshii is, Oshii can die, beat foundry can die, that is still there, what you got is, is there you have the full composition, and that is yours, right?

And you can do, you can even later on if you don’t like the recording, or if, if you outlive the recording of Oshii and even wanted to redo it later on in 200 years, and you have the composition to remake this song, right? That’s the core of the NFT. Right? You can put that into an Able ton or whatever Dao where people are using in 200 years, and turn it into something and you still have that. So that’s the provenance. And then the interoperability is also really important. Because like I said, this is free rights, right? Anybody can use this. You know, we’ve already been talking to platforms like our Apache, who are interested in possibly connecting to our stems, and allowing people to compose using the stems and by just grabbing the stems directly from the blockchain. And pulling in the compositional content allows them to truly, to make something right off the bat. They don’t have to, you know, find out, you know, for other music NFTs that are based on just audio, right? You can’t really manipulate audio too well. So like, you’re gonna have to download the audio, find some way to turn it into something manipulatable like, you know, MIDI right, turn it into MIDI somehow. And if you’re going to get that into like an Apergy, you know, you can right off the bat with  audio, you can use it as sort of like a sample, you can maybe just grab the drum part or just little portion and have it loop or something like that, that’s interesting. But you know, right off the bat with  Blockchain or with beat foundry, you know Apergy you can plug in, grab the MIDI, and you can be working with that immediately and there’s you know, a lot more you can do with that, because that’s, that’s the full composition, you know, that’s not an audio file, nobody knows how to work with audio files and change the  frequencies and all that kind of stuff to manipulate it. So that’s the interoperability aspect of it. So right now, you know, we’re accomplishing those first two, and then the verifiability is the  third one that will, depending on the drop, will apply.

So what’s the benefit then of having it on our Weave, IPFS? Like, why  use that model? Like, what’s the downside of having it on chain that you would otherwise use our weave or IPFS to basically host?

Benny Conn: Yeah, so the costs are the main thing, you know, the right now the blockchain is not cheap, and getting things on chain is just too expensive. And sometimes, you’re just not feasible, there’s a limit to the amount of bytes you can, you been put on chain at once. And just the size of a transaction, the size of a block is limiting. Right. So, you know, that’s the first thing that I would think about, you know, if you’re putting a huge video, you know, realistically, you can’t get it on chain. Because one, it doesn’t fit in one transaction. And even if you did split it up into a bunch of different transactions, that’s going to cost you literally, can cost millions of dollars worth, right. So that’s what I’d say that the biggest thing for IPFS our weave and also, given the cost is a big thing. I’m a very big proponent of like, what doesn’t need to go on chain, what doesn’t apply to those shouldn’t be on chain, there’s no reason to, like try to get something on chain that doesn’t necessarily need to be it doesn’t apply to those reasons, right? Like, the example I always give is, if somebody is making a website, they want their whole user graph to be stored on chain. Right. And that’s data for their website. Well, I’m thinking, you know, if the website goes down, does this on chain data mean anything anymore? You know, does it? You know, the website went down now, like I can’t this on chain doesn’t mean anything beyond the website, did it need to be on chain first place, right? In my opinion, the website should just have a database on their end, where they store all the data they need for all the users so that they go down, the database goes down to right. And it’s better user experience, because nobody needs to pay gas every time we do anything, right? So what needs to be on chain should be on chain and what doesn’t and IPFS and our weave are really great way at accomplishing the permanence aspect of something without, you know, getting something on chain and having to pay that cost, right. Because on IPFS and our weave, it’s going to live beyond whatever API you set up. Right. So I think that is a valid solution for a lot of people.

Benny’s Biggest Challenges With Bringing This Project to Life?

Benny, what were the biggest challenges with bringing this project to life? And what were some of the things you learned from basically producing the first drop to now producing the second drop?

Benny Conn: Totally. So there’s, I would say, there’s two main like categories of challenges that I’ve dealt with. And that’s like, technical challenges. And then just like, you know, beat foundry challenges, like the  idea of beat foundry and how to move it forward. And the technical challenges can be summed up by solving the problem that nobody else has really solved before, which is getting the video on chain, figuring out how to put that together on chain and make something that’s readable, right off the bat, then having all the other data we like the composer, you know, everything that’s involved in, in the metadata, and having the system work, right, you know, a big thing that I’ve had to deal with is, you know, there’s all these generative projects out there, like art blocks, where you can have pretty much an infinite amount of results, right, depending on the input, you know, let’s say the random factor of an NFT is just the transaction hash, you know, whenever somebody meets at our blocks NFT, there could be so many different results, right? But for beat foundry, when you make NFT,  there’s only a finite amount of results, because the artists wrote a certain amount of stamps, and there’s only so many combinations of those right. And normally, there’s more combinations than there are, than we can mint. Right, then then we open up for minting. But if let’s say we minted all of them, right, like, how do we ensure that no, two people mint the same one? You know.

Right.

Benny Conn: That’s, that’s a big challenge that we faced, just technically. Thankfully, we found a solution to that. But that would took us a long time. And then there’s the beat foundry side of it, which is, how quickly do we move? How do we work with a bunch of artists concurrently? You know, are we going to do you know, are we going to just keep it curated and only work with artists one on one? Are we gonna start releasing, you know, five artists at a time and kind of split it up? Or are we gonna allow anybody to release you know, on the platform and just, like, open it up, so that, you know, any average artist can do it, we don’t even need to get involved, right. And those kinds of decisions have been, you know, you know, problems, not necessarily problems for us. It’s just like, the, the, the energy it takes to figure that kind of stuff out. And, you know, those  are, are very important things, you know, a lot of products are going different ways, you know, catalog opened it up, and most people can, you know, anybody can release something on catalog sound is you know, doing more editions, now, they’re releasing a different total supplies. Snoop Dogg just did one which I believe was like, 1000, which is really cool. 

Yeah.

Benny Conn: And, you know, we’re still, we’re also still experimenting with  the supply thing, and then, yeah, just figure out like, how to schedule you know, we’ve talked with probably around, you know, 20 artists at this point, and, you know, managing that and trying to figure out okay, what’s the ordering of this and you know, who we’re gonna have next and we want to make sure that we diversify genres, and get people involved who have never done NFT’s before. You know, there’s a couple, like I said before, there’s a couple artists who just released on Spotify, Apple Music, and they’re trying to get in the space and like, how do we, how do we work with them in the most efficient way? How do we, you know, make the process super easy for an artist? Because we don’t want like I said before, also, we don’t want the artist even think about anything different to make this kind of music, you know, there’s the generative things should be back of mind for them, right, they should be writing music, the way that they want to write their music. And we can handle everything related to generate, generative, you know, MIDI, and making that process, you know, streamlined for the artists is something we’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about, and we’re getting but you know, we’ve only worked with, at this point three artists and we’re just getting better as we, as we go through. And but it’s fun working with the artists and hearing how, how they think about it, how the experience compares to other experiences they’ve had composing for people that are, you know, composing or writing or producing for people that are not just, you know, for their own record. So, yeah, I’d say those are the two main areas that we’ve been focusing on the most.

