Ye’s stem player and digital vs. physical scarcity

This topic was first shared by @MrTrick in the #web3 channel.

The Donda 2 rollout is beginning to feel a lot like the Donda rollout: As of today, the album is delayed (again), Ye unfortunately continues to work with abusers and, as part of his blockbuster album campaign, Ye has released yet another stem player.

The main difference is that, this time, Donda 2 will be made available exclusively on the stem player… allegedly. In an Instagram post, Ye directly attributed his decision to the “oppressive system” of the music industry, claiming that “it’s time to take control and build our own” — a statement that wouldn’t feel out of place on a crypto startup’s pitch deck.

We were pretty divided on the success (or sincerity) of Ye’s gesture. Many of us noted that while the “cutting out the middleman” narrative has become popular in recent times (in no small part due to recent high-profile PR crises for major streaming services), it feels a little hollow coming from artists like Ye, who the traditional music industry has arguably served pretty well:

The whole “cutting the middleman” narrative is so annoying, old, disrespectful. He is an international superstar also because a lot of people promoted his music in each country. A bit more respect for these people would be nice.” — @capopluggers

Indeed, “middlemen” — producers, publicists, operations experts — are often wholly necessary if artists want to execute creative projects on this scale. And as several indie artists have noted previously, fewer middlemen doesn’t necessarily equate to less exploitation.

“When all the “middlemen” are gone it will be interesting to see what happens. No one has to sign to labels anymore but somehow this is still a narrative.” — @DAOUda.eth

Regardless of whether Ye is sincere or not, it’s notable that Ye — an artist who so frequently sets the wider mainstream cultural agenda — is experimenting with new models of music distribution and consumption. As many of us noted, despite Ye’s anti-NFT stance, the Donda 2 stem player plays with ideas of scarcity and exclusivity, some of the main forces driving NFT adoption:

“How many fans are buying this as an investment hoping to resell at higher cost later? At the end of the day, it has little use value.” — @Henry Prince

In an extended Twitter thread, artist and academic Mat Dryhurst notes that one key difference is that Donda 2 is being made exclusively available on the stem player. This is antithetical to the free access/scarce ownership model that underpins many music NFT projects:

With more and more Web3 organizations experimenting with crafting experiences that bridge the gap between virtual and online scarcity, and with collectibles and merch drops becoming a common source of #utility advertised on NFT roadmaps, it wouldn’t be surprising if Ye’s stem player marks yet another milestone in how our digital and cultural consumption continues to shift.

Further reading: Digital scarcity in music: a practical introduction

Is NFT fraud “a feature rather than a flaw”?

This topic was first shared by @seaninsound in the #web3 channel.

On #web3, we discussed a quote from Cameron Hejazi, CEO of Cent. Cent is an NFT marketplace, perhaps best known for selling an NFT of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet.

In a recent interview, Hejazi described why Cent has halted all transactions due to “widespread fraud.” In his view, this fraudulent activity falls into three categories:

• people making unauthorized content into NFTs,
• people selling fraudulent copies of NFTs, and
• people selling NFTs as securities.

Hejazi characterizes these issues as “a fundamental problem with Web3”, likening clamping down on fraud on the platform as “like playing whack-a-mole.” This “whack-a-mole” analogy may resonate strongly with anyone who has experience trying to clamp down on music piracy (especially the wave of copyright infringement that followed the digital music revolution).

However, as @DAOuda noted, we must recognize that the immutability of the blockchain — the indelibility that makes clamping down on fraud such a difficult process — is a feature rather than a flaw of Web3:

“It’s because it was designed to be immutable. It’s not a flaw, it’s a feature. The original protocol, Bitcoin, was designed with a purpose. If that doesn’t fit your needs then you don’t use it, which is how Ethereum was created. The further and further ppl move away from the core principles it will be a different product.” – @DAOuda

This crucial component of immutability represents a paradigm shift for cultural industries in general, but especially to the music industry that’s historically taken aggressive actions when it comes to copyright infringement.

