Music DAO Deep Dives, Pt. 10: Why the Holly+ DAO is taking it slow

By: Cherie HuMaarten Walraven

Published: 2022-03-05

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 break down a music DAO’s approach to community design and onboarding, tech tooling, governance, treasury management and more. You can read our previous installments here:

Holly+ is an artist DAO, built around the eponymous machine-learning tool that allows anyone to clone the voice of experimental electronic artist Holly Herndon.

In July 2021, Holly officially launched Holly+ in partnership with machine-learning startup Never Before Heard Sounds, with an accompanying genesis NFT sale that has raised 15ETH to date. The DAO consists of a closed community of friends, collaborators and NFT supporters who are tasked with collectively stewarding the future of Holly’s digital likeness — namely overseeing the minting, certification and licensing of new works created with the Holly+ voice model. Profits from the DAO’s treasury will be shared among DAO members and artists using the model, and will also be used to fund future development of Holly+ and adjacent tools.

At its heart, Holly+ hopes to use a combination of emerging technologies to decentralize creativity. In particular, the DAO has two main aims:

  1. Experiment with machine-learning representations of the human voice, and find solutions for the ethical issues arising through this new technology;
  2. Allow for the community using this synthesized voice technology to control the ecosystem of its surrounding compositions.

In other words, two major themes in recent music-industry developments — machine learning and Web3 — converge in the Holly+ DAO, which is facing a core issue across many music DAOs about how best to decentralize creative decisions, especially when an artist’s likeness, reputation and legacy are on the line. Unsurprisingly, the DAO has been taking it more slowly and thoughtfully with respect to governance and incentive design, given what is at stake.

For this project, we interviewed Mat Dryhurst, a creative technologist and teacher, and longtime partner to Holly.

Main takeaways:

Fundamentals: Cryptographic identities and pushing the boundaries of IP

As previously covered in Water & Music, AI-generated deepfakes raise fundamental questions about copyright, including 1) whether it’s fair use to create new, algorithmic and permissionless music off the backs of existing compositions and voices, and 2) whether it’s possible to imagine a structure that allows for a more open compensation format when it comes to the input used in AI-music generation.

Holly has actively engaged with these issues in her work over the last several years. A quick example is “Chorus,” a track from her 2015 record Platform. In this song, Holly mixed together several samples of her own voice that sound like standalone sonic and instrumental components, interacting with each other in a playful way. The compositional freedom of sampling has long been a part of Holly’s sonic and technological explorations; she and Mat expanded on this freedom for her following record PROTO, where they devised Spawn — the so-called AI baby of Holly’s voice — which was used as an instrument in its own right in the album.

In an interview with Art in America from early 2020, Holly explained how she sees “singing as a technology” and how “AI is a step along [the] evolutionary track” for humanity. In that same interview, she also emphasizes how AI, and in turn what she and Mat do, can be seen “as a project of human intelligence … constantly redefining what it means to be human, what it means to be natural, or what nature is.” The long history of Holly+, then, goes back to very early historical examples of humans singing together for various purposes — think “creating community,” but also “warding off danger.” The slightly shorter history of the project starts with Holly’s own research: She holds a PhD from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, where she studied the intersection of machine learning and music through her experiments with sampling and Spawn. Now, with Holly+, she’s continuing the “evolutionary track” by examining ways for others to step in and play with her voice, and govern what’s done with the various compositional results.

So, if Mat and Holly had already been working on this type of project on Web2 rails for years, why move it into Web3?

According to Mat, one major reason is that Holly+ “hinges on verified open identities, so in future it can’t be on Web2.”In fact, Mat is the only interviewee in our series to define a DAO explicitly with decentralized identities in mind — namely, “shared governance of a treasury or asset using cryptographic identities.”

Cryptography is one of the three technologies from which blockchains are built — the other two being peer-to-peer networks and the protocols, or programs, that give us smart contracts. In its simplest form, cryptography is a set of two keys, one public and one private. The private key has an encryption algorithm and signature function that, when brought together with the public key, allow for verification of transactions on the blockchain.

