Hi there! I’m Cherie, the Founder of Water & Music. Hope you are thriving and surviving through these last few weeks of 2022.
As the holidays are fast approaching, I wanted to send a personal note reflecting on how far we’ve come as a community in the last year — and sharing why I think now is an especially opportune time to join the Water & Music membership, given the incredible research currently happening behind the scenes.
2022 IN REVIEW: From newsletter to network
Exactly one year ago, from December 13–17, 2021, we rolled out our Season 1 collaborative research report on music and Web3.
While Season 1 itself came together in a chaotic whim of just eight weeks, the launch was the culmination of several years worth of researching music/tech trends — through the maturation of the streaming landscape, the disruptive COVID-19 pandemic, and two different blockchain hype cycles. Throughout this process, I slowly came to the realization that there must be a better way to cover and learn about the music business.
How could we build a new media and learning ecosystem for the industry that incentivized quality of analysis over quantity of output; rewarded curiosity and skill-building over “expertise” and seniority; encouraged collaborating across borders over maintaining silos; and did proper justice to the diversity and ingenuity of people working in the industry today?
With the help of an incredible team and community — plus critical activation energy from the Seed Club accelerator — I set out in fall 2021 to codify these values into a new collaborative, peer-to-peer research and knowledge framework for music.
Fast-forward to today, and the amount of progress we’ve made at Water & Music is nothing short of impressive. In the last year, our community has:
-
✍️ Published over 100 articles, reports, and newsletters
-
📚 Run two educational workshops as part of our new Academy
-
🗣️ Spoken at nearly 30 events, both online and IRL across four continents
-
➡️ Distributed our $STREAM token to over 500 wallets
-
🤝 Rewritten our mission statement to reflect our expansion from newsletter to network
Key highlights include, but are certainly not limited to:
-
📈 An analysis of 2021 music NFT sales trends
-
💼 A speaker series on the evolution of artist teams
-
🎨 A hybrid research/art project on community design, in collaboration with Friends With Benefits
-
📧 Topic-specific newsletters The Score (gaming), Sidechain (music/Web3), and Career Connections (industry hiring trends)
2022 also kicked the butts of every DAO leader I know, including myself. On the fly, I learned to juggle leading a team as it doubles in size, fostering a community across both online and offline spaces, scaling an editorial voice across dozens of contributors, navigating a bear market, and designing a DAO with no prior playbook, all at the same time.
A special thank-you to the W&M core team — Kat Bassett (community ops), Alex Flores (tech), Diana Gremore (events/education), Brodie Conley (ops/governance), Yung Spielburg (collab research), and core teammate emeritus Brooke Jackson (database/ops) — for navigating this transition with so much grace, being instrumental sounding boards and sparring partners, and serving as role models for growing an organization thoughtfully without compromising on vision and rigor.
Hopefully, the work we’ve done this year has proven that our collaborative model is capable of producing higher-quality, more nuanced insights on industry trends at a faster rate than the status quo. And even still, we have a LOT of challenging and exciting work ahead of us.
In 2023, you’ll see us invest not only in even more original research, but also in areas like streamlining the contribution process for busy professionals, formalizing our governance strategy, and expanding our IRL events network — all in service of producing the innovative insights and mindsets we need to drive the music industry forward.
We also plan on reviving our free tier formally beginning in January 2023, to keep our wider network posted on key takeaways from our research and other activities going on within our membership — so stay tuned!
Why join us now?
As of writing, we’re around halfway through our Season 3 research sprint on creative AI, which will be released in winter 2023.
ICYMI, our “seasons” are our flagship outputs, consisting of in-depth explorations of music/tech trends that feel especially urgent, noisy, or under-explored, and that would benefit from more large-scale, distributed research efforts. We decided to focus on AI for our latest sprint because the topic is characterized by both a sprawling, multidisciplinary diversity of creative and commercial approaches, and an overwhelming level of hype (and resulting misinformation). Just like with our previous season topics (Web3 and the metaverse), this combination of factors creates the perfect breeding ground for a more bottom-up, emergent approach to research.
Against the backdrop of this season, there are four specific reasons why I think now is an especially exciting and opportune time to join our community and follow everything that’s going on:
⌛ Critical, real-time market analysis
Our fluid, nimble, and distributed approach to research allows us to track and synthesize market developments in real time, while incorporating bottom-up perspectives from our community that might otherwise go overlooked by the mainstream media.
In the Season 3 hub in our Discord server, we’re currently engaging in highly interdisciplinary research on creative AI — compiling music/AI market maps, annotating legal agreements, surveying artists about their sentiment on the technology, and getting hands-on experience creating with the tools themselves.
🎯 Actionable guidance for industry pros
As a music-tech research organization, we also see ourselves playing a critical role as a bridge — not just keeping a pulse on bleeding-edge tech trends, but also unpacking how those trends concretely impact everyday music-industry strategies and careers.
With AI in particular, we’re exploring questions like: How should artists and developers approach issues of copyright and data transparency in their creative AI experiments? What monetization models make the most sense for AI tools, based on their target user bases? How might the adoption of AI technology impact the set of skills that are in demand in the music industry at large?
🧪 Hands-on access to early products
A critical part of what makes Season 3 distinct from our previous season sprints is the amount of hands-on experimentation with the tools we are covering. Many early-stage music AI tools are being built in real time by our own community members, making our research stronger and more nuanced through direct access to of-the-moment development updates.
We've also integrated several generative AI models directly into our Discord server, including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and GPT-3, allowing members to play around with these tools in a safe, focused environment. We run interactive workshops every week in our server around these tools, guided by prompts such as generating song lyrics, PFPs, and even baseline strategy and contract templates.
🪟 Window into emergent organizational practices
Aside from keeping up to date with the creative AI market, being a Water & Music member is also an unparalleled opportunity to play a direct part in an organizational experiment.
Through Season 3, we will continue to strengthen our groundbreaking processes for tracking, crediting, and rewarding collaborative research via our $STREAM token, as well as laying out formal governance frameworks for follow-up research. At the same time, on a meta level, we’re thinking through how to incorporate creative AI into our business operations. We see the potential for AI to reduce the cost of several key parts of our research process — brainstorming ideas, conducting literature reviews, synthesizing information, editing pieces for voice — in a way that is ethical and does not compromise on the intellectual rigor and distinct perspective that the W&M community is known for. We plan on keeping our community up to speed on these shifts, providing a window into how media organizations could evolve in the near future.
I really do hope you’ll join us! If any of the above interests you, click here to learn about our membership benefits and options.
In fact, since you got all the way here, you deserve a special holiday prize: Use the coupon JOINUS2023 for 25% off your first quarter or year with us. (Coupon valid until January 2, 2023, and applies only to first-time members and those reactivating expired memberships.)
Thanks so much to all of you for your interest and support thus far, and I’m thrilled to see what the next year holds for our community!
Best,
Cherie Hu, Founder