Outro

Amazing so April 12, the drop 808 NFTs, 404 of which are basically available for pre Mint for Oshii’s first early supporters, including some of the you call them, I keep pushing Archana, right?

Benny Conn: Akarena.

Akarena. So I’m super stoked, Benny, before I let you go, and before we wrap this up, where can we find you? Were can you will learn more about the drop? And what should we expect basically leading up to it? Today’s April 5? So this will be coming out on Thursday. Okay, so what? What should we expect kind of leading up to this?

Benny Conn: Yeah. So I would say, you know, definitely follow the Twitter, which is at beatfoundryNFTs and just keep an eye out, we’re probably posting every day at this point. Tomorrow, we’re doing me a pretty big post, I think we’re the website, there’ll be a big change on the website that’s going to prepare for this mint. And that is where the mint is going to be happening on April 12. And for those of you who are on the allow list, make sure to you know, you have the whole day on April 11, which is next Monday, to mint, you can mint one, at any time starting from 12am. East to you know, 11: 59. Eastern. And yeah, make sure to be there at 1pm on  the 12.

Amazing, Benny, thank you so much. We’re gonna have to do something like this again for the next drop. I love what you’re doing. I love your energy. And I love how you’re helping musicians and tapping into what’s possible with creativity, software and crypto. So thank you so much.

Benny Conn: Thank you so much.

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Music | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 4 episode 32 welcomes Lee Parsons, CEO of Opulous, who’s changing how artists access the funding they need to pursue their music. He’s on a mission to wake up the outdated industry and he explains why the legacy music system is about to encounter a rude awakening. 

In this episode, we discuss: 

• 00:00 – Intro
• 08:18 – How Web3 Will Fix The Music Industry
• 14:27 – How Do Artists Get Started on Opulous?
• 15:43 – What is an S-NFT?
• 19:22 – The Future of Music NFTs at Opulous
• 24:22 – What Will the Decentralized Layer of Web3 Music Look Like?
• 27:33 – Does Web3 Favor Established or Up n Coming Artists More?
• 30:38 – How Do You Turn Listeners into Investors?
• 34:44 – Copyrights on-chain
• 40:14 – Future Plans for Opulous?
• 43:30 – Beyond the Collectible; Staking Your Music NFTs

…and so much more. 

I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

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Support Season 4’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co

2. Polygon Studios – https://polygonstudios.com

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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Intro

Lee Welcome to Mint, my friend. Thank you for being on. How are you doing?

Lee Parsons: I’m good, mate. I’m good. A pleasure to be here Adam. On the channel. So, look forward to the conversation.

Thank you. Thank you, sir. excited to have you. This is the first conversation we’re having, I guess explicitly on music meets defi, we kind of treaded around the topic across like 20. Other plus seasons, give or take, but I’m glad you’re on because I know jack shit of where defi meets using. I have ideas. I have thoughts. But you’re the real expert here. And we’re here today. So, let’s jump right in. Who are you? What does the world need to know about you? But more specifically, how did you get your start into crypto.

Lee Parsons: So originally, I was working the music industry, I run a company called ditto music. And I started that with my brother back in maybe like 2008. And the story behind that was just really quickly, we were in a band, we were trying to get our music out, we were on a record label that dropped us the day the songs first came out, we just didn’t know. We didn’t know how to release our music. And at the time, everyone was still doing CDs, it was like the end of the CD era. And we were the first people to get a contract with Spotify. I think there was like, four major labels and us at the time. And we just started a company that helped artists get onto Spotify and iTunes and Apple digitally. And then they keep all the rights to their music. And it’s a tiny little idea. But at the time, you just couldn’t get onto Spotify or anything like that without having an intermediary. So, I grew that company, it’s about having half a million users. No VC backing, just me my brother working away. That’s, you know, probably about 300 staff in in most countries now we’ve worked with some of the biggest sites in the world. And then around 2017, I was in the Philippines, because we have an office out there. And a producer friend of mine, he’s a friend now. But I just met him. Crazy guy, which he just sat me down and told me about Bitcoin. And I didn’t, I’d heard about it. But I didn’t. I didn’t obviously, I just hadn’t really looked into it probably because no one explained it to me. We spent like a day just drinking beer and he was telling about all these kinds of different things he’d been doing and he built he bought a house from his what you can what you only talk, he was talking about a Ethereum and then loads of really bad points that I ended up buying.

What year was this?

Lee Parsons: This was like early 2017. Right? I think Bitcoin was about $3,000, something like that.

Okay, so like the low period 

Lee Parsons: So, wait, so I was like, man, well, this is obviously gonna take off. I went, I thought, right, I’m booking my flight home. The next day, I’m going home, I’m gonna take everything out the bank, and I’m buying everything I can. So, I literally went home the next day, I’m quiet, let go kind of guy. They’d worry about it. Afterwards, I went home, I’ve got this book. What was it? I think was it. It was just about I can’t remember what the books called. It wasn’t banking on Bitcoin was it or something like that? It might have been, it talks about Ethereum and how you could use it in the future in, you know, in a Tesla and all this stuff. And it was just like, Man, this is this is obviously the future, there’s no way you know, the current banking system versus what this is offering that’s going to survive. I’m 100% Confident in this, let’s go, went to the bank where I lived. I said right when all went out the bank, you guys are finished. And this is, you know, oh, so hyped up about it, like you guys are finished, you’ll give me all my money and they’re like, you can’t have and they were like, you can’t have all your money back today. And that’s what you’re talking about, give me my money out of the bank. And I’d already, I already fallen out with this bank because I took my mom in there once. And my mom was actually the director of my company because she was, she just she had to have that kind of level of security to do something. And I took her in, I said like, you know, I want to do some work in my business account and they thought was they thought was trying to set an account with my mom. And they were just, they were really rude to me. They’re like, okay, well, you know, we can’t do that today. So sorry about this. And then my mom phoned them up and they ended up sending her a big bouquet of flowers and all this other stuff because they obviously looked at my business account thought well because, you know, we pay out 10s of millions a month that ditto, and they just literally shoot me out of the bank like I was, you know. So, we’re already fallen out with this bank. So went back because I want my money, they wouldn’t give me my money. This girl comes out with this pamphlet goes, look, you can earn 1% interest if.

Let’s go.

