Music DAO Deep Dives, Pt. 5: How Jonathan Mann built SongADAO from 4,000+ of his songs
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. Core contributors lead weekly, members-only research calls every Wednesday in our private Discord server to dive deeper into takeaways from these interviews. You can read our previous installments on Phlote, Mudd DAO, Sone and Dreams Never Die.
Song A Day d/b/a SongADAO is a legally registered co-op LCA (Limited Cooperative Association) in the state of Colorado.
Independent artist Jonathan Mann first created Song A Day on January 1, 2009, to overcome writer’s block by challenging himself to create a song every day and get attention for his work. 13 years later, he is still writing, recording and making a video and art for a song each day. In 2017, Jonathan discovered CryptoPunks for the first time, sparking inspiration and the beginning of his journey to turn Song A Day into a NFT project. This led Jonathan to sell his Year 1 and Year 2 (2009-2010) songs as NFTs on OpenSea in 2020, giving him capital to hire the decentralized Web3 product/dev collective RaidGuild and launch the sale of the rest of his catalog (Years 3-13) on December 31, 2021, and create SongADAO for owners of those NFTs. Song A Day’s recent drop sold out all 3,748 songs for 0.2 ETH each within 1.5 hours, grossing about 750 ETH (of which 125 ETH went straight to the illustrators Jonathan had hired to create generative illustrations that accompany each song).
SongADAO was built so the DAO could legally own Song A Day’s copyright and collect royalties. The advantage of a co-op, as the legal entity of choice, is the ability for members to co-own those rights and receive distributions in an equitable manner based on their collaboration with the DAO. Through a token voting process, SongADAO was recently accepted into Cohort 4 of the Seed Club accelerator.
For this project, I interviewed one of the DAO’s five founders and the primary artist behind the project, Jonathan Mann.
Main takeaways
- Jonathan was inspired by The Song That Owns Itself — a song-centric DAO structure formulated by a team that included Justin Boreta and George Howard — and the idea of giving comprehensive song rights to an organization that everyone can participate in (vs. just giving fractional song royalties to individuals).
- Jonathan is anti-token at this time (token in the fungible sense), and believes ownership of an NFT should be the membership model for SongADAO, with NFTs functioning as access. If people do work, they get paid in ETH. Jonathan has concerns about “whale influencers” and has questions about the risk of tokens as securities.
- Given that everything is subject to change, Jonathan is interested in building a community of people who want to support the project in a Patreon-like way and who are interested in building out this “weird experiment.” He’s looking for people who want to support the songs and hang out with the community long-term.
- Jonathan believes the fundamental innovation in Web3 is more around how people are organizing, and around their collective excitement, than around the actual tech and tooling.
On fundamentals
When talking with somebody who doesn’t know what a DAO is, Jonathan uses the phrase “subreddit with a bank account,” or simply a group of interested people coming together to do a thing.
The debate around why one should build a DAO is “such an important question,” says Jonathan. He remembers conversations with folks from MetaCartel back in 2018, when they were building DAO tooling and asking the same thing; at that time, Jonathan could not grasp the deeper “why,” and did not see a point to build his own songwriting project as a DAO.
The discovery of The Song That Owns Itself – a DAO that owns the copyright to a song – was a lightning bolt of intrigue for Jonathan that shifted his thinking. Jonathan loves the idea of giving song rights to an organization that everyone can participate in (vs. giving song royalties to individuals). He also believes in the potential of the DAO owning the IP and thus the DAO and its lawyer, instead of an individual artist, being able to negotiate terms on opportunities like sync and publishing with other organizations.
On the mechanics of the NFT drop
The main NFT drop underpinning SongADAO took place on December 31, 2021, the final day of the Song A Day project’s 13th year. Since Years 1 and 2 sold out on OpenSea in 2020, this drop was focused on years 3 through 13, featuring 3,748 songs for 0.2 ETH each. In total, the project earned about 750 ETH, with 125 ETH going straight to the illustrators Jonathan had hired to create the generative illustrations that accompany each song. Jonathan hopes the remainder will sustain him and his family as the DAO finds its footing.
Unlike Years 1 and 2, where people could choose which song they wanted, Jonathan chose a randomized minting model for this latest drop, which required a significant amount of Solidity engineering to execute. He found that giving people the opportunity to choose actually made things more difficult and less fun. Choosing the “perfect” song for one’s collection has more friction compared to hitting “mint” and being surprised — a psychological element that’s present across many other generative/PFP-style music NFT drops.
