poets rhyme their loneliness,
musicians starve as always
and the novelists miss the mark
ā Charles Bukowski, The Sun Yields Mercy
As noted by Bukowski, itās notoriously hard to make money as a musician. I think this is why some people thought the concept of Music NFTs was a good idea. As someone who makes music and NFTs and also likes to make money, I have avoided this particular area of web3. I have lots of opinions as to why.
\Music NFTs have been declared dead. Some guy thought he was smarter than everyone and it all blew up in his face because it became apparent that, like others before him, this person had no taste and had no business dictating trends for anything. I donāt know this person, but I also donāt like Avicii, so I was unbothered and unsurprised by this particular trash fire. Music NFTs have always been dead.
Today, I will explain why Music NFTs were corny from the beginning and why their death should be a shock to no one. I have an opinion on this topic because 1) I make NFTs 2) I make music, and 3) Enough strangers have told me they like what I do that I feel like Iām not a complete idiot.
First, a disclaimer: If you or anyone you love has made a Music NFT, make music in any of the ways I shit on, or have a generally rosy and sentimental outlook on life, you do you superstar. And, if you suspect that all this negativity from my end might be a big smoke screen hiding the fact that Iām bitter about a lot of things, youāre absolutely right. Thatās why Iām here after all.
A Brief History of Trying to Make Music in Web2
This section represents a summary of my experiments in trying to be a pop musician on the internet. In order to discuss the merits of Music NFTs as an alternative to the traditional music industry, it is important to outline what that world of Music NFTs consists of. Additionally, many of the things that make music āgoodā in web2 apply to web3 audiences as well (because theyāre also people).
A Brief Background on Me:
I graduated from conservatory with an electronic music composition degree in 2018 and promptly came to the realization that being a 21st century derivative of Stockhausen wasnāt going to get me very far in life. After hating myself for two years, I began making pop music at the ripe old age of 25 (read: not 19). In addition to my pop music, I began making various forms of crypto art in 2022, all of which included original music. Throughout this journey, I have attempted various ways of making money from music on the internet. After all, this is why weāre all here. Treating music like a side piece to your corporate job sucks and I want to be able to pay my rent.
A Summary on How to Make Money from Music in Web2:
Sync: Getting your song featured in a commercial, on a Netflix show, in a skate video, etc.
Streams: Spotify, Apple Music, and the hundred other streaming services DistroKid pushes your music out to.
YouTube: Separate from streaming as it necessitates a base level of views and followers before content is monetized.
Physical Merch: cassettes, vinyl, t-shirts, anything you can put in an envelope and ship.
Shows: Venues or bookers pay a fee for you to perform live
Sponsorships: Youāve achieved the level of cultural influence where corporations see you as an appropriate voice to advertise shoes, clothes, meal services, etc. In exchange for a cheeky Instagram post in your unique style to your doting followers, you will be paid money or given free things.
Features: Doing verses/hooks for other artists and charging them a fee
Additional methods: Making backing tracks for podcasts/vlogs, selling beats, producing for other artists. I file these methods under āfreelance client workā and see them as different from āIām making my music and Iām going to have fans who listen to it religiously.ā
A Summary on How I Made Money from Music in Web2: (Spoiler: I didnāt)
Sync: I learned about this one more recently and tldr weāre not in a position to do that yet. I will note that I saw a prominent music publisher in all seriousness tweet, āThe songs that make the best sync have very few words and unspecific lyrics that make them easily moldable to different product situations.ā
Streams: Iāve made $64 off of streaming in four years and Spotify curated playlists are the latest major label payola scheme.
YouTube: I have 12k views on YouTube which is still shocking and exciting to me. I am not monetized (yet).
Physical Merch: You need followers to sell merch and I was busy spending money on other things like microphones and paying my engineer for mastering.
Shows: Iāve played a couple shows and was paid for them, bless. To get any sort of serious show circuit going, however, I need a couple more connections and probably some more Instagram followers. To be continued.
Sponsorships: See Physical Merch, Shows re: Instagram followers.
