Chains & rails: How Songcamp builds community-first music infrastructure

What if we treat the financial rails around music with the same level of creativity as the music itself?

This operating mindset is one of the standout elements of the music/Web3 ecosystem compared to other areas of music/tech — namely, engaging with distribution and monetization models as creative canvases in their own right that artists can imbue with their own agency and values, rather than as external forces to which artists must relinquish control and authority.

One example of a community that has embraced this mindset publicly is the Web3-native music collective Songcamp. Founded by musician Matthew Chaim out of frustration with the low public output of traditional songwriting camps, Songcamp focuses on grouping artists across genres together to create, release, and monetize songs as NFTs. The collective celebrated its first birthday in March 2022 and has run three camps so far — each involving not only a larger group of contributors, but also increasingly ambitious, Web3-native rails to support their work financially.

The Genesis camp involved 13 contributors and raised the equivalent of US$34,000 from selling three NFTs. The second camp, Elektra, took the concept further into a world-building exercise featuring a cohort of 42 musicians, visual artists, developers, and strategists shaping a “choose-your-own-adventure Web3 game with music at its core.” When it concluded, the camp “exited to community” by distributing the ownership of Elektra to its participants through a token drop and the creation of a DAO. (We featured Elektra in our Season 1.5 research on music DAOs.)

Their third camp, dubbed Chaos, officially launched to the public on June 3, 2022, and involved nearly 45 musicians collaborating on 45 songs over the course of eight weeks, plus a surrounding team of over 30 other contributors (visual artists, engineers, radio producers, economists, etc.) preparing and packaging the songs for distribution as NFTs. Apart from sparking creative collaboration at scale across genres, Chaos also took the “gamification” and smart-contract development aspects of a Web3-native music release to a whole other level. They assigned different rarity levels to each song and sold them to collectors as randomized packs of four songs each (5,000 packs total), and collaborated with the splits protocol 0xSplits to develop custom, equitable revenue-share mechanics around the Chaos NFTs for all participants.

In the following sections, we’ll dive into the creative, technical, and financial aspects of Chaos, rounded out by interviews with two of Songcamp’s leaders, Matthew Chaim and Mark Redito. Along the way, we’ll make the argument that Songcamp can now be understood not just as a songwriting camp that produces music, but also as an experimental lab building new Web3-native blueprints and infrastructure for the music industry at large.

As we’ve covered previously at Water & Music, Web3 music communities are comparable to early Web2 internet music forums like the Hollerboard, Dogs On Acid, and AllHipHop, when it comes to their mentality of open networking, experimentation, and collaboration. The crucial difference with Web3 is the significant increase in available resources from community funding, and subsequently the velocity at which Web3-native communities can move and build tools for themselves.

Our Season 1.5 research highlights how DAO infrastructure specifically — i.e. membership, financing, and governance activities mediated by tokens — gives music communities the tools to mobilize against the backdrop of Web2 music-industry concerns, especially related to financial transparency and equality. Many of these communities then turn into early-adopter, experimental spaces in a much more tangible way, funding, practicing, and producing industry innovations that would otherwise be underserved or dismissed by big-tech platforms.

In this vein, while Songcamp at large is not a DAO per se (i.e. there is no cross-camp Songcamp token), Redito is inspired by the social inspiration and action that the concept of a DAO inspires in its members. “DAO can be a verb. We [at Songcamp] are DAOing,” he says. “When we work together, it carries the layer of a DAO.”

Hence, we will approach our analysis of Songcamp’s Chaos drop as a set of activities over time, rather than as a fixed “thing.” This will allow us to compare each step of the process in which Chaos came together to analogous processes in the traditional music industry, paving forth a clearer path for industry change through concrete action.

In an official Mirror post, Songcamp describes Chaos as a “headless band” consisting of 77 members: “45 musicians, 9 visual artists, 6 engineers, 5 radio producers, 3 economists, 2 lore masters, and 7 operatives gluing it all together.”

Headless brands — a term that Other Internet, an applied research organization, first proposed in October 2019 — refers to those brands whose values, beliefs, narratives, and symbols are determined in a distributed, permissionless manner by their proponents, rather than defined or reinforced top-down. The original 2019 paper highlights conflict and tension as core characteristics of “headlessness.” For instance, Bitcoin is tied to multiple different narratives around its utility that often contradict each other (e.g. electronic cash vs. uncorrelated financial assets), and different sets of users are not only empowered but also incentivized to spread the Bitcoin sub-narrative that best serves their own needs.

