the music always goes up, no tokens required
April 20, 2022 8:28 AM Subscribe
Future Tape is a web3 music player for new tracks for offer (~1500 USD) on the blockchain. The focus is on independent artists who are pitching music NFTs on the Catalog, Sound and Nina NFT markets. Use the rather minimalist interface to check out the 9 mostly decent tracks on Fellowships 1.0 Collection.
It's a new project from Anthony Volodkin who had a big role in the Web 2.0 as the founder of the very popular MP3 aggregator Hype Machine back in 2005 (previously).
> So, it's a scam?
What gave it away? Oh, web3 and NFTs? Yeah, that'll do it.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 8:48 AM on April 20, 2022 [18 favorites]
What gave it away? Oh, web3 and NFTs? Yeah, that'll do it.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 8:48 AM on April 20, 2022 [18 favorites]
So, it's a scam?
Or is it a grift?
(Possibly a swindle.)
posted by MrJM at 8:48 AM on April 20, 2022 [9 favorites]
Or is it a grift?
(Possibly a swindle.)
posted by MrJM at 8:48 AM on April 20, 2022 [9 favorites]
If anyone one metafilter cares to think beyond their typical reactionary web3 = worst thing in the world, Nina and Catalog specifically (not personally familiar with Sound) are doing really interesting things to advocate for artists in the wildly hostile streaming economy.
Somehow I doubt if everyone who calls this stuff a scam can also prove that they don't have a Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc., account.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 8:52 AM on April 20, 2022
Somehow I doubt if everyone who calls this stuff a scam can also prove that they don't have a Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc., account.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 8:52 AM on April 20, 2022
Somehow I doubt if everyone who calls this stuff a scam can also prove that they don't have a Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc., account.
Rest assured that I am 100% incapable of proving a negative.
posted by MrJM at 9:01 AM on April 20, 2022 [24 favorites]
Rest assured that I am 100% incapable of proving a negative.
posted by MrJM at 9:01 AM on April 20, 2022 [24 favorites]
Catalog runs on Ethereum. So does sound.xyz. Nina runs on Solana.
All three require cryptocurrency wallets to make purchases, which makes them ecologically destructive scams.
Somehow I doubt if everyone who calls this stuff a scam can also prove that they don't have a Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc., account.
I have an Apple Music account in part because of decisions like this.
If you're unfamiliar with the sources of our hate and suspicion for Web3/NFT/Cryptocurrency projects, please see this previous post on the blue which links directly to Dan Olsen's "Line Goes Up" and indirectly to resources Olsen used like Web3 Is Going Great.
posted by All Might Be Well at 9:01 AM on April 20, 2022 [33 favorites]
All three require cryptocurrency wallets to make purchases, which makes them ecologically destructive scams.
Somehow I doubt if everyone who calls this stuff a scam can also prove that they don't have a Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc., account.
I have an Apple Music account in part because of decisions like this.
If you're unfamiliar with the sources of our hate and suspicion for Web3/NFT/Cryptocurrency projects, please see this previous post on the blue which links directly to Dan Olsen's "Line Goes Up" and indirectly to resources Olsen used like Web3 Is Going Great.
posted by All Might Be Well at 9:01 AM on April 20, 2022 [33 favorites]
And Future Tape simply aggregates Catalog, sound.xyz, and Nina. It's environmentally destructive fraud all the way down.
posted by All Might Be Well at 9:03 AM on April 20, 2022 [15 favorites]
posted by All Might Be Well at 9:03 AM on April 20, 2022 [15 favorites]
Cool, let's talk about those things they're doing to advocate for artists then, and maybe give a miss to being part of the hype machine for the toxic wasteland that is the web3/blockchain/nft mess.
(Also, hey, "typical reactionary?" Not cool. Just because everyone is waking up to how awful this garbage is doesn't mean you get to handwave away the legitimate harm it all does now that hating on it is both popular _and_ correct.)
posted by Imperfect at 9:03 AM on April 20, 2022 [23 favorites]
(Also, hey, "typical reactionary?" Not cool. Just because everyone is waking up to how awful this garbage is doesn't mean you get to handwave away the legitimate harm it all does now that hating on it is both popular _and_ correct.)
posted by Imperfect at 9:03 AM on April 20, 2022 [23 favorites]
Could be a hornswoggle.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:05 AM on April 20, 2022 [33 favorites]
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:05 AM on April 20, 2022 [33 favorites]
Somehow I doubt if everyone who calls this stuff a scam can also prove that they don't have a Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc., account.
music distribution has been tilted against the vast majority of artists since wax cylinders. Arguing that people are hypocrites for and have no moral standing for argument is both a tu quoque and ignores the history of the system. those are the ways that music is distributed legally now so despite the system being unfair, it's the also almost the only way for artists to be paid for their work. you can advocate for a better system while participating in the current one.
almost anything with a blockchain attached, especially NFTs is un-arguably bad and artist choosing worse system over the current bad one is a shit choice
posted by Dr. Twist at 9:07 AM on April 20, 2022 [18 favorites]
music distribution has been tilted against the vast majority of artists since wax cylinders. Arguing that people are hypocrites for and have no moral standing for argument is both a tu quoque and ignores the history of the system. those are the ways that music is distributed legally now so despite the system being unfair, it's the also almost the only way for artists to be paid for their work. you can advocate for a better system while participating in the current one.
almost anything with a blockchain attached, especially NFTs is un-arguably bad and artist choosing worse system over the current bad one is a shit choice
posted by Dr. Twist at 9:07 AM on April 20, 2022 [18 favorites]
No, web3 isn't the worst thing in the world. But it is objectively bad for artists, bad for users, and bad for the environment. The only people it's objectively good for are pump-and-dump scammers, I've-got-a-brldge-for-you fraudsters, your favourite oligarch's money launderers, ....
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:08 AM on April 20, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:08 AM on April 20, 2022 [16 favorites]
I editorialized a bit in the tags and reference Olsen's video in the title of the post. There is something to talk about around the production and ownership of art but the crypto just consumes all the oxygen.
I do question what the artists see themselves doing in this space. The playlist I linked I feel is legitimately good stuff, what does this process give them that others don't? If anything the old web 2 site should have been the one called "Future Tape" so that this web3 one could be called "hype machine".
posted by zenon at 9:10 AM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I do question what the artists see themselves doing in this space. The playlist I linked I feel is legitimately good stuff, what does this process give them that others don't? If anything the old web 2 site should have been the one called "Future Tape" so that this web3 one could be called "hype machine".
posted by zenon at 9:10 AM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
> If anyone one metafilter cares to think beyond their typical reactionary web3 = worst thing in the world
That's a fair shout, but the outrage fatigue at nearly everything in that space is real. That said, just like medication, with cynicism the only difference between an ameliorative and a poison is a matter of dosage. I should try to lower mine, I reckon.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 9:11 AM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
That's a fair shout, but the outrage fatigue at nearly everything in that space is real. That said, just like medication, with cynicism the only difference between an ameliorative and a poison is a matter of dosage. I should try to lower mine, I reckon.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 9:11 AM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
Possibly a scheme.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:14 AM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:14 AM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
But in seriousness, yes, NFTs are a scam, and anyone involved in such a transaction is either a sucker or a con artist preying on suckers.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:19 AM on April 20, 2022 [24 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:19 AM on April 20, 2022 [24 favorites]
Solana uses the same amount of energy for a transaction as sending an email. Like, I get the environmental concern, but do you drive a car? Do you eat red meat? Do you have electricity in your home? Do you spend your free time advocating for a move away from fossil fuels and towards nuclear energy? I personally don't own or drive a car or eat meat, but haven't quite made the jump to the no-electricity lifestyle.
And I reject the notion that artists are just going to get fucked either way so they might as well not complain about it. Streaming platforms pay between $3,000-$5,000 for a million plays. That doesn't even get into the predatory contracts they've most likely signed with labels which means they see 10% of that, and then split it between their three other bandmates. Which, besides the fact that music should not be valued on how many times it can be played, is a paltry amount of money. A disgustingly small amount of money.
Do you know who profits off of streaming? Besides the lunatic tech bros in charge, I mean? It's artists who can grab the most attention. And they grab this attention by spending their time and money on tour (in... gasp... PLANES), and can afford the marketing budgets to ship merch (in... gasp... PLANES and BOATS) all over the world.
If Solana is an extremely low impact way to distribute music, why shouldn't artists use it? Every artist I know making NFTs is now living off of their art. The #1 reason for artists to use this stuff is because it allows them to capture and own a fair portion (read: all of) their value.
By lumping every Web3 project in the same bucket as other crappy crypto garbage, you're doing a specific disservice to artists who would one day like to afford to live off their art, and ensuring a Premium Mediocre world where the only music that exists is AI-composed *insert lame pop star here* remixes. Like, we get it, a lot of Web3 sucks. IT DOES NOT ALL SUCK. SOME OF IT WILL BE GREAT. And it certainly can't be worse than Spotify platforming Joe Rogan and investing in weapons manufacturers, or Apple's latest privacy shenanigans, and so on.