Lee Parsons: Like, Get out of my way. So, it took me about three days, I took all my money out the bank, and I moved most of it into, like Coinbase and Kraken, I bought all the Bitcoin I could buy, I can’t say how much money it was, I had a decent amount of savings. And then, they all got to like 20 grand, and I’m just like, Man, I’m a genius. I’m Oh, this is like three months later. So, I’m like, I’m a trading genius. This is brilliant. And then my mate from the Philippines, my friend from the Philippines gets back in touch. And he’s like, man, if you really want to make money, you need to get into these old coins and not really. So, you can imagine what happened next, I went all the way back down to less money than I started with. And then um, and then that took us it’s like January and my friend who just saw Fernando, me and him were just so far into it at that point. I was like, man, looking at all the problems we had in the music industry for reporting, and, you know, giving money to people and I started looking at what big, what blockchain could actually do. And you know, away from all the speculative nonsense about the price and everything. As that man, this is just still, you know, I was still pretty happy with it. And then so I started what a company called Blue Box, which was the original version of Oculus. And I was doing that for about two years, man. And like, it was so, it was such a mad experience. I was going to like China and I was meeting, I met all of the blockchains you know, some horror stories. And then with some of them, you know, these, I’m talking about really big top 20 blockchains, who had three staff, and you know, not even a proper office, and I talked to all of them. I started trying to build my product through a bear market. I couldn’t get any funding from anywhere. And this is having a company that’s worth hundreds of million dollars ditto, you know, which is one of the world’s biggest distribution companies that I own? No one was interested at all because it was a bear market, right? Absolutely. No one cared about crypto, it was going down every day. And then around, when was it? Must be 2019. When my founders miles, he was one of the original people who put together algorand. And he was one of the first lead investors, when I say put together, I’m talking about on the finance side, he put like that he helped using Cosmos capital he put like the seed round for, got investors in. So, he had contest algorithm. I spoke to him a few times before. And then we kind of knew a bit more of what we were going to do. But those two years were crazy man. And it was honestly I thought this is never gonna happen because the market was so bad. And then we got some funding off algorithm to kind of build a defi products. And that was around what September over a year ago, and then the market or just turned that it went crazy again. And since then, it’s been like, but anyway, that’s how I got into crypto. And since then, you know what? The best thing I did all the money that went back down to zero, I waited until that March when COVID hit, I think Ethereum is about $90 and put everything into Ethereum. And just left it and so the answer I want.

Everything is locked in Ethereum now.

Lee Parsons: Yeah, man, I’ve got other stuff. I’ve got a lot of algorithms; I’ve got a few things. But for the most part, I’ve got like stable tokens and stuff now, but I don’t have, I don’t have anything in the bank. Really, I don’t ever use banks, I just use my crypto.

How Web3 Will Fix The Music Industry

Lee, can you talk more about like the hype around where music meets crypto right now and what’s going on in the current state? And I want you to take it also from the point of view of because you have such a deep history and you have such deep roots in the music industry. What kind of problems are you kind of seeing web three solve as of now?

Lee Parsons: The biggest problem we’ve had in the music industry has always been lack of transparency, or lack of lack of reporting, right? When we were doing CDs, imagine this like we did, we’ve got, we have Spotify now. So, you can track exactly how many plays a song has. Because if you don’t, you know, if you give someone a report, it doesn’t match up with what they’re seeing on Spotify is completely different. Imagine what it’s like in CDs. When you label, a label would man, I have friends that labels and they were saying they would literally cross out columns and just make this up and put that there. And our artists never used to make any money. Because the record, even a record deal now, there’s artists I know, who have signed a record deal for like 100 grand, so they’re getting advanced, and I think it’s loads of money. The record label takes 90% of your copyright for the most part, if it’s not 100% You get so you get 10. No sorry, 90% of your profits, right? 90% of your profits come and go to the record label. And out of that 10% that you get they pay for everything. So, say 100 grand comes in, your video costs 50 grand that’s gone that way. We spent 20 grand on this that’s gone that way. There’s five grand left, the record label will take 90% of that which and then get what four and a half grand and then give you and so you end up with nothing with anything and then they own the copyrights forever. Just so the actual song you’ve made. The reason you see so many artists complaining at the moment because everyone from you know, pre-Spotify, pre independence era doesn’t own anything. So, 10 years later they got no income coming in, and then only thing and meanwhile, the record labels are making. I don’t know what it’s like $3 million, every hour at the moment, just in streaming. I mean, it’s cool, it’s crazy amount of money. But it doesn’t trickle down to the people actually making the music, that’s the biggest problem people would have.

When I started Ditto. It was, it was just crazy to me that unless I signed with the label, I can’t get a song on the radio, because if it’s not in a shop, you can’t get it in the radio, and one in every probably 10,000, 20,000 artists were signed to a label, and the competition is so fierce assigned to a label that you take the worst deal ever. And that was a problem right now, it’s all kind of shifted the other way in, in, in the direction of the independent artists, because, you know, they don’t need labels as much, they’re holding on to their copyrights. But the one thing they do need is funding still, you know, because if they want to raise 100 grand to go to a video or something, how do they get funding because a bank is not going to give them money, they don’t want to take them on record label. So where are they going to get the money from? So, I guess that’s kind of how, that’s how I just came in on the defi front, because what we do, our defi is backed by artist loans. So, say someone I mean, we work with a lot of big artists, I don’t want to name them on here, but say you had an artist that is earning $1 million a month, crazy amount of money, and you know, artists are, so they’re earning $12 million a year. And that’s backed by their copyrights, I know exactly what they’re gonna earn in the next three years, because I can see from their, from their analytics and Spotify and what playlists so on how much money is gonna come in. Now, they still can’t go to a bank and get a loan on that money because I don’t classify as proper earnings. Meanwhile, music copyrights are one of the fastest growing assets in the world, the fastest growing faster than anything are about 100% in the last few years. So, everyone’s trying to buy these music copyrights. So why can’t an artist who’s making this money get a loan, without Plus, they can take a loan out of the pool that’s in the middle. So, say, to take a loan out $5 million, then that is a staking pool that’s lending. And then people come into that pool and stake their money and earn interest on that money, do you not mean so it’s kind of, it’s like a normal pool, but it’s actually backed by an asset that’s earning money.

So, this is the revenue that’s being generated from their copyright contracts that they otherwise can’t go and get financing from, from a traditional bank, right? So, you guys are coming in as that new modern bank to provide them the financing that they need to kind of tap into the value that they’re generating that they couldn’t otherwise tap into. Right?

Lee Parsons: Yeah. And the independent market is 60% of the whole, when I started, it was like 10. But now it’s like 60% of the whole market and growing. So, most people have access to their own money and their own copyrights. And what happens is that they don’t pay the loan back. I mean, they have to pay it back anyway, most of it goes through ditto right now where it’s automatically taken out. If they don’t pay it back. We take the copyright until it’s paid back, and then they get the copyright back. You know, but they can only take a loan out, obviously, if they’re already earning money. So, it’s really 100% rate of them, you know, us getting the money back.