The drop sold slowly for the first half-hour, as Jonathan frantically DM’d everyone he knew. One person he DM’d, a well known NFT influencer named Pranksy, wrote back around 45 minutes into the drop and shared he had minted 100 songs. More than just being a significant supporter of the project, this served as a signal to the “degens,” who use a tool called Nansen to watch his and other NFT influencers’ wallet activity. As soon as Pranksy minted, sales accelerated and all 3,748 songs were sold out within 1.5 hours total.
Jonathan feels incredibly grateful for Pranksy’s support, but it actually highlights a key tension at the heart of the space. Song A Day would not have sold out so quickly without hundreds of degens “aping” in; however, these are not the ideal community members Jonathon envisions for the DAO. Many of them actually flipped the songs for a loss, driving the floor price down significantly. This was disheartening for Jonathan, who still does not fully understand their rationale but concludes that a slow, long- term growing project is not what a degen is after.
On treasury & membership management
Jonathan says the SongADAO treasury’s methodologies and overall design are currently a work in progress. He views NFTs as safer than fungible tokens as the membership model for the DAO, given the possible risk of tokens being considered securities in the future.
Jonathan also wants to do everything he can to tamp down on speculation risk and focus the DAO on what he views as most important – building, making songs, and hanging out with the community. He sees the ideal NFT owner and community member in SongADAO to be somebody who intentionally wants to support the project in a Patreon-like way and help build out this “weird experiment.” He sees this as the opposite of the typical “NFT degenerate speculator.”
To keep the community open and accessible to new joiners in the longer-term, an NFT is sent to the DAO treasury three times per month on random days instead of going to auction. These NFTs are set aside for people who complete challenges within the DAO — e.g., embracing a similar structure to Song A Day and doing a thing every day for a month, then documenting and sharing the process.
SongADAO “builders,” who contribute patronage activity, are paid in ETH as voted on by members. This compensation methodology, along with the one-person-one-vote design, protects against Jonathan’s fear of income inequality of voting power within the DAO. He thinks tokens introduce needless speculation and fears the possibility of “whale influencers.” He understands how tokens are useful for aligning incentives, and thinks that a well-established community like Water & Music is a good fit for a token, but thinks this is putting the cart before the horse for most early communities. Jonathan acknowledges the NFT design is inferior to social/fungible tokens as a method of compensation for people’s work, but argues their advantage is that they are valuable as art, music, games or collectibles regardless of their price. So, for now, the songs act as access, and the DAO will pay people in ETH for their work.
SongADAO has already experimented with DAO-to-DAO partnerships, such as the sale of Jonathan’s song “ENS DAO” to ENS DAO in exchange for ENS. Many of their collaborators from a product development standpoint, such as RaidGuild, are also structured as DAOs themselves. The collaboration with RaidGuild included a team of six people, working from August 2021 up until the mint of the December 2021 drop. They designed the entire project website, provided Solidity development work for the underlying smart contract and built the crucial element of randomly distributing the songs to buyers. They also helped inspire using Bright ID to implement a one-person-one-vote governance system, and introduced Jonathan to the lawyers that helped set up the co-op.
On governance
SongADAO is a legally registered LCA co-op formed in Colorado. Jonathan wanted SongADAO to be a legal entity to enable the organization to own Song A Day’s copyright and collect royalties. The advantage of a co-op, per Jonathan and the DAO’s website, is the ability for members to co-own those rights, and receive distributions in an equitable manner based on their collaboration with the DAO.
DAO membership requires holding a Song A Day NFT as well as verification through Bright ID. (In building SongADAO, Jonathan discovered that on-chain functionality for one-person one-vote does not exist yet, although there are many DAOs interested working on it at the edges.) DAO members each receive one vote for decision-making in how to deploy funds from the treasury. Voting is allowed by “listeners” (who own a Song A Day NFT, but are not yet DAO members) on non-binding Snapshot polls to provide creative input for the project.
For now, SongADAO’s main coordination tech stack is just Discourse and Discord, but they are working hard on their Snapshot strategy and infrastructure to support their ideal one-person one-vote design. Jonathan would have put more research and energy into building the Snapshot strategy if he had known the drop would have sold out on day 1. Ultimately, SongADAO could not take full advantage of the project’s early momentum, because one-person one-vote was not yet technically possible.
At the same time, from a decision-making perspective, Jonathan cites what he describes as a weird tension in a DAO of attempting to offload incentives or governance entirely onto smart contracts, which he says most DAOs do not do in a meaningful way. Like other music DAOs we’ve interviewed in this series, Jonathan believes the fundamental innovation with DAOs and Web3 is more around how people are organizing, and their resulting collective excitement, than the actual tech and tooling.
All in all, the journey behind SongaDAO shows how — just like developing any artist’s career — building a DAO is a slow process that is inherently iterative and legally complex, and will take a lot more time than the online hype cycles of Web3 might suggest.