I urge people to really look into projects like Nina, because the team is sound, the artists using it are sound, and they care about the environment as much as you do. We all want the same thing: a future for the planet and a future for artists. We will not get that from streaming companies. Web3 is coming whether you like it or not. You can get on board now, and maybe ensure the success of right-minded projects, or you can wait until Amazon is run on Web3 and you get Jordan Peterson monologues piped into your dreams because you took an extra five minutes of lunch break on your last work shift.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:20 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
And I reject the notion that artists are just going to get fucked either way so they might as well not complain about it. Streaming platforms pay between $3,000-$5,000 for a million plays. That doesn't even get into the predatory contracts they've most likely signed with labels which means they see 10% of that, and then split it between their three other bandmates. Which, besides the fact that music should not be valued on how many times it can be played, is a paltry amount of money. A disgustingly small amount of money.
Do you know who profits off of streaming? Besides the lunatic tech bros in charge, I mean? It's artists who can grab the most attention. And they grab this attention by spending their time and money on tour (in... gasp... PLANES), and can afford the marketing budgets to ship merch (in... gasp... PLANES and BOATS) all over the world.
If Solana is an extremely low impact way to distribute music, why shouldn't artists use it? Every artist I know making NFTs is now living off of their art. The #1 reason for artists to use this stuff is because it allows them to capture and own a fair portion (read: all of) their value.
By lumping every Web3 project in the same bucket as other crappy crypto garbage, you're doing a specific disservice to artists who would one day like to afford to live off their art, and ensuring a Premium Mediocre world where the only music that exists is AI-composed *insert lame pop star here* remixes. Like, we get it, a lot of Web3 sucks. IT DOES NOT ALL SUCK. SOME OF IT WILL BE GREAT. And it certainly can't be worse than Spotify platforming Joe Rogan and investing in weapons manufacturers, or Apple's latest privacy shenanigans, and so on.
I urge people to really look into projects like Nina, because the team is sound, the artists using it are sound, and they care about the environment as much as you do. We all want the same thing: a future for the planet and a future for artists. We will not get that from streaming companies. Web3 is coming whether you like it or not. You can get on board now, and maybe ensure the success of right-minded projects, or you can wait until Amazon is run on Web3 and you get Jordan Peterson monologues piped into your dreams because you took an extra five minutes of lunch break on your last work shift.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:20 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
I am now very curious if "My Hatin' Jawn" by Dutchyyy (seemingly distinct from the Dutchy and Dutchie I've heard of) is a reference to The Gaylads' "My Jamaican Girl." I could believe it's sampled in there, but it's not at all obvious, at least to me. I'll probably pass on downloading it. Cheers to those who like it.
posted by eotvos at 9:22 AM on April 20, 2022
posted by eotvos at 9:22 AM on April 20, 2022
Catalog runs on Ethereum. So does sound.xyz. Nina runs on Solana.
All three require cryptocurrency wallets to make purchases, which makes them ecologically destructive scams.
Solana doesn't use proof of work so I don't think it's gratuitously burning electricity like Ethereum does. That's not a defense of NFTs as a concept, just that it's not a particularly potent criticism of blockchains that don't use proof-of-work.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:22 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
All three require cryptocurrency wallets to make purchases, which makes them ecologically destructive scams.
Solana doesn't use proof of work so I don't think it's gratuitously burning electricity like Ethereum does. That's not a defense of NFTs as a concept, just that it's not a particularly potent criticism of blockchains that don't use proof-of-work.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:22 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure what the value proposition is with NFTs and music. I guess it's the digital equivalent of merch? Why would I buy a band's NFT? What is there to stop the rampant copyright infringement in the visual NFT space? And if there are centralized platforms that patrol for infringement, why bother with the blockchain?
posted by BungaDunga at 9:26 AM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 9:26 AM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
By lumping every Web3 project in the same bucket as other crappy crypto garbage, you're doing a specific disservice to artists who would one day like to afford to live off their art,
Good. All Web3 needs to perish, and if the only thing keeping it from going "Jordan Peterson monologues piped into your dreams" is FOMO/"Not Gonna Make It", then maybe it's not as benign as you're claiming.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:27 AM on April 20, 2022 [11 favorites]
Good. All Web3 needs to perish, and if the only thing keeping it from going "Jordan Peterson monologues piped into your dreams" is FOMO/"Not Gonna Make It", then maybe it's not as benign as you're claiming.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:27 AM on April 20, 2022 [11 favorites]
Solana's 2021 energy report is here: https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-2021
I mean, why would you buy a band's album on Bandcamp? The answer is presumably to support them, and be able to download the files onto your device for future listening. A project like Nina lets you do that, and then lets the artist keep 100% of the profit, instead of paying a cut to both Bandcamp and Paypal.
And yes, you could think of an NFT like a limited edition cassette or something. You can duplicate a cassette as much as you want but that doesn't diminish the value of the first limited edition version.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:29 AM on April 20, 2022
I mean, why would you buy a band's album on Bandcamp? The answer is presumably to support them, and be able to download the files onto your device for future listening. A project like Nina lets you do that, and then lets the artist keep 100% of the profit, instead of paying a cut to both Bandcamp and Paypal.
And yes, you could think of an NFT like a limited edition cassette or something. You can duplicate a cassette as much as you want but that doesn't diminish the value of the first limited edition version.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:29 AM on April 20, 2022
There's not enough data storage capacity ( unless you are spending 100's of thousands of dollars) for a jpeg of a monkey, so certainly not enough for a high quality audio file.
The NFT has enough storage for a short string of text so it is just a pointer to the actual content, on a normal boring web server, there's no reason to involve all this Blockchain bs in a transaction that could be handled using any number of existing media distribution platforms that just take normal money and provide you with a download ticket.
Edit: the porn industry has always been a leader in the future of media distribution and the fact that they have not embraced this technology tells you it's not feasible.
posted by kzin602 at 9:30 AM on April 20, 2022 [28 favorites]
The NFT has enough storage for a short string of text so it is just a pointer to the actual content, on a normal boring web server, there's no reason to involve all this Blockchain bs in a transaction that could be handled using any number of existing media distribution platforms that just take normal money and provide you with a download ticket.
Edit: the porn industry has always been a leader in the future of media distribution and the fact that they have not embraced this technology tells you it's not feasible.
posted by kzin602 at 9:30 AM on April 20, 2022 [28 favorites]
The point, CrystalDave, as I'm sure you know, is that Web3 will not "perish." It's here to stay already. The point is to adopt good projects before the cynical and cruel overlords that currently rule the internet decide to make this stuff as corrupt and terrible as they've already made everything else.
I really don't see why a group of independent artists struggling to create an equitable platform for themselves is worthy of so much vitriol and dismissal.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:34 AM on April 20, 2022
I really don't see why a group of independent artists struggling to create an equitable platform for themselves is worthy of so much vitriol and dismissal.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:34 AM on April 20, 2022
If you want to pay artists actual money so e.g. they can buy food, pay rent, etc, crypto just makes it more complicated not less, with more middlemen not fewer, more ways of breaking down, more ways of eventually fucking someone over. Please stop huffing the gazzz and use your damn credit card like a sane person.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:36 AM on April 20, 2022 [30 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:36 AM on April 20, 2022 [30 favorites]
kzin602, as far as I understand it, the tech titans of the porn industry are sitting pretty at the top of the pile on their version of streaming services. They capture the value of their performers, allow only one point of entry (whatever variant of ___Hub), barrage the visitors with ads, and make even more money with paid memberships. And the performers, much like current musical artists, see barely a fraction of the value they're creating.
seanmpuckett, the on-ramp problems of crypto are obvious, but if I have to choose between getting paid $1 for someone to download my track versus $0.000001, I think I know which I'd prefer.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:38 AM on April 20, 2022
seanmpuckett, the on-ramp problems of crypto are obvious, but if I have to choose between getting paid $1 for someone to download my track versus $0.000001, I think I know which I'd prefer.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:38 AM on April 20, 2022
I have a philosophical objection to NFTs. The technology seems to exist just to impose artificial scarcity on digital art. It's a good thing that digital art and music is infinitely replicable and available to anyone. Artists have always had a hard time making a living off their work, and the solution to that isn't to impose scarcity over their work such that they have to sell gimmicks to rich patrons to survive.
Artists are in this situation because of the scarcity of food, housing, and medical care artificially imposed by capitalism. Trying to extend that scarcity into the digital realm just takes us further down the dark path.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:39 AM on April 20, 2022 [23 favorites]
Artists are in this situation because of the scarcity of food, housing, and medical care artificially imposed by capitalism. Trying to extend that scarcity into the digital realm just takes us further down the dark path.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:39 AM on April 20, 2022 [23 favorites]
I really don't see why a group of independent artists struggling to create an equitable platform for themselves is worthy of so much vitriol and dismissal.
Here's the thing about NFTs: The struggling independent artists are basically just adorable stuffed mascots strapped to the grille of a coal-rolling juggernaut operated by brociopathic greedheads.
The idea that you're "supporting artists" is an emotional hook designed to suck you into a scammy, environmentally catastrophic pyramid scheme.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:43 AM on April 20, 2022 [42 favorites]
Here's the thing about NFTs: The struggling independent artists are basically just adorable stuffed mascots strapped to the grille of a coal-rolling juggernaut operated by brociopathic greedheads.
The idea that you're "supporting artists" is an emotional hook designed to suck you into a scammy, environmentally catastrophic pyramid scheme.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:43 AM on April 20, 2022 [42 favorites]
OSBA, I agree, but NFTs don't necessarily impose artificial scarcity, no more so than a limited run of vinyl does (and, for further troubled dreams, look into the environmental impact of vinyl records). On Nina, all the music is infinitely streamable for free. People who choose to purchase an NFT can do so, and then the artist makes however much money they decided to charge for it. I personally don't care about owning vinyl so I don't buy vinyl when an artist releases it. I don't consider that "artificially scarce" though.