So that sounds incredible. That sounds like it’s a win, win, win situation. Right? What am I missing here? It sounds like I’m just having this aha moment. And I don’t know this. This is why I’m asking you right? Like, that sounds like such a big problem that needs to be solved.

Lee Parsons: Yeah. And I think that’s what we should be doing on web three. Like you said, the best thing is, is connecting someone who wants to stake money and support someone, and someone who wants to borrow money and you don’t need a bank. Like I said, who’s going to take four days to let you take your own money out and throw my mom out the bank? Which I’ll never forget. But the fact they said, that’s my mom, you don’t mess with my mom. She goes, like that just shows you right?

Is she involved in Opulous right now?

Lee Parsons: My mom. My mom is just, she. Or she still involved, right? Your mom?

Always. So, Opulous came into the picture again, what was it? What was the year?

Lee Parsons: We actually launched last January, which was January 2021. But we’ve been probably I’ve been working on Opulous with algorand for nine months. And I’ve been working on the previous product that was still linked, we had investment for like our three, if you know our three quarter blockchain and a few other people and that and we were running two projects, then we kind of merge them into one as Oculus, about 18 months ago, something like that.

So, Lee let’s scenario arise from it. Okay. Let’s say lil pump comes to you and you guys had to drop a lil pump and he’s actually not applicable. It’s a big artist comes to you right now. Okay. 

Lee Parsons: Not Little pump, a big artist.

No, no, I say because you already did a drop a little pump.

Lee Parsons: Yeah.

How Do Artists Get Started on Opulous?

No, no, no, no, he’s dope. Alright. A big artist comes to Opulous. Right? They say, okay, I’m earning X amount of money per month, here are my contracts, okay, then justify that? How do they tap into Opulous? What does the step by step process look like now?

Lee Parsons: Yes. So, at the moment when we launch right, eventually it will be open to any artist to do so if you’re earning $300 a year, you’ll still be able to, you know, apply for a loan and the moment we’re looking at the bigger artists with bigger loans so we can fill those pools very quickly. Yeah, I mean, so they’re all kind of worked out from, from what their earnings but we have, there’s so much data out there, it’s very easy to kind of see what they’re going to be earning, it will go to an algorithm that will tell you how much money they can borrow. And then it’s really simple man. It’s so obviously it’s an algorithm. That’s it’s obviously mathematical itself, but it’s its own blockchain man. So, transparency

What is the interest rate on a loan?

Lee Parsons: Well, obviously, there’ll be different interest rates, right. So, you’ll have some that will be shorter term loans or longer-term loans, but you know, we want to be able to be around the 10% You know, zone for people staking and then add other rewards in for people using the plus token. So, we’ve got a few cents, the same as you have on a Nexo or anywhere like that. So, you stake a certain amount, Nexo tokens, you know, you get you get a higher reward.

What is an S-NFT?

Got it. Got it. I want to talk to you more about this  S-NFT. That you guys’ kind of like coined at Opulous. It’s called the security non fungible token, it was the backbone for the little pump royalty drop that occurred if I’m not mistaken, on Republic, right, was taken on Republic. This security backed NFTs security approved NF T’s. They’re like one of the biggest question marks and excitements in music ex crypto, let alone crypto in general, right. And a lot of people are trying to figure out how do I overcome the securities issues that have been around since like, what 1946? That I’ve kind of like stumbled many, many people from quote, unquote, innovating, because of these laws that the SCC believes, protects the everyday investor or the accredited investor, right? Yeah, but you guys have found a way around it. Okay. In your own unique nature, for the most part, give or take, I want to learn more about that. What is an  S-NFT? How do you think about it? How did you come to picture with it?

Lee Parson: So yeah, so it’s not even that we found a way around it, we’re just doing it, we’re just registering it as a security with the SCC. And eventually, we’ll have an exchange where you can trade that as you would a normal NFT. But, you know, it takes time to do this stuff. It’s a 12-month period to register something with the SCC, but you know, you can take the chance and hope that no one comes knocking on your door in 12 months. So, it’s a very hard thing to do. But I know, for me, I’m looking at this very long term. And I even know from speaking to people that, you know, some of the biggest changes, they think the next wave of tokens coming through could be securities because, you know, once the SCC do start coming into this industry and working out what is scary, and what isn’t, there’s, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of projects out there that are questionable, even just a you know, even just defi products, and even some of our defi products will be SCC registered on some parts of it, because it’s just once you’ve got that out of the way, it’s a lot easier. And as far as an  S-NFT, is say, with a little pump sale, we broke a song up, I think it’s sold into about 1200 pieces. They all get, they all get an artwork NFT, they all get royalties off the song, the songs already done, I think over 3 million on Spotify alone, it was one of his biggest songs. Because once you, once you put the song out, or the community of people have bought it or just streaming, it’s a death. So, it’s kind of a win win for both communities, really. But yeah, for me, building long term, looking at it from you know, two, three years down the line and where it’s going to be, then definitely having a security, you know, it makes no difference to the audience and the community. It just makes it a lot safer. And the other thing is you’re dealing with artists and their managers and their lawyers. And it’s very, very difficult to get something but even if I thought it’s not a security, which I’m 50/50 Anyway, once I come to, you know, one of the biggest sites in the world, are they going to want to take any risk as something being a security? No. And the lawyers, the lawyers won’t either.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I’m adjusting the screen here. So, for people who are watching on YouTube, I just want to get an idea of what like, what the, what the user flow kind of looks like. Okay, so when it comes to actually registering a song with the SCC, because that’s what essentially it is you’re registering security with a SCC, to do a drop, it took 12 months from what I understand?

Lee Parsons: To be honest, the we just announced another one today, actually, and we’ll have one out in about three weeks, which is Kora, which is amazing artist, and he’s gonna, hhe’s doing his full album. Isn’t that 12 months? It’s quite, it’s quite quick to do. The problem is you know, when you do the first one, it’s difficult because even though it’s SEC registered, there’s so many guidelines, which kind of spent probably the last three months just making sure all our contracts are good, and we can get them done really quickly. And now. Now they are, we’ve got them all lined up the next few months.

The Future of Music NFTs at Opulous

Got it. Got it. Got it. What do you, what does the future of music and NFTs look like at Opulous? What is your thesis around this entire space? Around this entire movement?

