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.

If you’re not on our server yet, please take just five seconds to authorize the Memberful Discord bot, which should automatically give you access. We have indicated members’ Discord handles with an @, and specific channels with a hashtag (#). If you want to find particular members, log onto the Water & Music server and type their names into the search bar.

The delicate balance of pricing music NFTs

First shared by @danfowler on #web3

Undoubtedly, the Web3 music story of the week has been the launch of Chaos, a collaborative music project from Songcamp. The effort, we’ll reiterate, brought together 45 musicians to make 45 songs over eight weeks, which were then minted and sold as randomized NFT ‘packs’.

Chaos NFT packs were priced at 0.2 ETH (or ~US$350 at the time of publication) — a price point which certainly isn’t the highest we’ve seen for a music NFT but will inevitably price out a significant chunk of music fans. As crypto weathers an apparent bear market and the US faces a cost of living crisis, we discussed whether financial accessibility should be a priority or is a distraction in Web3 music.

@danfowler noted Chaos’s current price point would financially exclude many casual fans who’d like to support the project on-chain. A small group of collectors, then, will arguably hold most of the NFTs in the collection. @BlackDave and @danfowler further posit that only attracting ‘asset class’ collectors to your NFT collection precludes the NFT from being used as a community building tool.

But many of us wondered whether that financial exclusivity genuinely matters if it allows wildly experimental projects like Chaos to exist in the first place.

As @cheriehu highlighted, the fact that Chaos exists may have been the point all along. As our interview with the Chaos project leads suggests, the project’s aim was to experiment formally with music industry mechanics, rather than mimic a traditional album drop with an alternate profit generator.

From that perspective, it may be more helpful to think of Songcamp as a laboratory for industry experimentation, instead of a music project aimed to attract fans in a traditional sense. Although many of us have observed, the actual music in Chaos is pretty great and will hopefully win the involved musicians new fans outside of Web3 circles.

Even the idea of “traditional fans,” though, gave us room to pause and consider accessibility:

“Just adding my two cents on being priced out — very difficult to earn in rupees and spend in dollars! This doesn’t relate to just the chaos drop, but web3 projects in general as most of the visible innovation in web3 x music is happening in the west, or at least spotlight is more on western projects.” — @aniket

The comment reminded us that many projects’ inaccessibility is even more extreme for fans outside the West. @aniket’s note calls attention to the possibility that Web3 replicates the same harmful, geocentric dynamics perpetuated by the traditional music industry. This parallel rings opposed to one of Web3’s most offered benefits on the collector side. Incidentally, the alternative solution for the artist, in this case, further distances fans from participating. Ultimately, as the Web3 music market matures and as local scenes develop their crypto-native platforms and movements, this will (hopefully) be somewhat diluted.

Several suggested tiered pricing and play-to-earn as the gold standard for creating both inclusive and profitable Web3 music communities — but as @basgras extended (from his own experiences of building communities), developing several different strategies, utilities, and onboarding plans for multiple tiers can be incredibly complex and time-consuming.

Like many aspects of Web3, there’s still no straightforward best practice for pricing NFTs — it remains a hugely unpredictable and volatile arena, littered with success stories and failures. Whether the crypto-whale-backed patronage model will continue to fund these alternative forms of creativity (as @BlackDave wisely notes, “culture is rarely created by the people who can afford to make it.”) or more consumer-friendly pricing will replace it is, for now, unknowable. In the meantime, we can only continue to observe and experiment, or as Songcamp founder Matthew Chaim put it:

Do crowdsourced music festivals work?

First shared by @cheriehu on #web3

On #web3, we discussed SUPERF3ST — a “decentralized” music festival from the creators of Bonnaroo and Outside Lands, where NFTs grant fans the ability to influence “what the festival becomes” (according to their website).

If the idea sounds familiar, it’s because it probably is. As @seaninsound notes, the concept of fan-curated music festivals has been kicking around since 2017 when Delaware’s Firefly became “the world’s first fan-curated festival.” Despite rave reviews (and a great line-up), Firefly didn’t return in 2018, maybe partly because (as @cheriehu notes), fan-curated festivals are logistically challenging to pull off.

Outside of music, the media company behind Mad Realities (the NFT-funded, Bachelorette-style dating show, which allowed NFT holders to become showrunners, choosing the show’s host,and nominating contestants) recently raised $6M in a funding round, suggesting that there is a market for crowdsourced curation in Web3.

However, we were divided on whether decentralized festivals would ultimately be suitable for music. While this dynamic intends to mobilize passionate fans, as @seaninsound observed, there’s a likelihood that it will privilege artists who are skilled at social media or well-connected. We’ve written about this dynamic in Web3 music circles before, focusing on how many artists connected with curated platforms like Sound or Catalog tend to be already established in Web3 circles.

Further, mass curation could lead to a race to the bottom, where bland, crowd-pleasing acts take precedence over underground or more esoteric artists. As @Charlotte – csquared notes, part of the magic of music festivals is discovering new artists you’d never have encountered otherwise. It’s impossible to engineer serendipity in a popularity contest.

Further reading: Revisit our Discord digest on decentralized curation economies