And I agree about the scarcity of food, housing, medical care (in the USA). But the situation is obviously exacerbated by the idea that society seems to have collectively decided that listening to music is worth fractions of a penny now.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:43 AM on April 20, 2022
And I agree about the scarcity of food, housing, medical care (in the USA). But the situation is obviously exacerbated by the idea that society seems to have collectively decided that listening to music is worth fractions of a penny now.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:43 AM on April 20, 2022
But you aren't paying the artist a buck, dude. You're moving some bits around at enormous cost and financial risk. If the artist wants to buy food they have to convert the bits into dollars or yen or whatever at still more cost and risk. Please PLEASE stop pretending you're paying money when you're not. Crypto is gilded shit, and not even real gold.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:45 AM on April 20, 2022 [26 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:45 AM on April 20, 2022 [26 favorites]
I mean, why would you buy a band's album on Bandcamp? The answer is presumably to support them, and be able to download the files onto your device for future listening. A project like Nina lets you do that, and then lets the artist keep 100% of the profit, instead of paying a cut to both Bandcamp and Paypal.But I have to get a crypto-wallet and buy some crypto-currency to put in it which means presumably using a credit card and paying the fees at that point though? (I could be wrong, I have not a clue how I'd go about doing all that stuff)
And it's not like Bandcamp costs no money to run right? Presumably someone somewhere is paying bandwidth and storage costs for these files on Nina and either taking a cut or incurring a loss in the hope that they'll make some money someday? Not a reassuring model for keeping these track available online.
I feel like there's a lack of transparency here that doesn't really do much to dampen my cynisism the site really doesn't seem to want to help me to understand it.
posted by tomp at 9:45 AM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
OK anyway, a thread-sitting referendom on "are NFTs shit or not (they are)" isn't really all that interesting, no one's minds are going to be changed.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:46 AM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:46 AM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
keep 100% of the profit, instead of paying a cut to both Bandcamp and Paypal.
Minus transaction/gas/etc. fees (sure, currently Solana's low, but only as a proportion of use & congestion), minus the cost of converting cash into it, minus the cost of the artist converting cash out of it, minus...
Ye of little faith about a cynical and cruel system being inevitable, but so much faith that the cruelty can be mitigated/avoided.
This project is serving as a smoke-screen for those self-same cynical & cruel overlords you're worried about. If we want to avoid an impending cryptocurrency dystopia, then it can't be by going "Yeah, the entire structure is a fractally recursive hypercapitalist nightmare, with artificial scarcity & tokenization baked in & horrific externalities of which environmental concerns are just one... *but there's some neat ways to pay for limited-edition versions of music!*"
I'm with you on wanting to avoid the cryptocurrency endgame, but since when has "let's surrender to Moloch, but if we get in early maybe we can direct it" actually worked? The portrayal of all this as inevitable and the way of the future is part of the shell game. Just because one of the shells is shiny to you doesn't mean we should lose track of the game. I'm not setting myself up as immune either, I'm sure there's a chance something might come up tuned to me where I go "Ooo, this shell is meant for me!", but that makes it all the more important to lash myself to the mast ahead of time.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:47 AM on April 20, 2022 [14 favorites]
Minus transaction/gas/etc. fees (sure, currently Solana's low, but only as a proportion of use & congestion), minus the cost of converting cash into it, minus the cost of the artist converting cash out of it, minus...
Ye of little faith about a cynical and cruel system being inevitable, but so much faith that the cruelty can be mitigated/avoided.
This project is serving as a smoke-screen for those self-same cynical & cruel overlords you're worried about. If we want to avoid an impending cryptocurrency dystopia, then it can't be by going "Yeah, the entire structure is a fractally recursive hypercapitalist nightmare, with artificial scarcity & tokenization baked in & horrific externalities of which environmental concerns are just one... *but there's some neat ways to pay for limited-edition versions of music!*"
I'm with you on wanting to avoid the cryptocurrency endgame, but since when has "let's surrender to Moloch, but if we get in early maybe we can direct it" actually worked? The portrayal of all this as inevitable and the way of the future is part of the shell game. Just because one of the shells is shiny to you doesn't mean we should lose track of the game. I'm not setting myself up as immune either, I'm sure there's a chance something might come up tuned to me where I go "Ooo, this shell is meant for me!", but that makes it all the more important to lash myself to the mast ahead of time.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:47 AM on April 20, 2022 [14 favorites]
Environmental concerns aside, nfts add extra hoops for the consumer to jump through and they are fundamentally just a different way to buy stuff, if there was a point where it was easy to buy an NFT, the platform would just take the same kind of cuts. What problem do they solve?
It's slower, more expensive and less resilient to fraud than paying to download from any existing traditional media platform. There's a reason services such as Steam are so popular; it just works. I can put in my credit card and download an indie game. I can go to itch.io, put in my credit card and download an indie game. I don't pay for music tracks (I just pay monthly fee for a music streaming service) but I'm sure there's equivalent platforms where you can just buy indie music tracks.
If my credit card number gets stolen or whatever, visa or Mastercard will make it good.
I can't do that with an eth transaction, aside from the insane transaction fees ( if it's more than the couple percent visa takes, it's insane) and slow transaction times.
posted by kzin602 at 9:51 AM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
It's slower, more expensive and less resilient to fraud than paying to download from any existing traditional media platform. There's a reason services such as Steam are so popular; it just works. I can put in my credit card and download an indie game. I can go to itch.io, put in my credit card and download an indie game. I don't pay for music tracks (I just pay monthly fee for a music streaming service) but I'm sure there's equivalent platforms where you can just buy indie music tracks.
If my credit card number gets stolen or whatever, visa or Mastercard will make it good.
I can't do that with an eth transaction, aside from the insane transaction fees ( if it's more than the couple percent visa takes, it's insane) and slow transaction times.
posted by kzin602 at 9:51 AM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
Solana uses the same amount of energy for a transaction as sending an email. Like, I get the environmental concern, but do you drive a car? Do you eat red meat? Do you have electricity in your home? Do you spend your free time advocating for a move away from fossil fuels and towards nuclear energy? I personally don't own or drive a car or eat meat, but haven't quite made the jump to the no-electricity lifestyle.
And I reject the notion that artists are just going to get fucked either way so they might as well not complain about it. Streaming platforms pay between $3,000-$5,000 for a million plays. That doesn't even get into the predatory contracts they've most likely signed with labels which means they see 10% of that, and then split it between their three other bandmates. Which, besides the fact that music should not be valued on how many times it can be played, is a paltry amount of money. A disgustingly small amount of money.
Everybody objects because none of that nft/crypto/blockchain crap is necessary to distribute/stream music and the addition of those things doesn't solve any problem with regards to distributing music.
Any form of payment that already exists could be used to unlock downloads/streams from a perfectly ordinary website, no pyramid scheme necessary. Want to receive tips/grants/donations, same thing. Music files are SMALL, until a band gets really popular there's no technical problem to even consider solving.
Now it's a PITA to set those things up, so that's why sites like Bandcamp exist (I'm sure there are others too), but you're still allowed to go DIY for distribution.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 9:52 AM on April 20, 2022 [16 favorites]
And I reject the notion that artists are just going to get fucked either way so they might as well not complain about it. Streaming platforms pay between $3,000-$5,000 for a million plays. That doesn't even get into the predatory contracts they've most likely signed with labels which means they see 10% of that, and then split it between their three other bandmates. Which, besides the fact that music should not be valued on how many times it can be played, is a paltry amount of money. A disgustingly small amount of money.
Everybody objects because none of that nft/crypto/blockchain crap is necessary to distribute/stream music and the addition of those things doesn't solve any problem with regards to distributing music.
Any form of payment that already exists could be used to unlock downloads/streams from a perfectly ordinary website, no pyramid scheme necessary. Want to receive tips/grants/donations, same thing. Music files are SMALL, until a band gets really popular there's no technical problem to even consider solving.
Now it's a PITA to set those things up, so that's why sites like Bandcamp exist (I'm sure there are others too), but you're still allowed to go DIY for distribution.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 9:52 AM on April 20, 2022 [16 favorites]
>But you aren't paying the artist a buck, dude. You're moving some bits around at enormous cost and financial risk. If the artist wants to buy food they have to convert the bits into dollars or yen or whatever at still more cost and risk. Please PLEASE stop pretending you're paying money when you're not. Crypto is gilded shit, and not even real gold.
I mean, I pay artists on Nina all the time. I'm not sure why you think I'm pretending to pay money? I do pay money, and I know how it gets turned from "USDC" to "USD."
> And it's not like Bandcamp costs no money to run right? Presumably someone somewhere is paying bandwidth and storage costs for these files on Nina and either taking a cut or incurring a loss in the hope that they'll make some money someday? Not a reassuring model for keeping these track available online.
Nina charges an upload fee instead of a recurring payment. And Nina, like many Web3 projects, is entirely "portable" so if the owners of Nina ever decided to sell themselves to, say, Epic Games, the community could create Nina 2, that was owned cooperatively, and looked and functioned identically to the first Nina they knew and loved.
