Music DAO Deep Dives, Pt. 7: How Songcamp/Elektra is building a Web3-native artist collective
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 here:
Songcamp is a community founded by independent artist Matthew Chaim, with the goal of building more financially sustainable, decentralized infrastructure for like-minded artists to share their creative output and develop projects together. These projects are organized into “camps,” and one of these camps, the interactive musical storytelling and worldbuilding project Elektra, has transformed into a DAO. How the DAO evolves is decided by $ELEKTRA token-holders, a community of musicians, visual artists, writers and coders from around the world.
For this article, we interviewed several core Songcamp/Elektra team members, namely Matthew Chaim, Mark Redito, Sarmad Ahmad and Will Juergens.
Our main takeaways
- Like many other DAOs, Songcamp is not easily categorized. They are part artist collective, part incubator, and are partially decentralized but with a centralized leadership team.
- Elektra has about 20 active voting members. Key decisions are ratified via token-weighted voting, but non-token holders can also participate in and guide the DAO’s direction.
- The word “DAO” is a social signal as much as it is an organizational structure. As Matthew says: “DAO is also like a culture right now. It’s an energy, it’s a sound we make with our mouth that points to a certain corner of the internet.”
- Songcamp and Elektra have a robust tooling kit for DAO collaboration and operations — though as is typical with these orgs, these tools are not always fully integrated with each other.
History
The name Songcamp comes from a songwriting camp Matthew was part of in Nicaragua in 2017, where he was paired up with talented musicians with the mission of writing one song a day for a week. When it was time to fly home, he was really excited about the results, but felt let down when none of those tracks were released, as they were lost forever in music-business limbo. After discovering Web3, he tried to create a decentralized version of a songwriting camp, and thus Songcamp was born.
Since its creation, Songcamp has now evolved into a community of about 300 artists and curious creative professionals exploring Web3, led by a core team of creative directors. They run experiments in collective creation organized into “camps,” a series of projects they’ve called “immersive digital theater.” Matthew sees a future where there are rosters of directors running different versions of these experiences, similar to the film industry with a collection of directors and production companies all working together.
Camp Elektra, the second of these camp experiments, ran between July 8th and August 17, 2021 with 42 creators building a fictional world and interactive story/game. 145 NFT ticket holders were able to access a gated Discord server, where they could experience interactive puzzles and stories, in a similar tradition of augmented reality games (ARGs) from the likes of A.G. Cook and Nine Inch Nails. A core group of the Elektra team, along with some of the game’s participants and backers, are now building a DAO around the story of Elektra.
The birth of ElektraDAO
As many people are still learning about the wider Web3 ecosystem, the term “DAO” has no universally agreed-upon definition.
“DAO is also like a culture right now. It’s an energy, it’s a sound we make with our mouth that points to a certain corner of the internet,” says Matthew. Mark Redito adds: “It’s a way to collect collective intelligence, it’s a coordination mechanism … It’s got its roots with coops, decentralized governments and activist groups; the only difference is that now there’s tech to support it.”
Sarmad Ahmad draws a line of distinction between DAOs and traditional organizations by who can ultimately earn equity. “DAOs differ from traditional companies or organizations in the fact that people are more proactive and they prosper,” says Sarmad. “In other types of organizations, it’s people that came early or have leadership roles that prosper.”
There might be an important technological side to DAOs, but, like any other organization, they are ultimately made of people. So, how Web3-literate are the human members of Elektra?
When Songcamp began, all 12 members of the Genesis camp had MetaMask wallets and were proficient with Web3 tools. Although Matthew had initially thought of bringing his prior Web2 following in this new ecosystem, he was frustrated by the early results, so instead started getting the new people he was meeting in Web3 involved in his project. Friends With Benefits (FWB) and Seed Club were the first two communities he tapped into.
“People in Web3 tend to have three things: Knowledge of the ecosystem, capital and curiosity,” says Mark. “People here tend to be interested in technology and want to shape it … [It’s why] Web3 is so similar to Web1 which was mostly hackers, artists and philosophers trying to imagine what an open web would look like.” Will Juergen is of the same opinion: “The beauty and the allure of Web3 is its permissionless nature … you can build it into whatever idea you have.”
At the start of ElektraDAO, backers could invest and buy $ELEKTRA, but now all you have to do to earn these tokens is to participate in the community. With this opening up of access, and the launch of several other projects, Songcamp has seen an influx of more and more folks interested in getting involved. To help with this, they’ve created a Camp Counselors group to guide newcomers into Web3 and the Songcamp community projects.
“People have not been taught to participate, but more to consume,” says Will, adding “it will take time for them to understand” this new paradigm for engaging with music where the boundaries between fans/supporters and active contributors continuously blur. Samar describes this dynamic as one where “fans become friends.” This kind of fluid friendship is at the very core of Elektra: While the DAO’s financial success is dependent on supporters, the team doesn’t necessarily see these backers as much different from core contributors.