In practice, “headlessness” for Songcamp is not so much about intentionally sowing contradictions internally. Rather, it’s about cultivating a sense of collective ownership and accountability, bucking the individualism or egotism of celebrity culture, and embracing a permissionless, memetic approach to growing the value of music. In fact, much of modern music and fan culture is already distributed and permissionless. You can see this with groups like BTS or The Grateful Dead whose fan bases are as much part of the brand as the band itself, and with apps like TikTok and Instagram Stories whose music experiences are built on permissionless mimesis and remixing.

Building off the notion of DAOs as a set of activities, DAOs’ activities are also governed by values. Chaos dubbing itself a “headless band” signals that it belongs to the 77 members who create it and create through it, rather than to any one single celebrity or founder. Being jointly responsible for the outcome of a brand, or band, and owning that outcome, is part of how Chaim describes Chaos helping to “reduce Web2 trauma” for its participants — referring to the challenging economics of streaming and the pressures artists face on social platforms. It’s from this value system that Chaos’ entire structure comes to life.

To assemble the headless band, Songcamp’s core team and alumni put out a call for participants, drawing 200 applicants. After narrowing this down through a quick filtering process that added potential fits to a long list, the team conducted 80 one-on-one interviews with candidates, ultimately selecting 45 musicians for the official cohort. “Vibe was important: Friendly energy, open to collaborations, are they flexible with emergent systems, what’s their bandwidth and time commitment,” Chaim tells us. Of course, their music had to be good, too, and their artist identity well-defined, which indicates a threshold level of development to contribute to the outcome.

Once assembled, the musicians were split up into 15 bands of three each, and given one simple task: Create a song in two weeks. At the end of the first week, a demo was made and reviewed by the rest of Chaos, after which the song was completed in the following week.

These bands were placed in containers called houses, which held four bands each and got reshuffled every two weeks, so that the 12 people in each house would work in three different configurations over the course of six weeks. Each house also contains an “alchemy group” of artists, whichwould not be reshuffled and were tasked to create music from all the stem materials uploaded into shared folders by the bands in their house. As the bands jammed and created their final songs, the alchemy groups had access to their house’s source files and would craft completely new songs using those sounds and stems — almost like a new take on remixing. Each house is also set up with two Songcamp alumni who take the role of guides and provide support and coordination to all the artists within.

The nine visual artists that are part of Chaos worked independently from these houses, and were responsible for creating the artworks that accompany the final 45 songs released as 21,000 music NFTs. They also created all the other branded assets, including logos to typefaces, headers, profile images, cover art for the Chaos Radio podcasts, and more. To generate unique artwork for each of the 21,000 music NFTs, Chaos created an algorithm that combined thousands of visual layers — somewhat akin to how Web3-native “PFP” projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoPunks create unique profile pictures once NFTs are minted.

The camp’s scribes, or lore masters, held responsibility for developing the story of Chaos, which it did through evoking the image of Eris, goddess of discord. The process of this lore creation started during the initial announcement of Chaos in late 2021 on Songcamp’s weekly “heartbeat call” – its primary touch point for the community – when eventual Chaos participant Shamanic suggested wanting to be part of an “Eris workgroup.” This ultimately culminated in a release event called Chaos Festival, featuring lore-filled “immersive digital theater,” a phrase first coined by Chaim to describe Elektra.

The way Chaos organized itself via a bespoke framework to deal with issues of intellectual property is a reflection of its values and inspirations (especially the open-source software moment), and of the Web3 ecosystem at large. When describing the evolution of Songcamp into Chaos, Redito pointed at the operating system Linux, which starts with a kernel that creates the basic layer of interaction between hardware and software. It’s on top of this kernel that the operating system’s software as well as any additional applications are built, which leads to the same kernel existing in many different operating systems. Songcamp’s genesis camp could be understood as a creative kernel. Over time, new patches and upgrades appear; components are built in; features are added on. The product of that is Chaos, Redito explains. Simultaneously, Songcamp’s Elektra DAO still exists with the same Songcamp kernel, but branched out differently.

As the music creation phase of the project drew to a close after six weeks, the collective investigated how it might make the music available beyond NFTs. Collaborating with Jeremy Goldman, a lawyer specializing in web3 & IP, Songcamp drafted a “Chaos Agreement” framework and put it to a token vote on Snapshot with a 1-wallet-1-vote strategy, drawing unanimous approval of the proposal from voters.