Features: I probably couldāve tried harder to do this but I didnāt.
Additional methods: I put some beats up on Traktor a while back and my soul hurts at the prospect of making a song for a Casey Nystadt vlog.
All of these methods boil down to one thing: creating an engaged audience. So, how do you create an engaged audience? You communicate with people. Music is an exchange between listener and creator: You have to balance expressing yourself with caring about other people. In my exploration of learning to communicate well through art, I had to understand how people related to the music they listen to. Through this study, I learned that the way I engage with music is very different from how most people do (and this is ok).
A General Profile on How I Engage with Music:
I am not the type of listener who makes a āHey You ā22 ;)ā playlist of syncs from my favorite Netflix shows with my free Spotify account. I listen to the Strokes every so often, but indie rock, for the most part, blows. I donāt think memorizing the alphabet soup of different microphone models makes you a better musician. I havenāt listened to a single Bandcamp purchase since I bought it, so I kind of stopped doing that. I listen to music on YouTube pretty regularly, but mostly for individual songs.
I like loudness, confidence, intensity, power and joy. This is why I love noise shows, trap, and punk guitars. I listen to the same five albums on Apple Music and sometimes I listen to my favorite Pauline Oliveros albums on Apple Music Classical. I understand that Iām an outlier in these behaviors: To be a successful musician, you need an audience, and sometimes this means meeting people halfway and understanding that sometimes people do things differently than you do.
How I Found Others Engage with Music:
Most people listen to music while doing something else (cooking, working, exercising, etc). Very rarely do they dedicate their entire focus to just listening to something.
People use music to set a vibe: Certain songs make them feel certain ways and make certain things more fun to do (driving, smoking, dancing). Most people donāt see music as an intellectual exercise to unpack and analyze.
People like how the character of you, the artist, plays with the music they hear. Maybe some people listen to people they want to be like, or imagine themselves as.
People listen to music from a variety of surfaces (earbuds, phone speakers, car speakers). Most people are not listening from studio monitors or high quality systems (although some are).
The majority of people use the most popular streaming services: Iād say most use Spotify, with some dedicated Apple Music listeners and YouTube as the Dodge Truck of streaming + music videos. A lot of these people listen to playlists instead of projects. Listeners who buy music on Bandcamp actually listen to the release on streaming.
People like to keep up with their favorite artists through social media and use artistsā profiles to keep track of their releases.
So, what do you need to accommodate these listener situations? One thing is mixing and mastering: People have a hard time listening to unprofessionally mixed music, so I paired up with a friend for my mixing and mastering (thank goodness for homie rates). Additionally, most people engage with their favorite artists on Instagram*, so itās important to curate a competitive presence there.
Instagram is tricky: It doesnāt like lofi visual content and prefers pictures of you. Given that I have a propensity for vintage camcorders and have a hard time being a Sexy Girl on the Timeline, I struggled with this. I tried paying for Instagram advertising a couple times and got lukewarm results. I was unable to promote any posts with low image quality, such as clips from my music videos.
In attempting to create an engaged online audience, I noticed something: Mixing, music videos, promo, and professional photoshoots for socials all take money. It seemed that everything I needed for my music to perform well on socials necessitated me becoming a customer to someone else. Additionally, I saw very little ROI on these investments
Some might suggest that a label solves this problem, so a note on labels (especially majors): Theoretically, a label can pay for all these expenses and has ample resources to launch large scale PR campaigns. However, I was advised by someone I trust that you donāt want to sign to a label until you have your own equity to use as leverage (i.e. itās better to make it on your own first so you donāt get thrown in the trash can with a big bill). This being said, majors, along with every other big corporation, have figured out social media, and this makes it very difficult to get anything done as an independent artist. I turned to web3 as a way to finance my music career, retain equity in my own work, and have the resources to compete with corporate war chests on the internet.
