This is a web version of our weekly Discord digest, which is designed to aggregate the most important conversations and resources being shared on the Water & Music Discord server, so that you don’t miss out on anything important.

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Is the promise of the metaverse beginning to fizzle?

First shared by @Mat_O in #metaverse

On #metaverse, we discussed a recent article from CoinDesk that describes how three of the buzziest metaverse platforms, Decentraland, Axie Infinity, and The Sandbox, have underperformed in terms of daily active users (DAU), despite the massive levels of external investment and media attention the metaverse has garnered.

Sound familiar? In many ways, the hype cycle experienced by these metaverses seems to echo the early promise of music livestreaming platforms that experienced a significant boost at the beginning of the pandemic. Similarly, these platforms have largely failed to capture a significant market share of music fans or successfully adapt offerings to compete in a “post-pandemic” world.

The CoinDesk report pins the blame for low metaverse DAU squarely on unappealing gaming mechanisms, quoting a post from Web3 analyst DeFi Vader: “There is currently no organic engagement that retains players in the game – unlike traditional games like Fortnite, GTA, Candy Crush – where players are willing to pay to keep playing.”

In the #metaverse channel, we discussed how failing to center fans within livestreaming experiences often leads to lackluster end products:

“Every act / manager / label / agent we talk to is hungry to know more and do more. But it ALL comes back to one central premise: The experience must create a deeper and more meaningful connection between artist and fan. There is a ton of interesting new tech out there. But 99% of the new tech that is out there only benefits… the tech. Not the artist, or the fan.”
– @LucasSphere

Similarly, @kalam noted that poor communication and storytelling around livestreamed events often leads to a lack of fan buy-in. Notable success stories have often created energy around digital events, by featuring genuinely innovative technology and digital experiences (see: Travis Scott’s watershed Fortnite concert), or through compelling storytelling around why the livestream needs to happen (see: Club Quarantine):

“Agree. And narrative / storytelling around the show experience. once you get past the overwhelming tech and creative effort involved with producing hi quality shows. It’s niche but I felt that club q in the middle of lockdown did good work tapping into electronic music club subcultures. We did live shows when launching inxspace last year which had thought through and fun narratives around live energy exchange but communicating all of this was and continues to be a challenge when working in parallel to production “
– @kalam

It remains to be seen whether metaverses will emerge as a distinct form of gaming and digital expression, or if the gulf between corporate visions of companies like Meta and the reality of user uptake will continue to widen.

The shape of Web3-native curation economies

First shared by @musnit in #Web3

While much of the media attention around Web3 has focused on its potential as a profit generator, many Water & Music community members are considering the challenges it presents to traditional Web2 economies of scale, and its mechanisms to reward niches and subcultures.

On #web3 this week, we discussed several use cases in which music discovery and consumption in Web2 falls short — and how Web3 could help plug the gap.

Catering to niche musical tastes

@seaninsound and @sydmusic pointed out that a critical weakness in the “all-you-can-eat” approach to music taken by many major streaming services is that it has diluted their ability to act as curators (rather than aggregators) of content.

A prime example of this is Spotify’s well-documented fake artists problem, which illustrates how optimizing content for streaming algorithms can counterintuitively create a much poorer user experience, resulting in increasingly low quality or homogenous music served to the listener:

“These [listening] spikes become a self-fulfilling cycle of Release Radar and auto-play featuring you the next release by the artist. Curation can be an amazing thing and deliver people surprising gems and help them break out of their comfort zones.”
– @seaninsound

As @sydmusic notes, the small, hyper-niche datasets associated with many Web3 content platforms could result in a less noisy, more highly curated user experience (becoming “the MUBI of streaming services” — to borrow a phrase from @seaninsound).

“It does seem to me that part of human nature is that we gravitate towards work en masse – not because something already is popular but because the art simply resonates and signals people to come closer. And capturing that glow of attraction is something an algorithm can do really well if it can get a clean signal. That’s hard to do when you’re Spotify and you’re saying “here is all of recorded music” – such a massive data set. But if one of the foundational principles of this new era is “intentional non-scalability” – I think I heard that first from @Bas Grasmayer – then the data sets are going to be smaller, hyper-niche, AND the rewards and compensation much greater – and here’s hoping that combination proves more equitable or at least more fun in the end.”
– @sydmusic

Creating cultural context around decision-makers

While the possibilities of using blockchain to act as an identity verifier are already well-established (and in some cases, already in place), @seaninsound suggested a novel use for Web3 — as a tool for creating a kind of portable cultural identity, which could work to create context around recommendations from individual tastemakers:

“I’d hope with Web3 we can begin to do more about reputation and trust. To show ‘people who recommended this, also recommended the same things as you.’ Like, I want to find the 5 people who listened to the same Chromatics tune as me 30 times and discover what else they love that I’ve never heard.

I have always dreamt of record reviews having the context of someone’s taste without needing to read 20 of their other reviews to work out if you’re remotely on the same page… Then there’s weird concepts of cool, which is quite a local cultural concept.

I know curatorial tools can’t do all that but finding ways of working interconnectivity into algorithms on a user level rather than popularity in clusters level. Airlifting in outliers is far more exciting to me. It’s why Internet forums remain so popular for people who have experienced this serendipity.”

– @seaninsound

Like many other journalistic disciplines, digitalization has increased the pressure on music journalism. Over recent years, music journalism has been increasingly underfunded, sidelined in favor of video content, and has frequently fallen more and more under the influence of industry PR engines. Creating additional context around the views of individual writers could re-inject authority and faith into the practice while creating an alternative to the SEO-optimized journalism incentivized by Web2 media platforms. Notably, the writing that Mirror tends to highlight is often highly technical, almost academic in approach — a discernible difference from the kind of writing that performs on virtually every other media platform.

As @cheriehu notes, this application is interesting because it allows a human, curatorial aspect of taste-making to remain centralized, while decentralizing the context and wider information around these decisions. However, many of these ideas are still just that — ideas. There’s still the possibility that Web3 (if it becomes popularized) will eventually bow to the same economies of scale that Web2 did:

“If the way Web3 tools curate culture ends up veering more towards monoculture-style curation for the “general” public, i think there’s a risk of falling towards lowest-common-denominator curation again and not making room / creating new incentive structures for introducing new voices, which IMO will have failed to make the best use of Web3 tech.”
– @cheriehu

If you’d like to have your say on how Web3 could usher in new forms of music curation and taste-making, join the discussion here.