Lee Parsons: So, we’re launching a normal standard artwork NFT platform and our next drop has you know, we’ll do artwork NFTs drops. It’s really hard. It’s really strange, man because when you hear you know, I was listening to Gary Vee talk you can’t get away from, can you about music NFTs? And he’s like, the same thing as actually. What do you mean the future of music NFTs? It’s all very good saying it’s going to revolutionize the music industry. But what are they actually going to do? Does anyone know what they’re actually going to do? I think right now, no one does, we’re just kind of working on it as fast as we can to dictate where it’s going to go for me. And then it is the best way of storing an asset on the blockchain and proving ownership. So, the most natural use for it is saying, you know, I own this piece of copyright, I own these royalties are coming in. And they also have a, you know, I have a digital representation of that I have an artwork representation of that, for me, that’s the most useful one, because we’re also building an exchange where they can be traded. And if you want to go and trade copyrights, that they’re not liquid, you know, I can go and spend probably three months trying to buy, I don’t know, a Lewis Powell the song or piece of catalogue, but it would take me three months, it’s probably going to cost me $100,000. In legal fees, what I can’t do is go and buy, you know, $100 worth of a copyright, because no one would do that a lawyer wouldn’t do it. The way we’re using NFTs is to break all of that down, make them tradable, make them be able to buy as you know, a small portion. And that’s where I see that part of the market going, you know, and that’s, that’s what we’ve been building for a long time, ask everything else is the Wild West, we’ll see. Right? 

So, let’s talk about the Wild West, because there’s a difference between collecting something to collect. And there’s a difference between owning like collecting to own right and own an artist share of something. And it’s very much a gray area, like there is no distinct definition of what’s better than what because even the economics behind owning a song, don’t really play out the way people kind of imagined it to. For example, we have yet to see like an actual use case and actual scenario of somebody making legit money from part of a song share that they bought, partly because all this is new. How do you think about the difference between collecting to collect and collecting to own? How do you how do you decipher the two?

Lee Parsons: I’m trying to make them both collectibles, right. So, the one we launched today is the same you know, if you have you have an artwork drop which are very collectible alongside you had the song drop now, I can calculate how much you know, Karl’s NFT is going to earn over the next few years for someone and they are going to get you know, the even the the people who bought the little pump NFT, you’re gonna make a lot of money from it. Because, you know, at some point, over the next few weeks, we’re paying everyone out for the first three months and they’re gonna be like, you know, I’ve got money here. This is crazy. So, if you compare that to other NFTs that are just a piece of artwork that’s probably gone down over the last 12 months, you know, that’s huge. And then obviously, whoever your, who’s your favorite artist.

In a space in the music kind NFT space. There’s a bunch, there’s people from Valencia to Queen George to Daniel Allen, the list goes on and on and on. I collect a bunch of them.

Lee Parsons: Oh, amazing, man. I’m on the music side who’s like your favorite musician?

Musician. So, I’m a drummer. So now we’re getting. You can see like the like the little outline of the drum kit, I guess. The thing is, but my favorite drummer has to probably be either Tony Royster, Jr. Steve Gadd. There’s, it’s endless. It’s endless. But I guess I’m like, like an artist point of view, maybe from like a singer songwriter right now. I would maybe say, Amy Winehouse, I love him. I’d love to own something from Amy Winehouse, for example.

Lee Parsons: We nearly did an Amy Winehouse track, which was a bit worried about legalities on it in the end, because the ownership was a bit unclear. But I guess for you to own a piece of Amy Winehouse track, that’s going to be really collectible. Now, even if it’s not going to make you a millionaire. 

Correct. 

Lee Parsons: It’d be cool.

It’d be cool to see like, a little bit of that song when I hear a play. 

Lee Parsons: So that’s where we are really, it’s about, there’s a lot of different reasons why someone’s going to buy an  S-NFT. So, some of what a Kyle fan, they want to support him, right? That’s the first thing they want it, they’ve got, then you have investors who want to make money who think well, this Kyle albums gonna do really well. So, I’m going to buy it now. And in three years’ time, I think the value is going to go up from it. So, you have investors. You know, there’s this kind of all different types of people that are going to want to buy something from a musician, I think music is the one thing that everyone is, you know, he’s passionate about if I was selling, you know, there’s this, there’s, there’s a, love the AI and algorithm, which I think is awesome. And they do the same kind of thing for houses. And you can buy a little piece of a house, but it’s just, I just they’re not going to capture the same passion as buying a piece of an Amy Winehouse song, but I’m not dissing that project thing, that projects great. But I think the one thing everyone has is that love. Everyone has a famous, you know, Favorite musician, and everyone has someone that they think actually yeah, that’s, that’s something that I want.

What Will the Decentralized Layer of Web3 Music Look Like?

Yeah, you know, a lot of the music NFT that I collect today, they have no real value, for the most part, the market determines their value, right? When you introduce royalties into it, you introduce another metric that potentially values the collectable song in a completely different light. Because it’s revenue generating, right, you can show data to back its value, etc, etc, etc. And I’m also trying to debate like, which one do I prefer more, because the majority of the ones that I collect right now are just purely collectibles, right? And also, there’s no real way to listen to them just yet to enjoy the collections that I that I kind of bought into right, which is another problem that I want to talk to you about, like the consumption layer. How do you imagine that decentralized web three consumption layer for music, looking and feeling like it’s gonna be like a decentralized Spotify that builds on top of all these open networks that allows anybody to listen to anybody song, but people own different versions of them, whatever it may be. And then it’s like a governance token that pays people out as royalties. You know what I mean? Like, what, what is that? What does it look like, a few years from now? Because no one’s really doing that yet.

Lee Parsons: To me, that’s a question. I think, it probably looked like the last thing we expect it to look. Because don’t you think, though, because when we all come into this space, you know, pets.com example, all the internet businesses that, you know, we thought this will be, you know, everyone will go to pets.com to buy dog food, like no one wants to do that. They do want to go to Amazon, and buy everything. And all those different things that came along with what not what they thought it’d be, I don’t think we’ve seen the best use case, it’s going to beat Spotify at the moment or anyone near it. Because Spotify is everywhere. It’s on your television, it’s on your laptop, it’s on your, you know, everywhere you want to be Spotify is so how are you going to take something from web two, from web three, that’s going to beat that? It will happen because you know, the same way Napster happened. But right now, we don’t really need it to happen as a listener. I mean, we need it from a musician standpoint to things out, but you’ve got to change the whole community moves fast and technology, right? That’s how things move. It’s not technology, you can’t sit around and think, well, let’s find an answer for this from a tech wise, eventually the community will discover a way of doing it. And we will all just be like, yeah, there you go. That’s what we wanted to do.

I wonder where Apple and Spotify come into the picture? How do you imagine like the ecosystems, both ecosystems implementing NFT’s as part of streaming services, for example, do you think they’re gonna allow people to purchase songs, in addition to stream them and listen to them? Or, you know, like, where does it play now?

Lee Parsons: Spotify just announced that they were doing that.

They are doing NFT’s? Yeah, yes. I saw that.