Complaining aside, much of the logic surrounding the web2 situation is sound: People donāt want to go out of their way to listen to your music. Even if you do manage to siphon off a couple superfans and good friends, supporting your work starts to feel like community service. If you try to go against the mainstream listening flow, you risk shaming your friends into buying your third $50 album on Bandcamp and itās not mixed or mastered or anything. Listening to your music shouldnāt be a chore, it should be a treat. People willingly pay for treats.
*Or at least is was in 2020. Since then TikTok seems to be the primary platform, but I got caught up in the 20 million web3 platforms and just didnāt have the will to add TikTok into the mix.
A Brief History of Trying to Make Music in Web3
Music in NFT form falls into a couple lump categories: Music NFTs (i.e. sound.xyz where itās just a track), the audio offshoot of visual algorithmic art, and music thatās part of a visual piece (i.e. an artist makes a track for their Zora animation mint). Obviously, this is web3, so there are outliers to these groupings.
My Initial Reactions to These Categories:
Music NFTs:
Wow this is like Bandcamp but itās worse.
Iām sure these people are very nice but I donāt really like this music.
This sounds like listening to the graphics for a startup doctorās office with automated sign-in kiosks.
Algorithmic Music NFTs:
Ah yes I remember my first SuperCollider patch.
These are random sine waves.
This sounds like the 20 hours of chakra stimulation video on YouTube.
Mixed Media:
Oh yay that was fun :)
Iāve also had several opportunities to observe Music NFTs IRL. Iāve performed at two web3 events: One was thrown by my friends who treated me well, and another, thrown by a DAO, made me feel like I was sitting at the kids table but the sound guys were nice. I am grateful to have been paid for both these performances. Additionally, I attended a Music NFT event at ETH Denver in 2023, thrown by aforementioned Music NFT Influencer, where there were lots of men who looked like they wished they were doing coke in Ibiza, but instead had an Adderall prescription and an inferiority complex (i.e. not my scene). Also in Denver, I attended an event curated by another Music NFT proponent, which was much better. Some of the performers at this event rocked, and some were not good, which is par for the course at any DIY show.
In addition to performing, Iāve tried a number of ways to make music in web3. Each had varying degrees of success.
Some Brief Case Notes on My Attempts at Music and NFTs:
Minting the album art for web2 releases on Foundation: This was fun, and one of my first attempts to mint things. I didnāt create the album covers: I paid artists I liked, up front, to create animated album covers for use as digital novelty items. When I sold them, which felt like a big deal at the time (Winter ā22/ā23), I was able to give the artists additional royalties on their work (which, for a moment of genuine earnestness, made me so happy because there is nothing I love more than paying people whose art I love for what they do).
Collaborating with visual artists: I created soundtracks for animations created by friends I had met in the web3 space (so many of these were with fabiola.eth, hi ily!!). I love working with artists I admire (and like), so this was super fun. It also allowed me to expand the reach of my growing web3 net of connections.
Minting a web2 music video on Zora before the web2 YouTube release: I did this as a free mint to test out double launching a project on web2 and web3. Similar to Bandcamp releases, I found that the initial buzz I got from the mint drop was retained on standard streaming platforms (return viewers/listeners went to YouTube to rewatch). I also realized that the web3 audience I had was very engaged and willing to give me a shot. I found an increasing amount of my web2 streams were starting to come from my web3 audience. I also found personal joy in the fact that 60 people cared enough to own a music video from me.
Live show opportunities: Both opportunities I had to be paid to perform my pop act were from connections I made through web3. These connections were a result of me sharing my music through web3 socials.
Leaking my EP on web3 through Zora: This was the first/only attempt of mine to mint traditional āmusicā media (an album thumbnail with an audio track). I made a whole joke PR run on Twitter with impassioned speeches about why I was leaking my web2 EP on web3 (so silly). This was fun because people actually listened to the tracks, liked the songs (and told me they liked the songs), and I made some money. I havenāt done this since because I got distracted with the other arm of my web3 career and havenāt recorded new pop music recently.
