Music DAO Deep Dives, Pt. 1: Dreams Never Die puts community before tech

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.

The goal with this project is to make collective sense of the emerging, fast-moving ecosystem of music DAOs — not only giving structure to the current landscape and future possibility space for music DAOs from the perspectives of function, tech tooling and organizational design, but also identifying critical needs in the landscape that are still going unaddressed.

All interviews in these series are conducted and written by members of the Water & Music community, and unpack music DAOs’ various approaches to community design and onboarding, tech tooling, governance, treasury management and more. Core contributors lead weekly, members-only research calls every Wednesday in our private Discord server to dive deeper into takeaways from these interviews. These weekly pieces will culminate in a final, concluding article that will be open to the wider public.

Dreams Never Die is an independent music curation brand and record label in the process of becoming a DAO. By moving into Web3, they hope to build financially sustainable, collectively owned infrastructure for incubating both early-stage artists and the budding industry professionals interested in discovering, developing, promoting and distributing them.

For this project, we interviewed the DAO’s two co-leads, Chad Hillard and Cole Ryan.

Our main takeaways:

• With its emphasis on brand-new artists, DND aims to scale alongside its talent. This is a compelling and also challenging model to pull off, as it would require scaling not only the artists’ businesses but also the teams around them (managers, marketers, collaborators, etc.).

• Unlike other, more Web3-native communities, DND is not relying on a token sale to raise capital. Instead, they are raising seed funding through a strategic, crypto-native partner.

• Chad’s curation track record from his other ventures (Before The Data and Hillydilly) is at the center of DND. And even though their business model is not about hits, he acknowledged that “the foundation of any label is hit songs; Web3 isn’t going to change that.”

• Chad is approaching DND with really honest, point-blank acknowledgement around the financial uncertainty of the project.

On their Mirror page, DND defines a DAO as “a place where like-minded individuals can come together [and] pool resources, talent and relationships to build a sustainable community,” while participating in the community’s “cultural and financial growth.” The mission of the DND DAO is specifically centered around “building sustainability around brand new artists and the individuals behind them,” in Chad’s words.

“It’s incredibly difficult to get people to care about a brand new artist,” says Chad. The DND communitywill hopefully serve as a career catalyst, a “springboard,” providing a certain amount of built in support. Providing mentorship for young business heads in the industry is just as much a part of the plan as is developing the artists themselves.

Both Chad and Cole are non-technical DAO founders. Chad in particular has strong opinions about the music he likes, disdain for the current economic reality of streaming and a really strong vision for DND’s overarching culture. The core team brings their strong legacy as music curators to the DAO, while putting seemingly lots of trust in their technical partners to figure out the details around the operation’s eventual tech stack and tokenomics.

This does not necessarily imply a neglect for self-learning; it simply reflects what skills the core team is bringing to the table and where their 10,000+ hours have been spent. Chad — who regrettably refused to start a YouTube channel for years because the platform’s sound quality was bad — does not want to miss another potential wave of innovation.

For now, DND is clearly prioritizing community-building and brand equity first and foremost — to the point where their underlying Web3 tech stack is not prominent in their internal and external communications, and, for the most part, does not even exist yet.

The DND DAO has an active Mirror page, and now maintains an active bounty board for its community. The organization is also now an official curator on the music NFT platform Catalog, giving their artists the ability to mint at any time without having to get individually accepted to the coveted platform.

But when asked how DND would be rolling out their token (which does not yet exist), Chad said he had “no idea” — deferring to their as-yet undisclosed “crypto-native” technical partner. DND is also not sure if/how the DAO will stay in the green overtime. Instead of putting the pressure of raising capital for artist development on their community through a token sale, the DAO currently has three years of runway thanks to seed funding from an unnamed, external strategic partner. It’s noteworthy to mention that DND is thinking in a timeline of years, not just months, with not even a hint of a cash-grab mentality within 100 feet of the project. That said, Chad — a super honest and straight talker — still views this endeavor as speculatory and unproven. “Never over promise … we have to prove that this works,” says Chad.

Notably, even though DND is one of the more high-profile label DAOs in the music/Web3 ecosystem, they do not require their roster artists to be familiar with Web3, or even to have or desire a “Web3 strategy.” We found this incredibly counterintuitive, in the sense that it never occurred to us that a label DAO might support an artist that doesn’t have any inclination towards Web3.

Many artists on DND, even those with NFT releases on Catalog, are not Web3-native. So, in addition to more traditional support (e.g. A&Ring songs, pairing with visual artists, promoting on traditional channels and filling managerial duties for self-managed artists), they “teach … [artists] essential concepts [NFTs, Ethereum, blockchain, etc.], guide them through Web3 tech, organize and mint NFT drops (oftentimes fronting the fees), and promote their NFTs in the Web3 community.”

DND’s community beyond their artist roster is also composed largely of members who do not have a crypto wallet. That said, Chad acknowledged how the underlying psychology of owning the token might financially incentivize people to participate in the community. Fans are “going to see that token in their MetaMask wallet with a USC price and go, hey … I’m a part of this group and my efforts are going to actually earn me some money … a lot of people won’t say that, but I mean, that’s the underlying factor of what’s going to make the governance token so special.”

Their Discord server only opened at the end of October, counting around 1,000 members as of publishing this article. Their primary Web2->Web3 onboarding effort consists of a dedicated, Web3 education channel in the Discord server. Most of the current resources have been compiled by DND team members, but there have also been community submissions, and members are actively encouraged to submit topics for additional research and explanation. The intention is for the educational component of DND’s Web3 journey to evolve into being completely community-run. The team is also discussing, but has not yet executed, larger campaigns that incentivize members to onboard into the DAO.

The DND token will be a governance token focused on curating the DAO’s artist roster and stewarding the use of the DAO’s funds towards artist development and promotion. For now, the DAO is adopting a one-person-one-vote approach to voting, to avoid giving token whales too much power. As with many other DAOs, DND intends to design its tokenomics and governance around a culture of proactive rather than passive participation, with more active people in the community — scouts (don’t need much web3 experience), A&Rs, managers, curators and other creative professionals — being able to vote on certain decisions that inactive token holders won’t.

In terms of what active token holders will be able to influence, Chad strongly believes that in the context of a music DAO, “you can’t decentralize creative decisions. You don’t want 30 to 40 people telling you the snare is too high or the artwork is bad.” In contrast, voting on roster membership and higher-level financial decisions is a more direct, perhaps less creatively dicey way of knowing if a community is behind a given artist. With the goal of turning the DND community into a career springboard for artists, this kind of clarity around shared community belief in the roster is crucial.

All in all, the DND team is embracing a mindset that a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors share in the Web3 ecosystem — namely, that cultural experiences, not financial applications, will drive mainstream adoption of decentralized technology. When asked about the potential dangers in navigating negative connotations around NFTs and social token drops, especially among certain pop and indie fan bases, Cole suggested that music could be a significant driving force for “reputational change” around Web3. It remains to be seen whether this wider reputational change will be driven by the particular model DND is proposing — one where culture and community take center stage, to the point where the Web3 part is nearly invisible.