>This project is serving as a smoke-screen for those self-same cynical & cruel overlords you're worried about.
I'd agree if I didn't follow the founders of Nina on Twitter and see what they're up to and follow the development of the project closely.
>I'm with you on wanting to avoid the cryptocurrency endgame, but since when has "let's surrender to Moloch, but if we get in early maybe we can direct it" actually worked?
Yeah... well... maybe this time? Look, I get where you're coming from, but I'm on the side of hopeful and plucky underdog. I just can't resume myself to a world where it's Bored Apes on one side and Spotify on the other. I see some legitimate and exciting tools for artists here, and it's a shame that other people get so virulently hateful about the technology behind it.
ANYWAYS I've likely overstayed my welcome in this thread, I just ask that people keep an open mind about some of this stuff. Not asking anyone to put their life savings into whatever Bored Ape clone is currently popular on Twitter but maybe just think about a ray or two of sunshine coming through the clouds.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:54 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
I mean, I pay artists on Nina all the time. I'm not sure why you think I'm pretending to pay money? I do pay money, and I know how it gets turned from "USDC" to "USD."
> And it's not like Bandcamp costs no money to run right? Presumably someone somewhere is paying bandwidth and storage costs for these files on Nina and either taking a cut or incurring a loss in the hope that they'll make some money someday? Not a reassuring model for keeping these track available online.
Nina charges an upload fee instead of a recurring payment. And Nina, like many Web3 projects, is entirely "portable" so if the owners of Nina ever decided to sell themselves to, say, Epic Games, the community could create Nina 2, that was owned cooperatively, and looked and functioned identically to the first Nina they knew and loved.
>This project is serving as a smoke-screen for those self-same cynical & cruel overlords you're worried about.
I'd agree if I didn't follow the founders of Nina on Twitter and see what they're up to and follow the development of the project closely.
>I'm with you on wanting to avoid the cryptocurrency endgame, but since when has "let's surrender to Moloch, but if we get in early maybe we can direct it" actually worked?
Yeah... well... maybe this time? Look, I get where you're coming from, but I'm on the side of hopeful and plucky underdog. I just can't resume myself to a world where it's Bored Apes on one side and Spotify on the other. I see some legitimate and exciting tools for artists here, and it's a shame that other people get so virulently hateful about the technology behind it.
ANYWAYS I've likely overstayed my welcome in this thread, I just ask that people keep an open mind about some of this stuff. Not asking anyone to put their life savings into whatever Bored Ape clone is currently popular on Twitter but maybe just think about a ray or two of sunshine coming through the clouds.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:54 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Also, “Web3” is not A Thing, and we should stop trying to make it a thing.
“Web 3.0” was briefly used as shorthand for various novel ideas, such as microformats and the semantic web, though failed to get widespread acceptance. Then the cryptobros picked it up and decided that it means the financialisation of everything in the interest of making Number Go Up and funnelling more fresh suckers into the base of the pyramid. Nobody with an understanding of technology postulated a future where your browser has a crypto wallet, your web guestbook app is distributed among an anonymous cloud of services auctioning participation in real time, and every time a user goes to post a comment in it, they pay 0.02c in Dogecoin to cover the cost of the SQL transaction or whatever. Some grifters with an understanding of how to separate suckers from their money did, but every time we accept their credentials as technologists, we do ourselves a disfavour.
posted by acb at 10:00 AM on April 20, 2022 [30 favorites]
“Web 3.0” was briefly used as shorthand for various novel ideas, such as microformats and the semantic web, though failed to get widespread acceptance. Then the cryptobros picked it up and decided that it means the financialisation of everything in the interest of making Number Go Up and funnelling more fresh suckers into the base of the pyramid. Nobody with an understanding of technology postulated a future where your browser has a crypto wallet, your web guestbook app is distributed among an anonymous cloud of services auctioning participation in real time, and every time a user goes to post a comment in it, they pay 0.02c in Dogecoin to cover the cost of the SQL transaction or whatever. Some grifters with an understanding of how to separate suckers from their money did, but every time we accept their credentials as technologists, we do ourselves a disfavour.
posted by acb at 10:00 AM on April 20, 2022 [30 favorites]
Cpt. The Mango I really appreciate your contributions to the thread.
I'm trying to give these ideas a fair shot to figure out if they are a better deal for artists than, say, Bandcamp, but I'm having a lot of trouble simply finding meaningful details about how the platforms linked to in the OP actually function. The FAQ for sound.xyz says something about purchasing an NFT of a song gives you the ability to leave a comment about it? But that's not the point right, it's about investing in a link to a song that may go up in value? And when I sell that the original artist gets 10% of that sale? Is that the idea? With Nina, it seems as though they are hosting the actual audio files? They say "DO I HAVE TO BUY A TRACK TO LISTEN TO IT? No. All tracks on Nina are freely and permanently streamable by anyone." So while the NFT element is portable, the hosting of the actual music is not? I'm asking, honestly not sure.
posted by gwint at 10:01 AM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
I'm trying to give these ideas a fair shot to figure out if they are a better deal for artists than, say, Bandcamp, but I'm having a lot of trouble simply finding meaningful details about how the platforms linked to in the OP actually function. The FAQ for sound.xyz says something about purchasing an NFT of a song gives you the ability to leave a comment about it? But that's not the point right, it's about investing in a link to a song that may go up in value? And when I sell that the original artist gets 10% of that sale? Is that the idea? With Nina, it seems as though they are hosting the actual audio files? They say "DO I HAVE TO BUY A TRACK TO LISTEN TO IT? No. All tracks on Nina are freely and permanently streamable by anyone." So while the NFT element is portable, the hosting of the actual music is not? I'm asking, honestly not sure.
posted by gwint at 10:01 AM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
@gwint: I think this is the real problem. The value add is theoretically in the purchase of "something limited" that's minted by the band itself. But there are always overheads associated with that. Like, I'll pay $30 for a band T-shirt, knowing that it's not worth $30 but that the band will pull in maybe half of that as straight revenue. Or I'll buy a $20 CD that cost them $5 to make. But it's just as easy for me to plop $5 or $20 or whatever into their Venmo/Paypal/whatever account to say, "I appreciate what you're doing and want you to keep doing it."
Having a new way of making these transactions doesn't change the economics. It doesn't change the consumer/band dynamic. It just changes the method. "I've got an NFT of them!" is about the same as "I've got their limited edition vinyl!" or "I've got their 2020 bobblehead!"
And fundamentally what a band wants - or maybe what it needs - is to be heard! By other people! The NFT idea is, like, the opposite of that, no matter how direct the buy.
All that having been said, I loved Hype Machine back in the 'Singles. It was a great way to discover music that just wouldn't hit my radar otherwise.
posted by ptfe at 10:08 AM on April 20, 2022 [8 favorites]
Having a new way of making these transactions doesn't change the economics. It doesn't change the consumer/band dynamic. It just changes the method. "I've got an NFT of them!" is about the same as "I've got their limited edition vinyl!" or "I've got their 2020 bobblehead!"
And fundamentally what a band wants - or maybe what it needs - is to be heard! By other people! The NFT idea is, like, the opposite of that, no matter how direct the buy.
All that having been said, I loved Hype Machine back in the 'Singles. It was a great way to discover music that just wouldn't hit my radar otherwise.
posted by ptfe at 10:08 AM on April 20, 2022 [8 favorites]
I'm unfamiliar with Sound but your "paid comment" thing makes me think it's a project I saw recently where you could pay to create an NFT of a comment on a track? IIRC it made a huge amount of money for the artists included in the project but I really can't see that taking off, or see any utility behind it besides being a way to give artists money.
For Nina, they currently host the music, but it could be hosted by anyone willing to pay for it. So both the NFT element and the hosting is portable, by community vote. They have a great Discord if you're interested.
And Nina also has the re-selling feature where if someone sells an NFT down the line for a huge profit, the artist gets a cut of that. Which is a complete rewrite of how the current resellers market works. As someone who has personally released music that gets sold for 10-100x it's original value on Discogs, oh boy do I wish I saw a cut of those sales.
BUT, and this is crucial for me personally, the initial investment is not speculative. You will never get "Bitcoin pizza'd" on Nina because the currency they operate in is USDC, which is pinned to the value of the US Dollar. I have no interest in gambling my internet money on a song, when if I'd just left that internet money alone for two years I could retire now.
On Nina, the only speculation is the value of the NFT itself. So, if no one likes the album, the secondary market value of the NFT might drop or stagnate, but you will only have ever spent $20 on it. But if the album is super popular and the NFTs become highly sought after, you can choose to sell your NFT to a secondary buyer. Maybe you'll make a lot of money, and then the original artist will get a portion of that money too.
And ptfe, you're actually precisely correct in your analysis. An NFT IS like vinyl or a t-shirt. It just has almost zero overhead and (on Solana) almost zero environmental impact. If you don't think NFTs have value, cool, that's fine. I don't think vinyl has value (for me) so I don't buy it. But people are developing a value-sense for NFTs and artists are catching up and Nina facilitates that exchange.
And of course, you can totally Venmo artists $20 and say "keep it up." That's awesome, and probably extremely appreciated! But most artists I know don't just want to run "keep me alive" GoFundMe campaigns -- they want to create something for people. And if NFTs are just one part of a modern album rollout, that's cool by me. Think about a big album you liked recently -- there was the first vinyl pressing, the second vinyl pressing, a run of CDs, cassettes, t-shirts, and so on. NFTs are just another one of those things.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 10:19 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
For Nina, they currently host the music, but it could be hosted by anyone willing to pay for it. So both the NFT element and the hosting is portable, by community vote. They have a great Discord if you're interested.
