Editor’s note: ICYMI, we’re piloting a number of topic-specific newsletters at W&M, curated by members who are trusted experts in their respective fields. We’ve already launched The Score, a music x gaming newsletter building off our Season 2 research on music and the metaverse, and CC:, a music/tech careers newsletter reflecting our community’s growing interest in following hiring trends and understanding current employment opportunities.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce our latest addition to this collection: A dedicated biweekly newsletter for music and Web3, called Sidechain.

The overarching goal of the newsletter is to capture the W&M community’s unique, early-adopter, critical pulse on the music/Web3 landscape, backed by ongoing reporting from our Web3 research team that you won’t find elsewhere. We’ve recruited our wonderful community members BlackDave (@BlackDave) and Lindsey Lonadier (@lindsey_with_an_e) to help with curation of community discussions and music/Web3 projects, respectively, alongside our database lead Brooke Jackson (@brookejaxon).

In many ways, this newsletter is LONG overdue. From the very beginning, we built our “proof of DAO” on the foundations of collaborative Web3 research, as illustrated in our Season 1 and Season 1.5 reports. In spite of the bear market, our most popular articles and databases, and the most active channels in our Discord server, continue to revolve around Web3.

We’re also reaching a critical music/Web3 inflection point that warrants a dedicated space for coverage. Emerging music/Web3 artists are looking to scale their brands and careers, and running into rather traditional “Web2” growing pains along the way (read: breaking through the noise and building an actual fanbase). Meanwhile, seemingly every major label, promoter, and performing rights organization (PRO) seems to be investing seriously in a Web3 strategy this year, perhaps challenging the notion that traditional industry intermediaries can’t be valuable partners to Web3-native entrepreneurs.

In the coming months, there will likely be as many lawsuits, burned bridges, and failed startups as there are groundbreaking, creative partnerships that break the mold of what’s possible. We hope to cover as much of these shifts as we reasonably can, through our distinct W&M lens — relentlessly curious and open to experimentation, while also respecting historical context and staying critical, unafraid to ask the simple questions of “why” and “how.”

And yes, the title of this newsletter is a double-entendre. In Web3, “sidechains” comprise critical infrastructure for cross-chain scalability and interoperability; in music production, “sidechaining” refers to the level of one track triggering a processing effect (often compression) on another track. Yes, we are nerds.

If you have any feedback on this new format, please reply directly to this email or reach out to us at members@waterandmusic.com — we’d love to hear from you. And if you’re not interested in receiving our Web3-specific updates, please click here to opt out.

Thanks all for your ongoing support! <3

– Cherie

OUR LATEST WEB3 RESEARCH

This section recaps our latest music/Web3 research activity. Dashboard updates are maintained by Brooke Jackson and Lindsey Lonadier.

MUSIC/WEB3 DASHBOARD UPDATES

Since our last update in the now-evolved edition of Currents, we’ve added and updated more than 1,700 music NFT projects, three music DAOs, and 13 additional Web3 tools and platforms to their respective tabs in our music/Web3 dashboard.

• Via two API pulls*, we have added 1,120 records of one-of-one NFT sales from Catalog’s legacy platform, and 308 additional records from Catalog’s current (V2) platform, accounting for ~$2.6M in additional sales tracked in our records.
• We also added 52 new drops from artists using the Sound platform, which added 1,626 units sold for a total of $126K in additional sales in our records.
• A few new Web3 music startups also launched or came to our attention in the last month, which included two new “NFT Labels” Hume and Player Zero.
• There were a few other notable recent drops that caught our attention from the last month, including Doja Cat X JBL’s free drop on OneOf (and also a paid auction launched on eBay) and BRICK / Trash Talk’s drop on Ledger Market, in which the NFT owners join a community focused on building a physical music venue in LA.

As a reminder, you can submit any music NFT drops or platforms we may be missing from our database, from any point in time, by filling out this Airtable form. All accepted submissions are eligible for 10 $STREAM as contributions to our research, with token allocations distributed on a roughly quarterly basis.

NEW MUSIC/WEB3 ARTICLES

Splitting the difference: Music and Web3’s multiplayer problem. For our latest season-agnostic Web3 research drop, Andres Botero, Paula Amaya, and Yung Spielburg dove into nascent smart-contract developments around collaborative splits for Web3-native music releases. Informed by interviews with artists and developers, this article presents an overview of on-chain music splits tools including 0xSplits, Slice, Reveel, and Revelator, comparing their capabilities and limitations to what’s possible with Web2 distribution rails. This research was also informed by several hands-on minting tests that our project leads spearheaded, with direct support from platforms like Zora to help troubleshoot. Hopefully, this piece will help the artists in our community as they continue to experiment with Web3-native release strategies at a collective scale!