As @aflores notes (in a killer summary of the theories underpinning immutability), the transparency of the blockchain actually makes it significantly easier to track the movement of assets throughout a network. On the one hand, this layer of transparency makes wrongdoing easier to spot and monitor, while on the other, as @seaninsound pointed out, administering a DMCA takedown after an NFT sale has taken place may feel a little like acting “after the horse has bolted.”

Ultimately, a test for the music industry may be whether they choose to invest time and (incredibly expensive) legal resources in manually chasing down fraudulent NFTs, or whether they invest in (or build their own) Web3-native tools and services to help them streamline or automate copyright “whack-a-mole.” While these tools are largely still under development, an example is provided by Italian anti-piracy group Digital Content Protection, which has “begun crawling web 3.0 resources such as NFT markets, virtual reality platforms and in-game platforms looking for unauthorized NFTs, bad actors and rug-pulls,” as part of their monitoring and takedown services. The agency has already begun working with majors like Sony, Universal and Warner — one can imagine that there’s going to be significant demand for these services in the near future.

It’s also worth noting that the financial and reputational impact of copyright infringement may be overstated. As @Bas Grasmayer notes in this Mirror post, researchers have found that counterfeits have no negative effect on consumers’ perception of the luxury brand. In fact, artists and management teams who fall victim to NFT scams could view the fact that the fraud even took place as validation of consumer demand for a legitimate drop in the near future — although, as @Bas Grasmayer notes, the success of this approach may depend on whether NFT integrations develop features which distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate NFTs — like the NFT profile pictures, which have already begun rolling out on Twitter.

All told, whether the traditional music industry stakes their claim in the “wild west” of Web3or adopt the same reactive, defensive stance which resulted in them missing so many opportunities to develop proprietary technologies during the digital revolution remains to be seen.

Further reading: An overabundance of NFT platforms — and scams

Spotify and Apple’s DJ mixes are great news for DJs (and a potential data nightmare)

This topic was first shared by @FSQofficial in the #music-streaming channel.

Hot on the heels of Apple, Spotify launched its DJ mixes product in October of last year. Like Apple, Spotify’s DJ mixes allow DJs to add full-length mixes to the platform — but so far, the monetization policies behind the mixes haven’t been made particularly clear to industry observers. Luckily, Water & Music member Chuck Fishman (@fsqofficial) has done some detective work to demystify DJ mix monetization.

Chuck discovered that Apple and Spotify DJ mixes both pay per stream of every track included — just as they would if you listened to each track individually. This gives Spotify and Apple a significant edge over more electronic music-native platforms like SoundCloud and Mixcloud that don’t have the same blanket pay-out policies for third-party inclusion like DJ mixes. although, as Chuck notes, they may have similar policies in place for major-label clients.

“One of the craziest things I learned about the ‘DJ Mix Album’ is that if a song is included in another artist’s DJ mix, Spotify and Apple Music will generate a new ISRC code for that song as it appears in the DJ mix.” – @fsqofficial

That means that every time a song is included in a DJ mix, it is essentially duplicated. One song could potentially have thousands of different ISRC codes, eachone representing an instance when the song has been included in a DJ mix. As Chuck points out, this will make reporting on streaming numbers pretty tricky, as artists and management teams will have to add up the streaming count of multiple different versions of the same track.

From a listener’s perspective, it’s easy to imagine how this duplication could cause frustration, as music fans struggle to find the “original” amongst a sea of duplicates.

“The more I think about this DJ Mix program and the new ISRC and audio recordings made from said DJ mixes … will multiple ISRCs point to the same audio fingerprint? This is going to be very unwieldy especially when you consider the musical key of a “mixed” track could change, as well as the tempo.” – @fsqofficial

While Apple and Spotify DJ mixes may have surprisingly artist-friendly monetization policies (as friendly as major streaming services get, anyway) — and they represent a significant step in terms of raising DJs profiles and establishing them as artists in their own right — creating yet more metadata-related confusion and complexity was, arguably, not the most ideal way to execute this feature.

Further reading: Part 1 & 2 of Chuck’s deep-dive into DJ mixes