And Nina also has the re-selling feature where if someone sells an NFT down the line for a huge profit, the artist gets a cut of that. Which is a complete rewrite of how the current resellers market works. As someone who has personally released music that gets sold for 10-100x it's original value on Discogs, oh boy do I wish I saw a cut of those sales.
BUT, and this is crucial for me personally, the initial investment is not speculative. You will never get "Bitcoin pizza'd" on Nina because the currency they operate in is USDC, which is pinned to the value of the US Dollar. I have no interest in gambling my internet money on a song, when if I'd just left that internet money alone for two years I could retire now.
On Nina, the only speculation is the value of the NFT itself. So, if no one likes the album, the secondary market value of the NFT might drop or stagnate, but you will only have ever spent $20 on it. But if the album is super popular and the NFTs become highly sought after, you can choose to sell your NFT to a secondary buyer. Maybe you'll make a lot of money, and then the original artist will get a portion of that money too.
And ptfe, you're actually precisely correct in your analysis. An NFT IS like vinyl or a t-shirt. It just has almost zero overhead and (on Solana) almost zero environmental impact. If you don't think NFTs have value, cool, that's fine. I don't think vinyl has value (for me) so I don't buy it. But people are developing a value-sense for NFTs and artists are catching up and Nina facilitates that exchange.
And of course, you can totally Venmo artists $20 and say "keep it up." That's awesome, and probably extremely appreciated! But most artists I know don't just want to run "keep me alive" GoFundMe campaigns -- they want to create something for people. And if NFTs are just one part of a modern album rollout, that's cool by me. Think about a big album you liked recently -- there was the first vinyl pressing, the second vinyl pressing, a run of CDs, cassettes, t-shirts, and so on. NFTs are just another one of those things.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 10:19 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
It doesn't seem like these NFTs of songs have any use value though, they only have exchange value. The vinyl has use value -- you could play it on a turntable and listen to it. What is the use value of the NFT? It seems to exist only as a speculative asset, something you could resell later for theoretically more money. But in a year, is anybody going to be interested in this gimmicky NFT music project? Why would the value appreciate past the initial hype? And why should a musician have to get into speculative financial markets to make money off their music?
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 11:13 AM on April 20, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 11:13 AM on April 20, 2022 [8 favorites]
Or I could have a service that skips nfts and let's me buy a download token that I could then resell. Theres no technical reason you can't do this now with steam or apple music or whatever. The NFT itself is just a token that points to a download. It is not the actual mp3.
posted by kzin602 at 11:13 AM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by kzin602 at 11:13 AM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I didn't buy in early 'cause I never thought it'd go to 11, now it's gone to the moon (the dark side, as well, and I'm not f_king buying that record in another format).
posted by k3ninho at 11:28 AM on April 20, 2022
posted by k3ninho at 11:28 AM on April 20, 2022
Well, the NFTs have the value that purchasers assign to it. Much like a piece of art which is sold for $100,000 at a solo show, locked up for five years, then sold for $3.7 million (and the artist of course gets exactly 0% of that resale). What is the use value there? And where does that absurd rise in exchange value come from?
And have you been to the vinyl bin of a thrift shop lately? Lots of vinyl that people have decided doesn't have value anymore. But in the 70s and 80s it probably seemed extremely important to print roughly 18 billion copies of every ABBA album -- not so much nowadays.
I know people who buy vinyl without owning a vinyl player. Is the use value there simply the fact it's a standard-sized piece of art you can hang on your wall? Why can't you just use your work printer to print off the album artwork then? Or does the use value derive from the fact that it facilitates a financial exchange in return for a product and the feeling of building a collection? Personally, because I'm a freak, I buy cassettes without owning a cassette player. Why? My girlfriend asks me this all the time. I don't know, just like 'em I guess.
Where does the use value lie in streaming? Oddly, the actual exchange value is so small as to be meaningless, even though many users of these platforms would insist that they value music extremely highly. But what are you "using" when you fire up Spotify or Apple Music? What you're basically doing is burning electricity to temporarily rent music out loud. And then letting Spotify charge your credit card $10 a month so you can do that as much as you want.
Keep in mind you have to listen to a song on Spotify 350 times if you want the artist you're listening to to make $1.00. Although if you're adjusting for record label contracts, that's more like 3,500 times for your favourite artist to make $1.00. I'm not sure if I've listened to ANY song 3,500 times, let alone 350! And if I have listened to a song 350 times, it's probably worth a whole hell of a lot more than $1.00 to me!
The other answer is that NFTs have use value when they're used as tokens or proof of ownership. Like, I love this band so much I got one of the first 50 NFTs of their latest record. Check it out. Dorky, but since when is collecting anything NOT dorky?
The reason you can't "buy a download token" with Steam and Apple Music is because that runs entirely counter to their business model. I mean wasn't there that huge Bruce Willis case where he had to sue Apple to give him the rights to pass on his iTunes music collection after he dies? You don't own the music you purchase through Apple, you lease it, and the artists make a fraction of a fraction of a cent for you to have the pleasure to do that. Nina and other burgeoning NFT markets are philosophically geared towards transferable ownership, which is where the entire terminology of "non-fungible" comes from.
>The NFT itself is just a token that points to a download. It is not the actual mp3.
And, this is a GOOD thing! This analysis explicitly disproves the idea that NFTs are about artificial scarcity. The mp3 still exists, the song still exists, the NFT hasn't gatekept anything!
On Bandcamp you basically buy an NFT -- a little picture of the album art that is a link to the album that pops up in your collection. You can then download the MP3s as many times as you want and share them, if you like. But if you're a Bandcamp power user, it matters to you to have the album appear in your collection. It's kinda the same thing with these NFTs. The value is there just because people have decided to put the value there. Just like anything else. And you might say, well people have decided to value a song at $0.003, but I explicitly reject this! I've never valued a song at $0.003 damn cents. I love music and happily shell out hundreds of bucks a year for it. To quote another Web 3 optimist, I only want to listen to Threnody for Hiroshima once. Does that mean it's only worth $0.003? Well, according to people who run, support, develop, and use streaming platforms, yes.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 11:36 AM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
And have you been to the vinyl bin of a thrift shop lately? Lots of vinyl that people have decided doesn't have value anymore. But in the 70s and 80s it probably seemed extremely important to print roughly 18 billion copies of every ABBA album -- not so much nowadays.
I know people who buy vinyl without owning a vinyl player. Is the use value there simply the fact it's a standard-sized piece of art you can hang on your wall? Why can't you just use your work printer to print off the album artwork then? Or does the use value derive from the fact that it facilitates a financial exchange in return for a product and the feeling of building a collection? Personally, because I'm a freak, I buy cassettes without owning a cassette player. Why? My girlfriend asks me this all the time. I don't know, just like 'em I guess.
Where does the use value lie in streaming? Oddly, the actual exchange value is so small as to be meaningless, even though many users of these platforms would insist that they value music extremely highly. But what are you "using" when you fire up Spotify or Apple Music? What you're basically doing is burning electricity to temporarily rent music out loud. And then letting Spotify charge your credit card $10 a month so you can do that as much as you want.
Keep in mind you have to listen to a song on Spotify 350 times if you want the artist you're listening to to make $1.00. Although if you're adjusting for record label contracts, that's more like 3,500 times for your favourite artist to make $1.00. I'm not sure if I've listened to ANY song 3,500 times, let alone 350! And if I have listened to a song 350 times, it's probably worth a whole hell of a lot more than $1.00 to me!
The other answer is that NFTs have use value when they're used as tokens or proof of ownership. Like, I love this band so much I got one of the first 50 NFTs of their latest record. Check it out. Dorky, but since when is collecting anything NOT dorky?
The reason you can't "buy a download token" with Steam and Apple Music is because that runs entirely counter to their business model. I mean wasn't there that huge Bruce Willis case where he had to sue Apple to give him the rights to pass on his iTunes music collection after he dies? You don't own the music you purchase through Apple, you lease it, and the artists make a fraction of a fraction of a cent for you to have the pleasure to do that. Nina and other burgeoning NFT markets are philosophically geared towards transferable ownership, which is where the entire terminology of "non-fungible" comes from.
>The NFT itself is just a token that points to a download. It is not the actual mp3.
And, this is a GOOD thing! This analysis explicitly disproves the idea that NFTs are about artificial scarcity. The mp3 still exists, the song still exists, the NFT hasn't gatekept anything!
On Bandcamp you basically buy an NFT -- a little picture of the album art that is a link to the album that pops up in your collection. You can then download the MP3s as many times as you want and share them, if you like. But if you're a Bandcamp power user, it matters to you to have the album appear in your collection. It's kinda the same thing with these NFTs. The value is there just because people have decided to put the value there. Just like anything else. And you might say, well people have decided to value a song at $0.003, but I explicitly reject this! I've never valued a song at $0.003 damn cents. I love music and happily shell out hundreds of bucks a year for it. To quote another Web 3 optimist, I only want to listen to Threnody for Hiroshima once. Does that mean it's only worth $0.003? Well, according to people who run, support, develop, and use streaming platforms, yes.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 11:36 AM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
> And why should a musician have to get into speculative financial markets to make money off their music?