Which brings us to:
Baggy Industries: My attempt at living out my Cageian generative music pipe dream, art coding extravaganza that has descended into esoteric electronic mysticism and junkie guitarist dreams. Weāve released 5 collections, all of which have music, the first of which (Rusty Rollers) I desperately shilled on Twitter in Fall ā22 as āmusic nfts where the music is actually good.ā These collections have been a blessing, both from a financial sense and from a career sense. This is the closest Iāve been to realizing my dream of ābeing like a painter or a poet but making music and being taken seriously as an Artist.ā To be determined or continued, who knows.
In summary, web3 has huge potential for independent musicians. I can tell you this first hand, as someone who has had numerous blessings bestowed on them by this space. However, in its current form, I agree with the general take that Music NFTs are a joke. There are still many miles to go.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
In the quiet aftermath of launching our last Baggy Industries collection, Iāve been experimenting with becoming my own woman: Creating my own beats, making my own visuals, singing my own songs. To me, itās no surprise Music NFTs are dead. They never really existed to begin with. The NFT landscape, like the web2 one, is dominated by visual narrative. If your track canāt be listened to on a playlist, hands-free, while cooking dinner, it canāt be used as music. And if it canāt be used as music, it has to compete on the same frontier as visual art, where it sometimes takes a back seat. This idea that enough starry-eyed donors are going to sit around and wait to support you with no return on their exchange is deeply flawed. However, what exists here is special. Here, we have a curious audience whoās willing to try new things. This is a rare gem in the scorched-earth landscape of digital media, and it shouldnāt be wasted.
Frankly, I donāt know where we go from here. I have a thousand Instagram followers and am applying to programming jobs while trying to come up with a way to practice in public until I rock hard enough to be a star. Donāt take advice from me.
That being said, I have some observations:
There are not enough good musicians here for this to work (yet). Most of the people who participate in web3 are not artists. They may be professionals who make art as a hobby (no problem with that), but the true ride or die, down and dirty dogs arenāt really out here. The ones who are, arenāt making music. As I descend deeper into the avant underground of the space (and closer to the pulse of the true cultural zeitgeist), I find more and more people who began as musicians (and still identify as such), but who are making exclusively visual art. I hope as this synthesis-mutation of mediums continues, weāll see those peopleās musical voices come back into their art. I also hope to see more musicians developing a compelling visual language alongside their sounds. Itās too early for that to have blossomed fully, however.
When we have a high enough volume of artists, weāll need curators. Not some hot air influencer, but people who listen to music often and care deeply about it. The friend you always want on the aux who finds things youād never hear otherwise.
We need a platform that is dedicated to only music. People need to be able to click and drag tracks from their wallets into playlists they can send to their friends and listen to while theyāre driving to work from their phone. It would be nice if the recognized curators put their playlists on the same platform as these individual user-created playlists. Itunes was nice. Spinamp lacked curation ability. It can be really really simple as long as itās usable (read: itās easy to listen to music that you like).
These are my thoughts on Music NFTs. As always, if you have anything (good or bad) youād like to discuss about this writing, you can let me know on Twitter (@gremlin_bb). Letās keep putting shitty things on the bonfire this summer, I think itās good for us.
xoxo,
āgremlin
Links to works:
Boule Goes Boing (my pop music project)
Apple: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/boule-goes-boing/1549975867
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2jxNOH62PXlouG4ds40ise
Youtube (music videos): https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHtctCWvhL3rdLGRfMz2B8b3-6z5RjdzW&si=3O_aqfdWIxJdR08S
Music and NFTs:
Winamp Collaboration with fabiola.eth: https://zora.co/collect/eth:0xfa530447de67655ea56a5f363fd3babee21dcf44
Foundation Album Art: https://foundation.app/collection/boule
DVPEGVRL 2 EP (Zora): https://zora.co/collect/zora:0xe48cb65dc6b2e534894b7f3ddcbb73a16962fbdb
Baggy Industries:
About: https://baggy.industries/
Different Rooms (most recent collection, mainnet, mint ongoing): https://baggy.industries/different-rooms