The reason these verified open identities matter so much to Holly+ is that the tool is available through open-source access; in other words, everyone can play and experiment with it. Since the voice remains Holly’s own intellectual property, she retains the voice model rights until her death. Even with this “centralized” ownership context, we find the key reason why Holly and Mat decided to decentralize ownership of Holly+ in the original Mirror article:

“In the event of my death, I feel more comfortable with distributed ownership of the rights to my voice model among a DAO of stewards who are invested in maintaining the value and reputation of my voice than the rights being passed down to someone less familiar with the values and standards associated with my work … My hope is that decentralizing decision making across a DAO of stewards will encourage a more delicate stewardship over those rights through debate and shared interest!”

In other words, the need for cryptographic identities stems from this desire to preserve the legacy of Holly+. There had to be a way to safeguard who can steward the project forward; currently, the best way to do that is to decentralize ownership and be able to verify people’s online identities, compositions and other future expressions through cryptographic keys.

Governance: Taking it slow

Given that Holly and Mat both have a consistent, years-long track record as early movers and innovators in music and tech, it struck us how slowly and patiently they have been cultivating the Holly+ DAO. Namely, eight months after launch, they still have yet to nail down the governance structure, token incentive design and treasury growth plans around the DAO — instead choosing to tackle more fundamental issues first around community design and base operational costs. This patience is a feature rather than a flaw of the team’s strategy: “I’m still optimistic, but we err towards moving slowly, so as to not expose ourselves to risks we don’t want to take for experimenting in a new field,” says Mat.

For one, the Holly+ DAO is still closed — only “intended for people who understand the project and eventually will understand Holly enough to steward the project effectively,” says Mat. “[We] don’t want a Discord full of ‘wen moon’ types.” For those coveted members who do get access to the DAO’s Discord server, governance has been limited to emoji-react votes on “small things such as how to structure the first NFT sale.” While the Holly+ LLC does exist, the DAO still has yet to officially implement the on-chain, modular Tribute DAO framework that they mentioned in their original Mirror post.

One likely concern for the Holly+ DAO is how to balance the relative short-term-ism of tokenomics with the needs to incentivize token holders and DAO members to do the “right thing” in the long term, with respect to stewardship of Holly’s digital likeness. Mat says they “haven’t crossed the bridge yet” in terms of nailing down more details around long-term incentive design, but that it is definitely top of mind given that the value of the DAO is essentially equivalent to the value of Holly’s voice.

“In the future, the main function of governance will be to weed out obviously bad-natured usages of the voice,” says Mat. “With the new realistic models we plan to launch, we will open up submissions of songs, and the more content that exists, the more discriminate people will need to be.”

Financial pain points

From a financial standpoint, Holly+ has faced many similar pain points as those of other DAOs, especially the need for cheaper minting and on-chain voting tools using Ethereum Mainnet. But perhaps their biggest financial pain point is ironically one of the most valuable parts of a culture DAO’s operations, assuming the DAO can afford it: Community management.

“Most successful DAOs … have people working on them full time, and our initial raise for this project has barely been enough to mint tokens and pay someone part time to take care of admin,” says Mat (while one of the genesis Holly+ NFTs has successfully sold, a second NFT of the raw singing model behind Holly+ has yet to meet its 15ETH reserve price). “I believe these structures will work well when they are cheaper to participate in; however, in the short term, they are laborious and very difficult to execute without enormous treasuries.”

Aside from NFT sales, one could hypothetically provide liquidity to the Holly+ token, but the resulting speculation can quickly “run into securities concerns given the nature of our project,” says Mat. In general, many artists are reluctant to launch their own social tokens out of a larger sense of caution around over-commercializing their brand and fan relationships. This is also why we see so many different types of experiments with social tokens — ranging from giving them away to long-time supporters (as with $RAC), to layering additional utility on tokens such as being able to spend them on merch (as with Colin Benders’ $VCA).

At the same time, Holly and Mat recognize that a radically public, cryptographic approach to managing online identities and intellectual property for artists and communities is required for the full vision around Holly+ to come to life. As Water & Music argued in our Season 1 report on music and Web3, generative art (i.e. art generated at scale entirely through code) is perhaps the most “Web3-native” art form there is — making unique use of blockchain technology to build new rails for scaling creativity and derivative works around IP in a financially sustainable way. Holly+ is one of the furthest along in this emerging tradition for Web3-native art, even if juggling accessible communication of multiple different emerging technologies at once is much easier said than done.

“While Web3 infrastructure is early, awareness of machine-learning music concerns with respect to voices are even earlier,” says Mat. “It’s quite difficult to attempt to build infrastructure for problems that most people don’t understand exist! However, I believe that is eventually where this tech will shine.”