Sorry, missed this, but I think I addressed it above: on Nina, NFTs are not primarily speculative. They sell for a fixed price. When they are RESOLD, the artist gets to share some of that value.
This is fundamentally identical to releasing a limited edition cassette, and then the cassette re-sells for x5 the initial price on Discogs. The only difference is that the artist is able to make some money from this resale. As it stands, artists see no additional value from resellers whatsoever.
If the NFT never resells, no harm no foul. If the NFT develops additional value and resells, the artist gets to share some of that wealth.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 11:40 AM on April 20, 2022
Sorry, missed this, but I think I addressed it above: on Nina, NFTs are not primarily speculative. They sell for a fixed price. When they are RESOLD, the artist gets to share some of that value.
This is fundamentally identical to releasing a limited edition cassette, and then the cassette re-sells for x5 the initial price on Discogs. The only difference is that the artist is able to make some money from this resale. As it stands, artists see no additional value from resellers whatsoever.
If the NFT never resells, no harm no foul. If the NFT develops additional value and resells, the artist gets to share some of that wealth.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 11:40 AM on April 20, 2022
You can get on board now, and maybe ensure the success of right-minded projects, or you can wait until Amazon is run on Web3 and you get Jordan Peterson monologues piped into your dreams because you took an extra five minutes of lunch break on your last work shift.
I won't say much about the inevitable dystopian nightmare future horrowshow that lies waiting for us, if we don't fully embrace cryptoschemes. Out of interest in keeping this as meta as possible, however, I will be shortly selling this quote as an NFT.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:50 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
I won't say much about the inevitable dystopian nightmare future horrowshow that lies waiting for us, if we don't fully embrace cryptoschemes. Out of interest in keeping this as meta as possible, however, I will be shortly selling this quote as an NFT.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:50 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Capt. The Mango: Web3 is coming whether you like it or not.
No thank you. The tech doesn't solve a real problem without grift. Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS) does content-addressible storage with integrity protection and redundancy without grift.
Capt. The Mango (again): This is fundamentally identical to releasing a limited edition cassette, and then the cassette re-sells for x5 the initial price on Discogs. The only difference is that the artist makes more money.
The artist could manufacture more copies to meet the demand on Discogs -- at the cost of not being "exclusive"and hyped. That smells like grift bullsh_t to me. The resale market on Discogs is only liquid (i.e. it has stock) because people buy, copy to another format, then resell these supposed rarities. Supply and demand are out of whack and no tech in the Web3 space does anything better than artists manufacturing more physical copies or making available more digital downloads.
posted by k3ninho at 11:51 AM on April 20, 2022 [7 favorites]
No thank you. The tech doesn't solve a real problem without grift. Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS) does content-addressible storage with integrity protection and redundancy without grift.
Capt. The Mango (again): This is fundamentally identical to releasing a limited edition cassette, and then the cassette re-sells for x5 the initial price on Discogs. The only difference is that the artist makes more money.
The artist could manufacture more copies to meet the demand on Discogs -- at the cost of not being "exclusive"and hyped. That smells like grift bullsh_t to me. The resale market on Discogs is only liquid (i.e. it has stock) because people buy, copy to another format, then resell these supposed rarities. Supply and demand are out of whack and no tech in the Web3 space does anything better than artists manufacturing more physical copies or making available more digital downloads.
posted by k3ninho at 11:51 AM on April 20, 2022 [7 favorites]
k3ninho, do you sell cassettes on Discogs, or manufacture them yourself?
I do both, I have for a long time, and I can tell you, it's a grind.
For one thing, artists don't sell direct on Discogs. It's a specifically third-party marketplace. So this means that the artist has addressed their market (usually Bandcamp) and now people are taking that value to another market. And people don't "copy to another format" -- are you talking about like, bootlegs? I'm talking specifically about buying a Taylor Swift vinyl, receiving the vinyl, and then selling that same vinyl to someone else. The "demand" on Discogs does not exist until the record exists in the market and the market decides what its value should be. I hope that makes sense -- I'm saying that you don't know that something is a highly-sought-after collectible until people start collecting it.
And it always goes wrong. You think you're preparing for demand: you sell 20% of what you manufactured. You think you're releasing a few copies only your closest fans will buy: you see resale pop up that night at astronomical markups.
Obviously NFTs don't solve this problem, because they're NFTs, not cassettes or vinyl or CDs. But they do address this paradigm and give artists tools to make sure that they're compensated as their market worth grows. Right now they are not, and I personally don't think that's fair!
Think about some outsider artist who releases some music and vanishes and then gets popular 20 years later. It'd be neat if they could start receiving some money for all the secondary sales of their music. Or think about someone like Q Lazarus, who released a huge song and I believe is a bus driver now? I hope she's still making money from that song, but my gut tells me that she signed a crappy contract and someone else is eating off of her hard work.
If you release something that goes on to have a second life as a valued collectible, I think it's cool that you can get a little bit of kickback for that via NFTs and the shared percentage resale function. I hate to see people snap up limited edition physical releases in the anticipation that they'll be worth a lot of money in a third-party marketplace, and then for the artist to get none of that money. THAT's a speculative asset, exactly like people accuse NFTs of being.
And furthermore, if we're really all so concerned about environmental concerns, we should NOT be manufacturing more physical music products! They degrade, for one thing, and exert huge carbon demands to get from point A to point B. I'm telling you, the environmental impact of selling vinyl, to say nothing of manufacturing it, is absolutely staggering. Why would you not want this replaced by an extremely low-impact NFT?
I personally have my own reasons for liking physicals but it seems like with certain crowds NFTs can't win. They're not a replacement for physicals; artists should manufacture more environmentally demanding cassettes and vinyl. They're a replacement for physicals; artists should stop making NFTs because they're "ecologically destructive scams." Your song is worth $0.003 and if you want to wrap it up in an NFT and sell it for more you're being grifted. It's exhausting!
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 12:06 PM on April 20, 2022
I do both, I have for a long time, and I can tell you, it's a grind.
For one thing, artists don't sell direct on Discogs. It's a specifically third-party marketplace. So this means that the artist has addressed their market (usually Bandcamp) and now people are taking that value to another market. And people don't "copy to another format" -- are you talking about like, bootlegs? I'm talking specifically about buying a Taylor Swift vinyl, receiving the vinyl, and then selling that same vinyl to someone else. The "demand" on Discogs does not exist until the record exists in the market and the market decides what its value should be. I hope that makes sense -- I'm saying that you don't know that something is a highly-sought-after collectible until people start collecting it.
And it always goes wrong. You think you're preparing for demand: you sell 20% of what you manufactured. You think you're releasing a few copies only your closest fans will buy: you see resale pop up that night at astronomical markups.
Obviously NFTs don't solve this problem, because they're NFTs, not cassettes or vinyl or CDs. But they do address this paradigm and give artists tools to make sure that they're compensated as their market worth grows. Right now they are not, and I personally don't think that's fair!
Think about some outsider artist who releases some music and vanishes and then gets popular 20 years later. It'd be neat if they could start receiving some money for all the secondary sales of their music. Or think about someone like Q Lazarus, who released a huge song and I believe is a bus driver now? I hope she's still making money from that song, but my gut tells me that she signed a crappy contract and someone else is eating off of her hard work.
If you release something that goes on to have a second life as a valued collectible, I think it's cool that you can get a little bit of kickback for that via NFTs and the shared percentage resale function. I hate to see people snap up limited edition physical releases in the anticipation that they'll be worth a lot of money in a third-party marketplace, and then for the artist to get none of that money. THAT's a speculative asset, exactly like people accuse NFTs of being.
And furthermore, if we're really all so concerned about environmental concerns, we should NOT be manufacturing more physical music products! They degrade, for one thing, and exert huge carbon demands to get from point A to point B. I'm telling you, the environmental impact of selling vinyl, to say nothing of manufacturing it, is absolutely staggering. Why would you not want this replaced by an extremely low-impact NFT?
I personally have my own reasons for liking physicals but it seems like with certain crowds NFTs can't win. They're not a replacement for physicals; artists should manufacture more environmentally demanding cassettes and vinyl. They're a replacement for physicals; artists should stop making NFTs because they're "ecologically destructive scams." Your song is worth $0.003 and if you want to wrap it up in an NFT and sell it for more you're being grifted. It's exhausting!
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 12:06 PM on April 20, 2022
How is the NFT environmentally "low impact?" Genuinely asking.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:09 PM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:09 PM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
If you look around the crypto thread and can’t tell who the Cryptobro Who Won’t Shut Up About Crypto is, it’s you.
posted by notoriety public at 12:09 PM on April 20, 2022 [22 favorites]
posted by notoriety public at 12:09 PM on April 20, 2022 [22 favorites]
They sucked his brains out!: I won't say much about the inevitable dystopian nightmare future horrowshow that lies waiting for us, if we don't fully embrace cryptoschemes. Out of interest in keeping this as meta as possible, however, I will be shortly selling this quote as an NFT.