The Chaos Agreement allows all members to use their contributions to the project in non-commercial ways, but also sets Chaos up with some security for the exploitation and monetization of the creative assets. Notably, the passed proposal states that if members ever vote to disband Chaos, all the IP will revert to their originators. This means that if a majority of artists decide that their art doesn’t fit well within the Chaos framework, they can vote to dissolve at any time. “This is us collectively deciding to move as a headless band, not only in Web3 land but throughout the universe,” Chaim explains. “No one fractionally owns the IP but we all own it wholly together.” That means that instead of each person owning a percentage of the total IP, the entire collective, as Chaos, owns the entire IP.

Chaim continues:

“The process of coming to this agreement, and having camp-wide conversations about it, was a really beautiful thing. We were able to talk about things openly and honestly amongst a lot of people, on stuff that is usually very challenging to talk about and often happens in the shadows. I’m excited for us to steward this IP forward as a network.”

The agreement, as Goldman explains in episode 5 of the Chaos podcast series, gives the Chaos community a chance to move forward while figuring out other organizational matters: Whether to set up a legal entity governed by members, whether to open a royalty account for performing rights organizations (PROs), and how to model a way to distribute revenues to all members. According to Redito, there have even been talks to dedicate a percentage of the revenue flow to charity — noting that all of this, including whether to distribute to Web2 services, would be subject to a vote if a proposal is created.

This framework, as will become apparent later, also gave participants the ease of mind that nobody wins unless everybody wins, which allows them to fully commit to the experiment and the headless artist called Chaos.

The 45 songs were released as collectibles, bundled in the form of 5,000 packs. Each pack is an NFT priced at 0.2 ETH (around US$360 at time of writing), and contains a randomized combination of four of the songs from the collection. If someone is ready to spend at least 2.4 ETH, they have the chance to pull all 45 songs from the packs. (This sum is likely to be much higher, since certain songs are rare and less likely to appear in packs.)

Opening the pack “burns” the original NFT — “burning” referring to a process that destroys the original NFT and removes it from the blockchain. When people burn this NFT, the Chaos smart contract algorithmically mints four of the songs with their unique cover art to the burner’s crypto wallet, meaning a total of 20,000 NFTs can be collected across the 5,000 packs. An additional 1,000 NFTs are reserved for the Chaos cohort, which don’t just contain the music and visual art, but also serve as the keys to the camp’s value distribution (more on that later).

June 3 marked Chaos’ release day and saw the headless band launch a website, built by its in-house full-stack development team, from where packs can be collected and all the music could be listened to. This latter part bears emphasizing: The music is not exclusive to the NFT holders. Everyone can hear every song created by Chaos on NFT platforms, the Chaos website, Web3 music players like Spinamp & Future Tape, Songcamp’s incubated Discord music bot BPM, and eventually Web2 streaming services if Chaos chooses to distribute.

After minting a pack, an inventory appears, which allows people to open the packs they’ve minted and see which songs they’ve collected. The interface has a matrix which shows you which songs you already own and which are still missing from your collection. This is reminiscent of folders for collecting baseball cards or — a metaphor mentioned multiple times during the release event — Pokémon’s Pokédex. You can see the unpacking process in this video.

The release went live during an online event that took place in the Songcamp Discord server called Chaos Festival, featuring lots of music, interviews, pack giveaways, and the launch of the Chaos website. In order to get in, you needed a ticket NFT; two were distributed to each camp participant, so they could invite friends. Additionally, there was an airdrop that saw hundreds of tickets be distributed by people who held tokens in at least two of various creative Web3 communities (including Water & Music). This is a great example of how networks are modularly building value together: $STREAM tokens can be earned by contributing to Water & Music, and can then unlock access to communities and experiences far beyond W&M alone.

As the release went live, Songcamp opened a channel in their server called #showtrade-your-nfts, where people have already started swapping NFTs to try to complete their collections or get their hands on specific songs they want and offload duplicates. Swapping is also occurring through Twitter as well as through secondary sales on OpenSea.

In its first hour of release, 1,400 packs were minted, totalling a revenue of 280 ETH or US$500,000. As of publishing this article, 1,900 packs have been minted, totalling 335 ETH in revenue.

Chaos’ headless band counts three economists who were responsible for designing the “value flow” of the camp. In other words, they had to define the mechanisms for how this revenue, as well as any future revenue, would be split among participants.

First, let’s rewind. Two weeks into the experiment, Songcamp offered all Chaos participants a grant from its treasury dubbed a UBI (short for “universal basic income”) of 0.3 ETH, worth around US$1,000 at the time. Redito outlines the thinking behind it: “If we have the basics covered, it will allow you to think more creatively, because you’re not in survival mode anymore.” It has added bonus effects too; one participant tweeted that the UBI allowed her to fund a music video. The net effect of the artists in the headless band being more successful individually is that they can garner more attention, and revenue, collectively.