After Camp Elektra’s interactive game ended and the team began to organize into a DAO, a subgroup was tasked with understanding how their governance system should work. At the moment, the DAO’s governance is token-weighted — i.e. the more tokens you have, the more your vote counts — but they are still taking an inclusive approach with constantly considering opinions from new members and using token governance as seldom as possible in creative decisions. While this approach is more feasible withsuch an intimate team, the DAO is adamant that their governance is also structured to be scalable.
We also asked the Songcamp team what happens if a member of the community offers up a contribution that is not helpful or not up to a required quality standard. For example, as part of Camp Elektra, there was a need to create original pieces of music as well as many other creative deliverables including graphics, animations and voice acting. What happens if someone offers a song or script idea that is not going to work for the larger mission?
Will tells us that the secret to dealing with these situations is “honesty. Nobody will be mean and nobody will talk down. Some things that are contributed are not used; it all counts, but sometimes something doesn’t get the vibe of the room.”
Sarmad adds that “people want to see you succeed,” and “will offer comfort and help” — fostering a culture that is constructive rather than punitive.
The tech
Songcamp is currently very much a Mirror-based organization. The platform gave them excellent tools to set up a crowdfund and mint their own tools, but Matthew found two problems along the way.
The first was not knowing what the token supply would be, because the supply depended on what kind of support you get on the crowdfunding on Mirror. This could lead to vastly different outcomes for two different crowdfunds on the platform, where “holding one token versus 10,000 could have the same value,” says Matthew.
The second problem, which is now solved, is that Mirror had funneled everything on their platform to their own NFT minting contract. This turned out to be a major problem from a metadata and community-management perspective, because a Songcamp or Elektra NFT would be sitting in the same contract as many other projects. That meant “someone who funded some other project [on Mirror] could gain access to our [Discord] channels, which wasn’t exactly optimal,” says Matthew. (Mirror has since resolved this issue.)
The Songcamp team gave us three main tool types for running DAO operations:
- Data capture for keeping all projects and teams organized (project management)
- Whiteboarding collaboration system to work together
- Communication among members/supporters of the DAO
Here is a full list of the tools they are using to run Songcamp/ElektraDAO:
- Mirror – crowdfunding, NFT minting
- Notion – Project management and note taking
- Snapshot – governance votes
- Gnosis – DAO treasury
- Coordinape – compensation and distribution of payments
- Parcel (for mass payments from Gnosis)
- Miro – whiteboarding and collaborative brainstorming
- Airtable – form fills
- Google Docs – storytelling
- Discord bots (BPM, Dino.gg for Elektra game automated responses, Wick for Songcamp moderation)
- Catalog – Minting music 1 of 1 nfts
- Zora – Minting multimedia NFTs (Elektra Logs NFTs)
- CryptoVoxel – Genesis party
- Gather – for future use with virtual events/meetups
The treasury
Songcamp and Elektra do not have a legal entity associated with their organizations and do not deal in fiat. They have two separate Gnosis safe treasuries. The Songcamp treasury has a small amount of ETH and 10% of Elektra tokens.
ElektraDAO was funded by 145 backers via a Mirror crowdfund. Each supporter purchased an NFT “portal tickets” which served as a key to access and experience the story/game. The funds were largely used to compensate the creatives building the world of Elektra, but there is some ETH remaining in the Elektra treasury.
The Songcamp community also created their own Discord bot called BPM Bot, which allows servers to stream songs listed on the music NFT platform Catalog (parallel to Sone/Topshelf’s Tone bot for streaming music from multiple different services in Discord). BPM Bot was funded by ETH contributions on Mirror, which went to the developers who built the bot. While BPM has allocated tokens as part of the crowdfund, it is structured differently from the Elektra DAO project. It has a small but dedicated community of builders working on the next versions of the Discord Bot, but there is currently no formalized governance process.
Parting words of wisdom
The Soncamp team mentioned that many of the challenges they face are related to managing the messy process of collaborative creation and clearly defining scope, time commitment and incentives. Container design is very important.
When you start a DAO, there are three crucial elements that need clear guidelines
- People — How are you going to communicate with the people in your DAO?
- Principles — What are the principles of the DAO?
- Process — What are guidelines and expectations for how the DAO runs?
“Everyone is figuring out day by day how to set up a DAO,” Sarmad tells us. “The best organizations are the ones that are constantly reminding users of this, like Songcamp and CabinDAO.”
“It’s not so easy for people to understand that they own the DAO too, so there is no boss guiding them,” adds Mark. “It is very different from other organizations that people are used to. You need to keep this in mind when you are onboarding people.”
While there is no blueprint for running a DAO as of yet, the Songcamp team’s experience and perspective suggests the importance of centering the human experience over the tech stack itself in more collective-driven artist DAOs — particularly fostering close community among collaborators, and experimenting with rethinking relationships between collaborators and supporters. As Sarmad Ahmad rightly told us on our call: “All roads lead to people.”