Lee Parsons: Token showed. 100%. I hope they announced it again. Um, but even then, I know Spotify very well. I speak to them all the time. And they don’t have a clear path at the moment. They’re just kind of looking at it, looking at were, where it should be. But, you know, it’s like Facebook going to the metaverse, they’re gonna win. They’re gonna win because they are Facebook, they don’t have to do as much as someone else has to do to beat Facebook. So, I think as long as Spotify make the right moves, they’re gonna win. But that’s also not going to stop an 18-year-old, 19-year-old kid coming up with an answer and changing the whole thing, which I hope will happen. Yeah.

Does Web3 Favor Established or Up n Coming Artists More?

Yeah. I’m curious to also hear your point of view of like, does the web three market favor established artists or up and coming independent artists, maybe not even up and coming just like new, independent artists?

Lee Parsons: It depends what you mean about web three? You mean? How do you mean like.

So, let’s say, let’s talk about the Ethereum community, for example. Okay. Ethereum community they support innovators, right, a lot of the entire foundation of Ethereum is innovation. Right? We are still in the innovator’s adoption cycle, right? The really, really early stage of the adoption curve, right. And from what I’ve seen, you see, creators, let’s say, like Daniel Allen, who was absolutely nobody on Twitter raised $180,000, with 200 followers, on Twitter raise that amount of money in less than 48 hours, right? They saw the innovation within his model of sharing a percentage of his artist share right into his EP that has yet to be produced, that is not yet revenue generating, there’s nothing to prove its value. Maybe there’s some data on Spotify to show he has about a million monthly listeners, but still not a substantial amount. That project was absurd. And it also influenced the evolution of this new wave of web three native musicians who went to go ahead and then copycat, a similar model to his a basically, forming a crater Dao distributing his percentage of artists share into that crater Dao, issuing a governance token that then collectively, everybody kind of buys into and then raising money off that governance token to then crowdfund in EP right? That entire, it’s a very like web three native model, but it comes from an independent artist who otherwise wouldn’t have the traction as little pump. soldier boy, Kanye, etc. How do you think about that? Like, does the Ethereum community, the crypto community, web three community, whatever buzzword you want to tie to it? The current state of where we are today? Do they favor more? The up-and-coming independent artists aren’t tied to record label? Or the ones who are revenue generating or the ones who are established, that have a fan base, etc? What have you seen kind of, kind of layout us?

Lee Parsons: Yeah. So, I’d say there’s a big difference. You know, most people, I mean, you know, most people on Ethereum, average pop music fan anyway, right? Because you’d have a hard time. The audience, you know, the audience of music fans, I guess, would definitely favor the independent musician of Ethereum. But I think if you look at what he’s done, as you said, it’s not going to keep replicated over and over again. If you look back when Myspace launched, you had a few artists who became superstars, because they got in there first and did something amazing which he, which he obviously did. And everyone was like really excited about it. So, he has done something for the first time. That was genius. And, you know, and that’s worked is that the model to keep it going forward? It could be actually mean similar to what we’re doing. But I guess everyone who works in Ethereum is a bit to the left anyway, of what they want to kind of so they’re going to support that, you know, it’s unlikely he’s going to go into a BTS forum and get the same response. Terrible, but I think, yeah, he’s obviously he’s obviously done something really, really good there. 

How Do You Turn Listeners into Investors?

Now, I’m curious, like, a lot of people are like, a lot of people in crypto are both listeners and collectors. But a lot of people outside of crypto are not collectors. How do you make in turn more listeners into collectors? Into investors?

Lee Parsons: Yeah. So, I guess the funny thing was, when we, the first one, the first sale we ever did was for a guy in England called big zoo, and Taylor Bennett, who’s trans rappers’ brother, and they were just friends. And I was like, man, let’s just, let’s just put a song out and split it and, and see what happens. And that was probably about 18 months ago, we did that. And I don’t think our audience had heard of either of them at the time. But what he saw was incredible. These people who bought like a tiny piece of a song for like 200 bucks, started playing their back catalogue. The one guy hosted the party at his house, where he was playing the song and all for all his neighbors. And it just created this crazy kind of superfan of people who didn’t know anything about the, I tell you one thing right after working in music for what, 15 years, when a song is making your money, it sounds a lot better. I have a playlist to do stuff. Some of it, some of it’s difficult hearing, man. I mean, let’s not sugarcoat it, little pump songs not gonna win. It wasn’t Bohemian Rhapsody at all that one but it sounds pretty sweet when you know you’re getting paid for it. So, these people, you know, a massive fan of these eyes now. And you know, and they actually do like the music because they feel so much more connected to it than someone who’s just playing it there. You imagine a fan who actually is, you know, someone who does know that artist is a superfan and has that song and they want the artist to win because you know, music fans are the most obsessive people community there is that and they do all that for free right now, you know, the BTS funds, you know, they just spend all their day on Twitter, having a go everybody that says anything bad. But imagine when that actually getting, you know, paid for doing that it’s creating. It’s creating a new ecosystem for music and funds.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I don’t know. I’m like, I’m so curious to see how this kind of plays out in the future, what legality, what infrastructure goes into play to standardize a lot of the experimentation that’s been happening behind the scenes that has yet to be caught up on by the SCC. And to really think and see, like, look at the data and see, does owning something, collecting an NFT of someone entice that person to kind of further support and further sell and further listen to that artist in their craft, the best example we have of this is boarded Yacht Club, and the absurd, like the complete insanity that comes from that community and how, how dedicated those people are to their craft to one another, to their brand, etc. And I wonder if that’s gonna hold true for musicians, music artists, if a fan goes ahead and collects, whether it be collectible for the sake of collecting or an investment, and you’re able to earn royalties, if that really does change the relationship between the artist and the fan, we’re still very much like the pre-early inning, to really see that thing come into play and to see it come to fruition, but we’re seeing small instance of, instances of how it does make a difference, right, but nothing fully to the extent where we’ve seen like, like a Charlie Amelio blow like she has on Tik Tok, for example, right? We haven’t seen like that happen in web three, like we haven’t seen a web three Native artists really take off in the in the mainstream. And I think intentionally because, again, we’re so early on.

Lee Parsons: Yeah. And you know, that’s the best thing about starting a company, right? Because if you’re investing in any company, I don’t know, I have a plan myself for what I want to be doing in five years, but it might completely change, right? It’s like you just have to be ahead of the curve, know what’s going on, and be ready to kind of, you know, someone else’s something amazing. You got it. You got to take, take the positive, take the positive out that keep working like we don’t know, do we really, and it’s probably, it’s definitely the most exciting thing I’ve ever worked in. Because of that.

