Last month, we rolled out our first-ever collaborative report as a DAO — an in-depth, five-part syllabus on the state of music/Web3, assembled by over 40 contributors from our community.
The report, which marked “Season 1” of our collaborative research model, spans topics from artist tooling and fan onboarding/sentiment, to music PFPs and legal challenges around defining music NFT ownership. Our supporters and onlookers have praised the report for:
- Combining granular, practical details and big-picture thinking on Web3;
- Considering both optimistic and critical perspectives on technology with equal weight;
- Successfully drawing some of the ecosystem’s most influential players into the Water & Music community, and
- Pioneering new models for funding industry research.
Oh, and we’re also now the top search result for “Web3 music."
Like so much in technological innovation, Water & Music's journey into Web3 happened very slowly, and then all at once.
After covering music, tech and crypto from a critical, research-oriented perspective for the past two years, we dove headfirst into becoming Web3 and DAO operators ourselves in the second half of 2021. Within the span of just five months, we:
- Migrated our membership off of Patreon to our own (primarily Web2-facilitated) website and membership management stack, giving us more direct ownership over our community relationships and revenue flows;
- Went through Cohort 3 of the Seed Club accelerator, which gave us a crash course in Web3 and DAO fundamentals;
- Started and published our first-ever collaborative report as a DAO — a 20,000-word resource focused on all things music and Web3, featuring the work of over 40 member-contributors;
- Sold out of our first ever genesis NFTs in under 36 hours, which went directly towards supporting our research;
- Minted our token $STREAM, and
- Executed our first retroactive $STREAM airdrop to over 300 of our active members.
This post below is focused on fleshing out both the philosophical context and tactical details behind our inaugural $STREAMdrop (see what we did there?...). Not only is our airdrop approach complex in its multiple component parts, but it's also markedly different in its intention and target audience from those of many other DAOs, because fundamentally we are not a Web3-native community.
It would not be an exaggeration to call the rise of Web3 one of the biggest music-business stories of 2021. From independent artists recording multimillion-dollar music NFT sales, to acts like Megadeth, Blond:Ish and Portugal. The Man launching their own social tokens, to labels like Topshelf Records and Leaving Records experimenting with becoming decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) — practically every corner of the music industry seems to be experimenting with making blockchain and crypto a crucial ingredient in their next stage of evolution.
To be sure, there's been a lot of noise coming from the top down, as countless celebrities have treated one-off NFT drops as get-rich-quick schemes without a long-term vision, often duping their own fan bases in the process. At the same time, from the bottom up, independent artists and creative collectives are leveraging Web3 to rewrite the playbook for digital music monetization, community engagement and IP co-creation right in front of our eyes, crafting new social and financial incentives around culture on their own terms.
In Water & Music’s first-ever collaborative research report, nearly 40 of our community members across industries, geographies, career stages and skill sets came together to try to make sense of the immense challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for music/Web3's future.
Over the past two months, we’ve:
“Countless treasures are buried along the path to nowhere in particular.”*
- Kenneth O. Stanley & Joel Lehman, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, 2015*
Hi there!
We’re Water & Music, a newsletter and research DAO on a mission to empower the music industry with the knowledge, network and skills to do more collaborative, innovative and progressive work with technology.
In December 2021, we will be launching $STREAM, a research token designed to incentivize, credit and reward collaborative knowledge-sharing in music, tech and entertainment. We’re excited to share more info below about the context, utility and roadmap around our token, and how you can get involved today.
Over the past few weeks, Berlin-based creative collective CO:QUO has been hosting a virtual panel series titled Music Futures & Simulacra, exploring the use of “symbols and signs to imagine new futures for the music industry.”
The first panel, focused on the future of NFTs and crypto for music, took place via Zoom and Facebook Live on June 16, featuring perspectives from artists, researchers, developers and curators. With a healthy dose of skepticism and criticism, the discussion dissected not only how artists can leverage NFTs to gain more ownership over their careers, but also the significant cultural, financial and ethical risks associated with this emerging infrastructure that tend to get overlooked in mainstream music-industry conversations.
The full recording of the panel is available on Facebook, but we also wanted to publish a text recap of the key themes and takeaways here on Mirror. This specific platform also gives us a chance to put the panel speakers’ collective enthusiasm for collaborative crypto economics into practice, in even a small way.