Category: Newsletters

It took nearly one whole year for the independent music community to see some initial fruits from Epic Games’ acquisition of Bandcamp.

If the music industry is an orchestra, curation is like its conductor — arranging and guiding otherwise disparate artists, scenes, and styles into a dynamic, narrative whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Music’s potential in virtual worlds is much more than just a game.

In today’s crowded landscape, the best moat you can invest in as an artist is a strong, memorable brand — which comes downstream of good marketing.

Following the growing interest in music and gaming, we’re excited to announce a new format for The Score: A monthly newsletter distributed for free to all Water & Music newsletter subscribers. Each issue will round up and analyze the biggest music and gaming stories of the month, through Water & Music’s unique industry lens — forever curious about the latest tech innovations and eager to dive into the weeds, while also pulling out actionable insights grounded in music-industry needs and challenges.

The concept of community has risen to a new level of prominence in the last few years as a critical source of social and commercial resilience in artists’ careers.

Data literacy is table stakes for making smart decisions about how to grow music careers and brands, and Web3 shouldn’t be any different.

2022 closed with a dynamic debate in the #web3 channel of the Water & Music Discord server about the role of aggregation and traditional IP law in the music NFT landscape.

A new series unpacking essential foundational concepts for navigating music and tech.

Highlighting the most impressive music and gaming collaborations you might have missed in 2022 — including the key features that made these collaborations so remarkable, how they were activated and monetized, and what you can learn from them.

Capturing the W&M community’s unique, early-adopter, critical pulse on the music/Web3 landscape, backed by ongoing reporting from our Web3 research team that you won’t find elsewhere.

In September 2022, Space Ape Games announced that its mobile rhythm game Beatstar had generated $73 million in revenue — and shared over $16 million of its income with rightsholders, in a revenue-share model that is almost unheard of in the video game industry.