Copyrights on-chain

Yeah, I hear you. I’m curious. Also, on the website you guys talk about, I have it right here on my right. Copy, music copyright backed NFTs. I want to talk to you about copyright. Okay. Copyright is very much still a gray area. I’d argue in unchain, excuse me. And it’s something that’s actually quite difficult. If you look back in like the LimeWire era, I remember people used to upload songs to LimeWire. And like pirate songs, and they changed like the frequency or the tune just a little bit and upload it to LimeWire. And it would kind of pass their content ID systems that would otherwise flag copyrighted material. And it makes you think we’re, we’re working in building on a network that’s so open, so transparent, and so borderless that a lot of these issues can kind of prevail again, on chain. Sure, there’s a level of ownership. Sure, there’s a level of transparency, you can trace back when something was uploaded, first, whose wallet address it came from. But it still doesn’t stop, for example, the pirating of music, let’s say, okay, when you think of, when you think of copyright, okay, on chain. And again, it’s such a big topic, it extends way beyond just music, but for copyright on chain for music, what is the perfect scenario look like? 

Lee Parsons: The perfect scenario, right would be that you create a piece of music, you put it on the blockchain, every time anyone interacts with that music, you get, you know, it’s recorded, right? Because that’s the problem in the music industry. It’s like, I live in Brazil. And I think something like 90% of the money that’s supposed to go out doesn’t go out. Because nothing is recorded, the way it works at the moment in music industry, right? Say, where everybody plays, everybody in the UK pays a license. So, if you own a bar, or a restaurant or anything like that, you have to pay license for PRS. And then someone from the PRS will come in to your bar once a year and say, oh, you know, what songs have you played, and then they count that for the whole year, the whole year. So, say you’ve got an independent song, and it’s played like, you know, 10 times in each and each little thing and you’ve had loads of plays, the chances are, I’ll never get picked up ever. So pretty much all the money just goes straight back to the major labels, because your ratio, and all these other guys are the ones that they will always record. So, all that money just is not going back to everybody else. So, the transparency and the recording of what your asset does is the most important thing. I think that’s definitely gonna happen. But, you know, we’re a long way off, because you need so many things that happen, but the blocks that we’re building now, all of us music companies will eventually, you know, allow that to happen.

Yeah, I hear you, you know, my whole thing is like, it’s still, it’s still, the whole idea behind these platforms of it being highly curated, right, and being very selective on who can publish new can come on, kinda like works towards solving the copyright issue, right and legitimizing people’s brands, legitimizing people’s platforms, like the element of curation, very much, very much helps with minimizing copyright problems for now. My question to you is like, can platforms solve the issues of copyright without risking decentralization?

Lee Parsons: platforms on web three?

Correct. correct. Because, again, it’s one thing to submit something to Zora, right? Music NFT and to publish something on Zora, it’s another thing to get it published on Opulous, sound or catalog, right? There’s a band of collectors that wait to buy things on those platforms that trust the curation process from those individuals, but they’re highly gated and highly centralized, the technology, right, is inherently decentralized. But I guess my question is a lot of their answers as to why they keep things gated is of course, one for exclusivity. But another point is to maintain, like the issues that would happen in would kind of like evolve with copyright issues. Right? When you have anybody publishing anything, right? And the issues that come with that? Can these platforms, continue to grow, continue to innovate, and also preserve the copyright issues without kind of like combating with decentralization and coming head-to-head with decentralization?

Lee Parsons: Right now? No, I think like I said before, I think the will, there’s just, there’s no way now, right? We can’t up. I’d love to go straight into the decentralization of everything, wouldn’t you? But you’re just not going to work in this system. We need people in the middle to kind of record stuff and do so because there’s nothing, you know, we’ve probably got about 1% of what we need on chain at the moment. But you know, I think 10 years down the line, we will, don’t you? You want a system were.

 I’d like to think so?

 Lee Parsons: That’s the whole point, right? Because so you don’t have a third party involved who can mess anything up or steal or act dishonestly. And that’s what we need.

Yeah, I don’t know. I think the primary winners right now are the ones who are making it easy to interact with these primitives, right? Making it easiest and most efficient and most approachable to interact with these primitives. Right? And I think with that comes monopolies. With that comes empires that will end up being built, despite our ethos and love for decentralization, which could be a good or bad thing. I don’t think I don’t think that’s up for discussion, because we’re not just there yet, but I don’t know. It’s something that I think about like can web three music platforms really address copyright infringement while staying decentralized? You know, I don’t know, I haven’t gotten a clear answer on that just yet.

Lee Parsons: Me neither. I see if I do. I’ll let you know. But you’re right. We don’t have an answer right now I’d say.

Future Plans for Opulous?

Talk to me more about like, what are the future plans right now for opulous? What can we look forward to? What’s in the pipeline? What upcoming drops? I know you mentioned, there’s another one coming out in three weeks that you talked about briefly, fill me and what can we expect in the next few months to year?

Lee Parsons: Yeah, man. So, we have our next NFC  S-NFT coming out in a few weeks with a guy called Adad who’s like one of my favorite UK rappers. He was like someone that Drake’s been, I think it’s like Drake’s favorite UK rapper, he’s just amazing, independent guy who’s done hundreds of millions of streams, then I’ve got Kyle, his album. And we’re just about to record a video with Tiger will not me personally. Normally, Tiger is about to record it. And he’s got an amazing single coming out. We have an artwork, website launching, so that we’ll be doing like artwork, or artwork drops alongside the  S-NFT sales. So, you can buy, you can like kind of pre-register for the main sale buy, you know, buying NFT’s, we just did a 3d artwork drop with Adads, we have a new like artwork team that we’re working with on that, our own platform launches next month with our own staking on it. And then we will have the copyright loans, which will be the next part where you can just stake USDC and Opulous. And, you know, people were taking loans out from that, we’re building an exchange, a copyright exchange, so after the do the sales, you know, you can go and trade it, you know, in fractions of the Sun, which is awesome. You know, something else I forgot was going to say that. And then I think in a couple of weeks, we’re going to start paying the first royalties for the little pump. So, for all those, all those massive little pumps fans out there, finally, all the way in, they’ve been doing probably never pumping alive, but you know what you don’t need, that’s probably the most thing I’m excited about. I work in digital distribution, right? So, if I’ve got a song out, I don’t get excited anymore, cuz I’ve got so many artists, but I remember like, you know, I’ve got, we have a label. So, we have like, 20% of a song for doing the distro. And it’s like, I get to see the stats from tick tock and Spotify and Apple and all the things like daily on what it’s done on, like, let’s sit in there. Now everyone is not any music, and she’s now gonna be able to do that log into Opulous and see that okay, well, this got use on Tik Tok yesterday. So, it’s just shot up on Spotify, and you’ve made some more money. And it’s so cool, man. And it’s so addictive. And, you know, eventually people have just a library of songs in their account that they’re probably just streaming themselves to death. And then, you know, checking the sales every day, we’ve already built that I’m just waiting for the sales to come in. So, I can get the data out.