As is my right, I demand a 30% resale stake in the NFT you mint. I will enjoy my 30% of $2.00 greatly.
tiny frying pan: you can check out a recent Solana energy report here: Link
Spoiler: one Solana transaction uses up about as much energy as a Google search!
notoriety public: well, I certainly don't think of myself as a cryptobro and I hope I'm not giving off the vibe of "not shutting up" but as your comment says, I guess that means I am one, and that I won't shut up :(
Truly folks, not trying to threadsit here, I'm just passionate about this particular use-case and niche, and I know that MeFi has enough smart people with their hearts in the right place to hopefully see what I see. Definitely willing to bow out at any point, just trying to respond to comments and continue having good faith conversation with people who seem like they want the same.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 12:15 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
As is my right, I demand a 30% resale stake in the NFT you mint. I will enjoy my 30% of $2.00 greatly.
tiny frying pan: you can check out a recent Solana energy report here: Link
Spoiler: one Solana transaction uses up about as much energy as a Google search!
notoriety public: well, I certainly don't think of myself as a cryptobro and I hope I'm not giving off the vibe of "not shutting up" but as your comment says, I guess that means I am one, and that I won't shut up :(
Truly folks, not trying to threadsit here, I'm just passionate about this particular use-case and niche, and I know that MeFi has enough smart people with their hearts in the right place to hopefully see what I see. Definitely willing to bow out at any point, just trying to respond to comments and continue having good faith conversation with people who seem like they want the same.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 12:15 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
"Web 2.0"
gag me with a spoon. "Web 2.0" was a bit of hype promoted by Orielly. There is only the web. You don't get to make up a new protocol stack and rename the entire www as a marketing technique. Imposing such terminology on the good work of others says a whole lot about you.
"web3" has more of a resemblance to Ted Nelson's xanadu, which was always supposed to include monetization for everything. Except at least his vaporware was conceptually beautiful. Let me know when your NFT shit-stack has automatic backlinks.
posted by joeyh at 12:23 PM on April 20, 2022 [8 favorites]
gag me with a spoon. "Web 2.0" was a bit of hype promoted by Orielly. There is only the web. You don't get to make up a new protocol stack and rename the entire www as a marketing technique. Imposing such terminology on the good work of others says a whole lot about you.
"web3" has more of a resemblance to Ted Nelson's xanadu, which was always supposed to include monetization for everything. Except at least his vaporware was conceptually beautiful. Let me know when your NFT shit-stack has automatic backlinks.
posted by joeyh at 12:23 PM on April 20, 2022 [8 favorites]
Reading this thread I feel like the kid from Time Bandits who falls through a void into a raging battle, not knowing who's on what side or why.
That is to say, I'm coming at this with an open mind. I want to make sure I get what this site is doing, cause I like music and I'm pretty tech savvy so...
This site is advertised as a music player, ok, I scroll through the list and I see something that catches my eye. I play it, and let's say I like it enough that I would like to replay it at my convenience, so I click the catalog.
When I do so, it appears as if I cannot buy it immediately, but only place a bid on it for 0.75 Ethereum, the cryptocurrency (although it's not specified how long this will take, only that I can "kick it off"). However, reading the notes, I see that the same song is actually on Spotify. Ok, so I can play it at my convenience elsewhere, not sure what the value is here. Oh wait, I see it's a high resolution wav file, ok cool, so this is sort of like Bandcamp?
Oh wait! I also see that whoever buys this will get an acapella version of the song, as well as "an airdrop of my upcoming collection". Ok, cool, so this is sorta of like Patreon?
I also see that if I resell this, the creator gets 20% of that resale value. Interesting, I guess, does the person I sell it to also get the acapella version and airdrop? It's a bit unclear. Probably a minor detail.
Hmm, I don't really have any issue with any of the above. Although it's a little unclear if I'm doing this primarily to support the artist or as an investment. I suppose it could be both. But it's all based on this idea that this digital money called Ethereum is a thing that has value, correct? The artist gets Ethereum when I buy it, and if I resell it, I get more Ethereum and so do they.
So how do I get Ethereum? Looks like I have to pay some amount of currency that I currently use.
So let's see, 0.75 Ethereum looks like it's equal to $3,065.69 USD, yikes, and that's just the bid, it could end up being higher.
I've also heard there's this real concern over how much energy it takes to facilitate Ethereum transactions. Hmmm, it's not as easy to quantify as Ethereum to Dollars, but this site estimates that one single Ethereum transaction consumes 238 kilowatt hours and 100,000 Visa transactions consume 148 kilowatt hours.
I must say, all these numbers definitely give me pause for what seems like a mashup of Bandcamp and Patreon.
posted by jeremias at 12:31 PM on April 20, 2022 [14 favorites]
That is to say, I'm coming at this with an open mind. I want to make sure I get what this site is doing, cause I like music and I'm pretty tech savvy so...
This site is advertised as a music player, ok, I scroll through the list and I see something that catches my eye. I play it, and let's say I like it enough that I would like to replay it at my convenience, so I click the catalog.
When I do so, it appears as if I cannot buy it immediately, but only place a bid on it for 0.75 Ethereum, the cryptocurrency (although it's not specified how long this will take, only that I can "kick it off"). However, reading the notes, I see that the same song is actually on Spotify. Ok, so I can play it at my convenience elsewhere, not sure what the value is here. Oh wait, I see it's a high resolution wav file, ok cool, so this is sort of like Bandcamp?
Oh wait! I also see that whoever buys this will get an acapella version of the song, as well as "an airdrop of my upcoming collection". Ok, cool, so this is sorta of like Patreon?
I also see that if I resell this, the creator gets 20% of that resale value. Interesting, I guess, does the person I sell it to also get the acapella version and airdrop? It's a bit unclear. Probably a minor detail.
Hmm, I don't really have any issue with any of the above. Although it's a little unclear if I'm doing this primarily to support the artist or as an investment. I suppose it could be both. But it's all based on this idea that this digital money called Ethereum is a thing that has value, correct? The artist gets Ethereum when I buy it, and if I resell it, I get more Ethereum and so do they.
So how do I get Ethereum? Looks like I have to pay some amount of currency that I currently use.
So let's see, 0.75 Ethereum looks like it's equal to $3,065.69 USD, yikes, and that's just the bid, it could end up being higher.
I've also heard there's this real concern over how much energy it takes to facilitate Ethereum transactions. Hmmm, it's not as easy to quantify as Ethereum to Dollars, but this site estimates that one single Ethereum transaction consumes 238 kilowatt hours and 100,000 Visa transactions consume 148 kilowatt hours.
I must say, all these numbers definitely give me pause for what seems like a mashup of Bandcamp and Patreon.
posted by jeremias at 12:31 PM on April 20, 2022 [14 favorites]
Let's not conflate artisanal manufacture and industrial mass manufacture. I hope you drive enough joy from making cassettes that you keep doing it, no matter how the grind goes.
Capt. The Mango: people don't "copy to another format" -- are you talking about like, bootlegs? I'm talking specifically about buying a Taylor Swift vinyl, receiving the vinyl, and then selling that same vinyl to someone else.
I know people who buy, record to their computers and resell. Mostly IDM (for their own reasons), but you would take a copy for later interest because you can.
Capt. The Mango: But [NFT's] address this paradigm [that you don't know that something is a highly-sought-after collectible until people start collecting it] and give artists tools to make sure that they're compensated as their market worth grows. Right now they are not, and I personally don't think that's fair!
Can I bring to this conversation about artists profiting from resale something it's ignorant of: "exhaustion of rights" (in most countries) or "first sale doctrine" in the USA. You sell a thing and with the sale goes any rights to what happens next. The existing grift of payola and promotions and copyright licensing is an add-on to extract rent from a thing they should've said and lost control on. This NFT/web3 setup is replicating that rent-seeking behaviour, and it deserves contempt.
posted by k3ninho at 12:31 PM on April 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
Capt. The Mango: people don't "copy to another format" -- are you talking about like, bootlegs? I'm talking specifically about buying a Taylor Swift vinyl, receiving the vinyl, and then selling that same vinyl to someone else.
I know people who buy, record to their computers and resell. Mostly IDM (for their own reasons), but you would take a copy for later interest because you can.
Capt. The Mango: But [NFT's] address this paradigm [that you don't know that something is a highly-sought-after collectible until people start collecting it] and give artists tools to make sure that they're compensated as their market worth grows. Right now they are not, and I personally don't think that's fair!
Can I bring to this conversation about artists profiting from resale something it's ignorant of: "exhaustion of rights" (in most countries) or "first sale doctrine" in the USA. You sell a thing and with the sale goes any rights to what happens next. The existing grift of payola and promotions and copyright licensing is an add-on to extract rent from a thing they should've said and lost control on. This NFT/web3 setup is replicating that rent-seeking behaviour, and it deserves contempt.
posted by k3ninho at 12:31 PM on April 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
Why the fuck do we have this when Bandcamp literally exists?
posted by SansPoint at 12:37 PM on April 20, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by SansPoint at 12:37 PM on April 20, 2022 [11 favorites]
> On Bandcamp you basically buy an NFT -- a little picture of the album art that is a link to the album that pops up in your collection.
