10 new AI models for music and audio generation have been unveiled in the last month alone. Some of these are home-grown models from anonymous contributors; others are part of master’s theses; still others have come from AI research groups at big-tech juggernauts like Google and ByteDance.

Last week, our community got an inside look at bleeding-edge music AI tools from Harmonai, the open-source music AI arm of Stability.ai, and Pollinations, a company focused on creating more accessible interfaces for existing AI models.

After interviewing several music AI startup founders, key differences have emerged in how music AI companies are building out their tech stacks compared to companies building visual- or text-based AI tools.

We interviewed nearly 20 different artists and community leaders from underrepresented genres in Web3, to learn about the role of genre in shaping long-term branding strategies as well as artist sentiment around the technology.

Continuing Water & Music’s exploration of the legal maze around music and Web3, this article takes a closer look at nascent smart-contract developments around collaborative splits for Web3-native music releases.

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.

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.

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.