COMMUNITY PULSE: More pressure on the Web2<>Web3 bridge

This section synthesizes conversations happening in the #web3 channel in our Discord server, and is written and curated by @BlackDave.

Soundtrack for writing this post: “Collections 01” by Teebs and “Midnight Menu” by Tokimonsta.

Venice Music opens up to everyone

THE NEWS: Venice Music, the hybrid Web2/Web3 label services company spearheaded by veteran music exec Troy Carter, announced last week that they are opening up their services to everyone, positioning themselves an “all-in one platform for building a music career.”

For context, Venice first launched their “genesis” NFT membership passes in June 2022 — granting holders access to both virtual and IRL community events and Venice’s open distribution tools, as well as consideration for more premium sync and marketing services. An important part of this rollout was that you could only buy their NFT and join the community in an official capacity if you were approved manually for the mint list by the Venice team, and/or if you were part of an aligned Web3 community that was put on Venice’s early allowlist (examples of these communities included The Heart Project, omgkirby, and Friends With Benefits). Currently, under 300 people hold these genesis passes, according to OpenSea — implying that the Venice community experience was highly curated and exclusive by design.

Per their new pricing page, Venice will be offering distribution services, royalty services, sync services, artist and label services, as well as access to their community and educational tools for $500 per year, which is around the cost of the Venice Music NFT at current market prices. (Notably, there is no token-gated option for the new pricing.)

COMMUNITY PULSE:The news of an exclusive, token-gated community opening up their services completely to the public, with no options for Web3-native payments, has understandably left many of the original NFT holders confused or unhappy with the change. @FSQ @chuckdafonk of @fsqofficial from the community first shared the news in our channel, saying “it’s unclear to me how [Venice’s] going to scale” and he is also “confused about what the utility of the NFT is/was.”

This opened up the conversation in our community around what Venice Music is really offering in the first place. In fact, Venice’s new pricing model makes it look and feel quite similar to those of other competing distribution platforms like UnitedMasters or AWAL that are trying to target a similar crop of fast-growing, mid-tier artists. Likely a lot of classic distribution problems will come up at Venice too, including the growing pains of trying to deliver the same level of high-quality, hands-on distribution service across an entire community as it scales. As FSQ says: “I viewed it as a club where the club owners would be trying to help out the artists in the club. But the club just got bigger and yeah there’s not been much investment in the community of artists.”

After applying to receive artist services a month prior and not receiving a response, FSQ returned to the Venice Discord server to express his discontent, which led to a conversation directly with their founder Troy Carter. A bit of clarity was added around what was previously unclear around receiving Venice’s services, which requires you to use their open distribution network.

This leaves holders of the NFT wondering what the tradable value of the NFT is, and how they will be differentiated from or integrated into the new $500 yearly Venice Music membership. Water & Music core team member @yung spielburg, who is also a music producer who holds a Venice Music NFT, called the community “highly experimental” while “trying to approach it with an open mind.”

Disclosure: W&M has co-hosted an event with Venice Music in the past, but this has no impact on our editorial coverage.

Muse NFT drop criticisms continue

THE NEWS: As we covered in a previous Discord digest, Muse dropped their latest album “Will Of The People” as an NFT on Serenade, the sales of which counted towards UK chart rankings.

The drop of 1,000 NFTs crashed the site, leading to its 25-minute sellout. Alongside the sellout, the album was #1 in the UK, becoming the first #1 album using NFT technology, with the NFT selling for £20 each, netting the band £20,000. Serenade talks a bit about how the metadata looked for the drop in a recent Mirror post.

COMMUNITY PULSE: The temperature of the community after the announcement posted by @joshdalton, who leads Web3 Music & Community at Serenade, is that Muse did not directly promote the NFT enough. Muse not making a single social media post through the release cycle directly about the NFT did not go unnoticed by the community; as @fascinated points out, Muse has still not taken to socials even up to (and past) release day.

That said, Josh sees the NFT as just a part of their overall release campaign, and believes the general PR efforts from the band, which covered the NFT as a release type, were enough when set against the perspective of their other commitments around the album release. The conversation around large acts promoting NFTs continues to rage on.

Warner Music UK launches new Web3-focused label, Probably A Label

THE NEWS: On August 30, Warner Music Group officially announced their organizational expansion into Web3 with the launch of Probably A Label, a partnership with Probably Nothing.

Based on the information provided so far, instead of working in the traditional route of empowering artists, they are trying to power up the future of IP for projects in Web3 at large, through at least two different services arms. The most hands-on arm, known as “Studio A,” aims to incubate and scale derivative creative concepts built off of pre-approved, open-IP projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, and Doodles, backed by the resources, tools, and connections of a major label. The second arm is less exclusive: Any music artists who hold the Probably A Label NFT pass will be able to submit their music to a community library, known as “Studio B,” that grants a license to Probably A Label to use the works in their projects.

