Category: $STREAM

RAC DAO is the community of holders of independent electronic artist RAC’s eponymous social token, $RAC. In February 2022, he worked with HIFI Labs to launch a custom web portal known as “racOS” for his Web2 fans to claim $RAC tokens and access token-gated tracks and other exclusive content perks down the line. That same month, $RAC also became the first artist social token to be available on Coinbase Exchange.

Holly+ is an artist DAO, built around the eponymous machine-learning tool that allows anyone to clone the voice of experimental electronic artist Holly Herndon. At its heart, Holly+ hopes to use a combination of emerging technologies to decentralize creativity.

Good Karma Records (GKR) is a record label DAO founded by the artist Grady Lee. Since raising 20ETH from 76 backers in November 2021, GKR has distributed its $KARMA governance tokens and voted on their first artist signing, Daz Merchant.

Songcamp is a community founded by independent artist Matthew Chaim, with the goal of building more financially sustainable, decentralized infrastructure for like-minded artists to share their creative output and develop projects together. These projects are organized into “camps,” and one of these camps, the interactive musical storytelling and worldbuilding project Elektra, has transformed into a DAO.

Songcamp is a community founded by independent artist Matthew Chaim, with the goal of building more financially sustainable, decentralized infrastructure for like-minded artists to share their creative output and develop projects together. These projects are organized into “camps,” and one of these camps, the interactive musical storytelling and worldbuilding project Elektra, has transformed into a DAO.

Ampled is a digital cooperative building a paid membership platform that is 100% owned by its artists, workers and community. Founded in 2019 by a group of designers, software engineers and musicians, Ampled helps artists gain sustainable and predictable income in today’s streaming economy. The cooperative is currently incorporated as an LLC, and is evaluating a DAO structure as a means to give the organization more long-term financial sustainability.

Independent artist Jonathan Mann built SongADAO as an ownership and decision-making layer on top of his daily songwriting project Song A Day, which has been running for over 13 years.

Phlote is on a mission to create the most exciting music company on the internet, with a focus on using tokenomics and DAO infrastructure to redesign music curation, discovery and distribution.

Mudd DAO is a self-described “decentralized, community-run record label at the forefront of collaborative creation and generative music.” The long-term vision of the DAO is to help more collaborators make more music together than ever thought possible through generative creative techniques, and to give that music a platform via decentralized distribution infrastructure.

Sone is a music DAO spun off from the longstanding indie record label Topshelf Records. The ultimate vision for Sone is not necessarily to build a “Web3 label,” but rather to produce public goods for music.

This breakdown is part of an ongoing, members-only interview series focused on artist and label DAOs, as part of Season 1.5 of our ongoing collaborative research on music and Web3.

Lifting the veil on our process of putting together $STREAM Season 1 and highlighting what did — and didn’t — work about our highly emergent, agile approach to research.