You know, another thing that hasn’t really been tapped into yet is there’s already value locked in a lot of these collectibles, right, a lot of these music NFTs that people already have boughten, whether they are ownership based or whether they’re collectible based. 

Lee Parsons: You said boughten.

Boughten, excuse me. I don’t know, it’s a word, now making it a word. Boughten is my word, there you go.

Lee Parson: It literally is your word, congratulations

And it’s live. I want everyone to quote me on that boughten, is a but or boughten?

Lee Parsons: I never heard boughten and before but I love it.

What about button, button?

Lee Parsons: Getting off track there.

Beyond the Collectible; Staking Your Music NFTs

I love it. My point is there’s a lot of value locked in these music NFTs. Could there be a way for people to stake their NFT’s and these NFT lending and borrowing protocols for them to extract that value? That’s number one, to who would take a loan against these illiquid JPEGs, is in liquid?

Lee Parsons: Yeah, my that’s some crazy person. Like, I guess on the music side, that’s pretty much exactly what we’re doing. And we have a new CTO, who was one of the, wasn’t really original NASA people, but he worked on a lot of the web two products. And we’ve been looking at, you know, different ways that I get, it’s hard to explain them, because we don’t run out. But you know, an NFT can obviously represent, so let’s say you bought Opulous NFT and you’re saying right, this sounds effect. I know this is going to 1000 pound a year because of we’d look at, say you buy because we’ll have albums that are old albums, right? So, you might catalog on all Michael Jackson song, you bought 1% that earns you $1,000 a year, you will then be able to take the Anthopoulos system and get a loan from it. Because we know what money you’ve got coming in as regard as taking a loan from an NFT. I’ve thought about that as well. It’s like no, thanks. If I was a bank, there is no way. Right. Would you, I guess.

I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m asking you, is there a way to take loans against like illiquid wav files in all these music collectibles that people are basically purchasing on chain? Is there a way to kind of pull all these assets together and take loans against them as a whole?

Lee Parsons: Is there a way to quantify the value of it?

Guessed to an extent. I mean, the value is what it’s been bought for the floor of that.

Lee Parsons: Right? Okay, so I’m gonna go and buy an NFT for a million dollars is worth five pence and then take a loan out from it. Actually, I’ll be a moron to do that, anyone would know. But, you know, I think that that’s the problem, right? Because you’ve still got to sell it to someone, just because you put that as a value doesn’t mean that’s the value because you could no one would want to buy it what you’re gonna do, then.

I guess my point is, I have 1000s of dollars of NF T’s music, NF T’s that I’ve gotten, that are just sitting in my wallet. No only thing that they provide me is access to the community, even if the artist even has set up access and utility like that. I’m trying to think of how can I take it a step further as a collector and put my money to use that’s locked in these collectibles? Yeah.

Lee Parson: I mean, that’s the problem, then a teaser, right? That’s why we don’t run it in the same circle. Because where’s the value? You know, you bought it. We got all excited. We bought it, you try it, you know, is that going to go and trade on the open market for the same price? Do you know if you tried to sell it? You know what the value is?

Yeah, I mean, some of them have risen from like, point one to like, 8 Eth. Right?

Lee Parsons: Yeah, sick.

Which is amazing. You know, some of them are worth like, 10 Eth. And I bought them for point one.

Lee Parsons: Amazing. So, you’re so you’re really, are you? Are you collecting for collectibles? I mean, I guess we’re all, you’re all in it.

Here’s the thing there is like, I have two perspectives. I think at one point, it’s going to end up like we’re gonna see the same way that happened in March and February 2020. We saw that corporate artist, the Instagram artists transition into NF \T’s and end up being in Sotheby’s and Christie’s and doing exceptionally well through platforms like nifty gateway, I think the same thing is gonna happen with music artists. And if I could be a small part of that process and using my platform to help them once I collect something, I’m fucking happy. And if it just so happens that I can also read the value they generate for themselves and all the collectors like why not it’s a win, win.

Lee Parsons: But what classes music NFT then? Are you classing a piece of artwork, the wave what?

Let’s say, let’s say I buy something off Zora? It’s a WAV file, okay, a WAV file with a piece of art, that’s a gift. I can listen to that. There’s value, I have an offer, let’s say for example, like I want Eth offer and I bought it for point one.

Lee Parsons: right? Is that a gift that only you have? Or is that you, because you remember when.

Let’s talk about in two situations. Let’s say it’s a one on one, it’s only one that I have? Assuming it’s one, one, and then let’s take it from another point of view. It’s a collectible. It’s an addition of 25, edition of 100, edition of 1000.

Lee parsons: Yeah, so. But who would buy it? Who would buy it? And it’s a song that 1000 People have.

The 0X39, some random ass address wants it.

 Lee Parsons: Oh really?

 Let’s just say, yeah.

Lee Parsons: I mean, it just, like you said, it depends who wants to buy it? Right? I mean, yeah, that’s what you’ve just got to be making sure you’re, I mean, the artists have got to be really careful. And, you know, obviously, we speak to a lot of artists every day, some of them have just dove in and tried to make as much money as possible. But the majority of musicians have been quite skeptical about the space. And honestly, that’s why a lot of them like Opulous is because Okay, well, I can see you’re actually doing something, my fans will appreciate that I’m not ripping them off, because that’s what an artist does not want to do. Really, you know, if you’re, if you have a huge fan base, someone like you know, 50 cent you just massive and you kind of they’re not, it’s not gonna get you know, you can have independent artists, you’ve got a ridiculous engaged fan base. Now they can’t sell something because a bit flat, if you’re 50. And you know, you’ve kind of got that mid fanbase, you can but for the most part, fans, fans are very close to the artists and they can’t sell something. That’s rubbish. And I think this is the main problem that we have at the moment as you guys want it a music NFT is and what the value is, you know, I hope that’s something you know, we can we can change with Opulous.

Yeah, I think that’s a perfect place to wrap off. I was actually the last question I had for you. But Lee before I let you go. Where can we find you specifically? Where can we learn more about Opulous and everything that you guys have in the pipeline?

Lee Parsons: I am Ceoleeparsons on Twitter. That name was a joke when my brother and me started because we had no staff, but it’s grown into something that I hate now, but I can’t change it. Ceoleeparsons on Twitter. Opulous app on Twitter. You can ask me anything on Twitter again, man. I really appreciate you. I know you’ve had some really big names on the show man, you’re obviously, you’re obviously really ambitious and hardworking man, thank you for inviting me on man. And I’ll make sure our community support as much as we can as well.

Thank you, sir. We’ll have to do this again. Once more drops come in. And Opulous has 10x is where it’s at right now. I’m looking forward bro. Excited. Thank you.

Lee Parsons: down but we got to back up. I appreciate it, man. Thank you.

Thank you, bro.