COMMUNITY PULSE: The response from the community has been general curiosity, with a touch of skepticism. While still feeling a bit of apprehension from his own experience, @danfowler says: “When labels grant freedom for web3 experimentation and represent at the web2 level amazing things will happen.” @DAOuda © – createsafe.xyz sees the play a bit into the future and posits that “If Probably A Label becomes the de facto licensing label for all of those projects that is a win.”

Until now, labels have been licensing the IP of web3 avatars for their own use cases, but this Probably A Label exists more as an agency, working on the individual project basis, infusing their funds and resources into ideas of others.

IN OTHER NEWS

This section compiles and contextualizes music/Web3 news you may have missed, and is written and curated by BlackDave.

E/merge/nt strategy

• The Ethereum Merge was a success, signaling a new era of the chain. Proof of stake is now the new consensus mechanism for the blockchain, departing from the energy-consuming proof of work. Ethereum’s impact on the environment has drastically minimized, claiming the chain will use 1/26th of the energy that PayPal does each year. Environmental impact was one of the top fan and industry concerns we identified in our Season 1 and Season 1.5 research on music and Web3; it remains to be seen whether the Merge will have a significant impact on fan perception of NFTs.

Major companies making major moves

• Kingship enlists Hit-Boy and James Fauntleroy as producers. The Universal Music- signed 4-piece band consisting of Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars officially have producers. The Bloomberg article cites “Jump” by Van Halen as an early reference to the inspiration the group will follow. The W&M community is just excited the band will finally have music.
• Ticketmaster partners with Flow Blockchain to issue NFT “tickets.” Importantly, though, these aren’t actually tickets, but rather are virtual commemorative tickets that signal attendance, similar to POAPs. Thinking of commemorative NFTs from events as an alternative to the tour tee, a lot of possibilities open up around their future value. That said, this announcement comes with no mention of how these NFTs will evolve to combat scalping and open up opportunities for safe and transparent secondary sales.
• Nifty Gateway introduces Publishers, signaling their move toward curation. Nifty Gateway has always been the sole curator of drops on their platform, and this is the first time they’re opening it up to other entities, marking a new era for the marketplace.
• Doodles Raises $54M at a $704M valuation, led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanion’s Seven Seven Six Capital. In June, Doodles brought on Pharrell Williams as Chief Brand Officer. For comparison, Bored Ape Yacht Club was valued at $1.27 billion.

Bans and shutdowns

• Mint Songs announces that it’s officially winding down and no longer allowing minting on their platform. Everyone who has minted on the platform will be able to continue to trade the NFTs they initially minted, and all hosted files have been moved off of the Mint Songs server to nft.storage. The news comes after the abrupt layoffs of over half of their staff in July 2022. Mint Songs co-founder and W&M community member Garrett Hughes cites being unable to find a sustainable model as the main reason for this move. The startup was one of the few completely open music-focused NFT marketplaces in the landscape, and also played a key role in driving industry-wide discussions on improving music NFT metadata.
• Splice says they don’t allow their sounds to be used in NFTs, as discovered in their FAQ. Some of our community members have been engaging with Splice about the matter on Twitter and bringing the results back to base camp. Ironically, many of the more cutting-edge music NFT projects we’ve covered in the recent past rely on making stems and sounds available for more open remixing, like Secret Garden, StemsDAO, and omgkirby.

Legal updates

• Creative Commons creates a FAQ on CC0, which has been a hot topic in the music NFT ecosystem as of late. Creative Commons noticed a lot of confusion around what CC0 actually means in the context of their legal tools, so they cleared it up. This sentence from the FAQ sums it up: “The CC0 public domain dedication would apply to the underlying creative work, and its use means that no one exclusively owns the rights to copy and remix the work for commercial or noncommercial purposes — not the owner of the NFT, not the original rightsholder, no one.”
• A16Z introduces their take on NFT IP Licenses, dubbed Can’t Be Evil NFT Licenses, with a focus on hate speech censorship while granting commercial rights. Combining the need for NFT-specific commercial licenses with the ability to revoke individual rights if the “what if” situation of our nightmares happens (such as being used in hate speech or other supporting unethical practices), this allows creative professionals to continue to explore different licensing solutions without fear of the overall brand being ruined.

*Special thanks to our tech lead @aflores and platform developers at Catalog who helped to get these records into the database, saving a lot of manual data entry. We do still need some additional research done to fill in Genre and Label Status columns for these records. If you would like to help in making the database even more comprehensive by assisting with this research (or if you have coding skills that could make this process more automated), please reach out to @brookejaxon on Discord or via email at brooke at waterandmusic dot com.