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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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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.