The revenue generated by Chaos is split into four buckets. Three of those buckets represent value distribution processes for participants, with 30% of the revenue flowing back into the fourth bucket, namely Songcamp’s treasury. The value distribution in the buckets is determined by the distribution of one million $CHAOS tokens. The proportion of tokens that one holds at the end of the camp determines the size of the holder’s revenue split, and is defined through three mechanisms:

1. 20% self-selection: Participants indicated their level of contribution on a bi-weekly basis.
2. 40% gratitude flow: Every two weeks, participants were asked to rate each other’s contributions through a Web3 tool called Coordinape (explainer video), which Songcamp first used during its Elektra cohort.
3. 10% holdback: 100,000 of the total tokens were reserved, so that people doing less visible work could still be acknowledged in case it was not accounted for through the self-selection and gratitude flow processes.

Once the million tokens are distributed, a second distribution of one thousand Chaos NFTs occurs. These NFTs are similar to the ones people can buy, with the 45 songs and unique generated artworks, but they have an extra property: They are “supercharged” and infused with “liquid splits.”

Songcamp was fortunate to have the creators of the 0xSplits protocol participate in Chaos’ dev team. 0xSplits previously made waves in the Web3 music ecosystem through mechanisms which include the ability to dynamically split NFT royalties, including those from secondary sales, among all the creators involved in mixes; the feature debuted in February 2022 through Soulection’s mixtape drop on Sound.xyz.

The 1,000 Supercharged Chaos NFTs will split fractions of Chaos’ total ongoing revenues to their holders proportionally. If one artist has gathered 2% of the $CHAOS supply, they will get 20 NFTs, which gives them 2% of the revenue. If they sell two of those NFTs, they’ll still receive 1.8% of the total revenue from the project.

This means that Chaos participants have the option to sell their splits or part of their splits through the sale of the Supercharged NFTs — but they can also transfer these NFTs into DAO treasuries, and the wallets of supporters or loved ones. Instead of updating bank details or actual contracts, they can simply transfer an NFT from one place to another. This is a unique dynamic, even in Web3, for which a blueprint has now been created by Songcamp, 0xSplits, and Chaos.

Through Chaos, Songcamp has found a way to conduct interdependent experiments across the entire supply chain of music, including collaboration, release strategies, revenue distribution, virtual events, storytelling, and more. It shuffled creative professionals together in varying configurations to make new songs every two weeks, for six weeks in a row. It created a digital immersive theater experience for its NFT drop, and maintained its guest list through an NFT airdrop by looking at where creative communities in Web3 intersect. It developed Supercharged NFTs with liquid splits, which allow recipients to receive fractional revenue from the project, or sell or transfer those NFTs to others. It formed a collectively owned outcome in the form of one headless artist built by 77 people all known as Chaos.

Songcamp is unique — but doesn’t have to be. Parts of the collective’s approach have been common in open-source software for decades and more recently in other domains of Web3 such as DeFi. Above all, Songcamp has an exceptionally strong community that intersects with many others. This community-first ethos provides the underpinning for all of the above; by approaching these new technologies through a social lens, Songcamp has been able to onboard dozens of people (author included) to Web3 or facets thereof whilst previously having no experience with it. Web3 can be daunting, but the story of Chaos shows that an energized set of people who approach these topics with creative inspiration and willpower can build completely novel infrastructure and blueprints.

Music doesn’t have a distribution problem: The 60,000 songs that get added to Spotify each day is testament to that. The problem that artists most commonly face with their music – besides perhaps indifference, which is a different discussion – is a problem of value, which is reflected in discussions around streaming royalty rates, social media promo exhaustion, unfair label deals or advances, and the tensions that exist between artists and industry.

Chaos shows what a creative community of artists and builders can do when value is an inherent part of the tooling — and, importantly, debunks a common myth that talking early on about the financial value of art detracts from the process of making the art itself. In fact, in Songcamp’s case, experimenting with the economics of art was not only a freeing creative ingredient, but was also a necessary step in establishing trust and encoding values into practice, both for participants and for their supporters.

As Songcamp continues to go through these camps, it leaves behind a kernel of blueprints and software, ready to be built upon by anyone paying attention.

• Bas Grasmayer is a former participant in Songcamp Elektra and holds $ELEKTRA tokens, 4 Chaos NFTs, and small amounts of various cryptocurrencies and tokens, which can be viewed here.
• Cherie Hu, founder of Water & Music, holds a Chaos Festival NFT (via airdrop) and a small handful of other music-related tokens including NFTs for Poolsuite, The Rattle, and COLORSxCOMMUNITY; her full holdings can be viewed here.