Nope. Not even close.
posted by user92371 at 12:42 PM on April 20, 2022 [13 favorites]
Nope. Not even close.
posted by user92371 at 12:42 PM on April 20, 2022 [13 favorites]
It's interesting to see the gap between what these platforms are claiming (call it the maximalist position) and Cpt. The Mango's take on this (call it the minimalist position)-- the former is saying this is a transformational technology that will finally see artists paid fairly for their work, while the latter is saying they're more like selling t-shirts without having to order them from Cafe Press and man the merch table. And I see Cpt.'s point about how (in this metaphor) the t-shirt might become a collector's item or it might just fall apart in the wash, but that really the main purpose of the transaction is to help the artist initially. I'm not convinced that this is any better than buying an album on Bandcamp or starting a Patreon, but given that these systems seem to be trying harder than, say, Bored Apes, to work within reasonable environmental parameters (Solana) and backed by stablecoins instead of more wildly fluctuating cryptocurrencies, I don't quite get the level on invective found in this thread.
posted by gwint at 12:43 PM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by gwint at 12:43 PM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
if you want to give money to an artist... then write them a check? I don't see why NFTs have to get involved (unless there's a scam)
posted by serif at 12:43 PM on April 20, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by serif at 12:43 PM on April 20, 2022 [7 favorites]
I should say also that part of the maximalist position is: It's a good idea to ultimately financialize everything, which I believe was one of Dan Olsen's larger criticisms of NFTs and crypto in general.
posted by gwint at 12:47 PM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by gwint at 12:47 PM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
jeremias: lots of valid points that someone smarter than me will hopefully address as these platforms develop. Onboarding into crypto/Web3 as it stands is like some sort of Lovecraftian mashup between booking a budget flight on your phone's mobile browser in a second language and genuinely trying to pay off one of those IRS "you owe $30,000 NOW" scams. Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy and certainly wouldn't let my parents do it without me nearby!
I will say I personally don't care for NFT marketplaces that function in the form of bidding or auctions. You can already see many of these where a piece of art sells for something astronomical and you look at the bidding history and see a wallet that's plainly owned by the artist or their gallery or representative or something artificially inflating the price. That is called, as far as I understand, money laundering.
k3ninho:
> I hope you drive enough joy from making cassettes that you keep doing it, no matter how the grind goes.
I will never stop, no matter what my bank account tells me!
>You sell a thing and with the sale goes any rights to what happens next. The existing grift of payola and promotions and copyright licensing is an add-on to extract rent from a thing they should've said and lost control on. This NFT/web3 setup is replicating that rent-seeking behaviour, and it deserves contempt.
I disagree! I think artists SHOULD be able to profit further from the market's inflation of their work. I think most artists would agree. I don't see why it's rent-seeking when the purchaser owns the NFT at every step of the process and the artist gets a percentage of any resales. It certainly seems more rent-seeking to me to buy an artist's work, artificially inflate the market price through advertising, soft promotion, and so on, and then sell it for an enormous profit that the artist doesn't get even a microscopic fraction of.
user92371: Could you expand on the difference, as you see it? I buy NFTs on Nina, I buy albums on Bandcamp. I don't see a whole heck of a lot of difference in the fundamentals there.
gwint: you're totally right that a lot of the pro-Web3 invective is absolutely exhausting, "change the world" level stuff. But really if you're talking about an economy for artists you're several thousand levels below meaningfully changing the world and are just wishing that your favourite singer-songwriter didn't have to washes dishes 8 months of the year. It's a scale and scope problem, and I don't know why more Web3 platforms take the minimalist position.
As far as the "financialize everything" tack: yeah, that does seem to be the case, and I don't like the sound of it either. But I mean, we all paid for our memberships here, right? We all willingly give up our data for abject harvest on the big three social media platforms too, right? Personally, I'd happily pay five bucks a month to use Twitter without ever seeing a sponsored tweet. A lot of the "financialization" that people are (rightly) wary of comes down to just changing which end the money enters the ecosystem. It can either come from people like Cambridge Analytica or it can come from users who don't want to be the financialized product anymore.
SansPoint: Great question, and as a Bandcamp user and lover myself I just see the difference between the two as like, ice cream flavours. But Bandcamp did piss off about 99% of their userbase last month by selling themselves to Epic Games. That cannot happen with a platform like Nina (see my comments upthread for details). People are rightly upset that they don't have a voting stake in something they invested in.
serif: Of course, and many artists would probably greatly appreciate that! If I got a check from somebody that said "thanks for the music" I would probably move house and change my legal name, but I understand where you're coming from. But there's a big difference between purchasing something from an artist and giving them a charitable donation.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 12:54 PM on April 20, 2022
I will say I personally don't care for NFT marketplaces that function in the form of bidding or auctions. You can already see many of these where a piece of art sells for something astronomical and you look at the bidding history and see a wallet that's plainly owned by the artist or their gallery or representative or something artificially inflating the price. That is called, as far as I understand, money laundering.
k3ninho:
> I hope you drive enough joy from making cassettes that you keep doing it, no matter how the grind goes.
I will never stop, no matter what my bank account tells me!
>You sell a thing and with the sale goes any rights to what happens next. The existing grift of payola and promotions and copyright licensing is an add-on to extract rent from a thing they should've said and lost control on. This NFT/web3 setup is replicating that rent-seeking behaviour, and it deserves contempt.
I disagree! I think artists SHOULD be able to profit further from the market's inflation of their work. I think most artists would agree. I don't see why it's rent-seeking when the purchaser owns the NFT at every step of the process and the artist gets a percentage of any resales. It certainly seems more rent-seeking to me to buy an artist's work, artificially inflate the market price through advertising, soft promotion, and so on, and then sell it for an enormous profit that the artist doesn't get even a microscopic fraction of.
user92371: Could you expand on the difference, as you see it? I buy NFTs on Nina, I buy albums on Bandcamp. I don't see a whole heck of a lot of difference in the fundamentals there.
gwint: you're totally right that a lot of the pro-Web3 invective is absolutely exhausting, "change the world" level stuff. But really if you're talking about an economy for artists you're several thousand levels below meaningfully changing the world and are just wishing that your favourite singer-songwriter didn't have to washes dishes 8 months of the year. It's a scale and scope problem, and I don't know why more Web3 platforms take the minimalist position.
As far as the "financialize everything" tack: yeah, that does seem to be the case, and I don't like the sound of it either. But I mean, we all paid for our memberships here, right? We all willingly give up our data for abject harvest on the big three social media platforms too, right? Personally, I'd happily pay five bucks a month to use Twitter without ever seeing a sponsored tweet. A lot of the "financialization" that people are (rightly) wary of comes down to just changing which end the money enters the ecosystem. It can either come from people like Cambridge Analytica or it can come from users who don't want to be the financialized product anymore.
SansPoint: Great question, and as a Bandcamp user and lover myself I just see the difference between the two as like, ice cream flavours. But Bandcamp did piss off about 99% of their userbase last month by selling themselves to Epic Games. That cannot happen with a platform like Nina (see my comments upthread for details). People are rightly upset that they don't have a voting stake in something they invested in.
serif: Of course, and many artists would probably greatly appreciate that! If I got a check from somebody that said "thanks for the music" I would probably move house and change my legal name, but I understand where you're coming from. But there's a big difference between purchasing something from an artist and giving them a charitable donation.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 12:54 PM on April 20, 2022
The exchange happening here illuminates one thing for me: it's conceivable that making a living off your creative endeavors can only ever realistically happen inside of some grifter-dominated artifical market. The history of the music industry in the 20th century featured some artists getting rich, but even they wouldn't have been able to do that outside the context of an ecosystem created by and for the benefit of grifters, in the main. The 21st century is the same story but with Internet. When I see some "new" market for music, my first question is "who are the grifters?" and if I don't really have a grasp on the technology or can't follow the money, I start by assuming the answer to that question is "whoever gets mad and insists there is no grift happening".
posted by lefty lucky cat at 1:15 PM on April 20, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by lefty lucky cat at 1:15 PM on April 20, 2022 [7 favorites]
I can promise you lefty lucky cat that I am not making anything like a living from this, and I'm not mad that people are assuming there's a grift :)
You're definitely correct that the recorded music industry has been hideously inequitable and unjust for as long as it's existed though! I'm not sure how you draw a line between a platform like Nina, with its explicit artist-first philosophy, to the current paradigms, with their explicit artist-last philosophy, however.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 1:19 PM on April 20, 2022
You're definitely correct that the recorded music industry has been hideously inequitable and unjust for as long as it's existed though! I'm not sure how you draw a line between a platform like Nina, with its explicit artist-first philosophy, to the current paradigms, with their explicit artist-last philosophy, however.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 1:19 PM on April 20, 2022
lots of valid points that someone smarter than me will hopefully address as these platforms develop
The only thing that "people smarter than [you]" are spending their time on in these platforms doing is working out new and better ways to scam people.
Look: you seem really hyped about this. Unfortunately, it is a scam. No amount of walls of text from you is going to change that. Web3, NFTs, and everything out of the crypto-sphere is a scam. Everything. I don't care how much you think this time it isn't. I don't care how much you think actually this is helping [pick someone].
It is a scam.
It is a scam.
And given that you don't even know what "financialization" means, and that you're conflating commerce (like "buying a membership in a site") with financialization (turning everything into a financial vehicle used for speculation, in this case in unregulated markets that amount to gambling houses) -- maybe consider that you are in fact pretty under-informed on this?
We did this same thing last time we went around, but in that case with Axie Infinity. There was someone involved in an earlier crypto thread who was very adamant and very calm in explaining that actually it was helping people in the Phillipines, and you see all of us just don't understand, and, and, and, and, and.
And: yeah, turns out Axie Infinity, like every crypto scheme, is a fucking scam, only able to keep profits for those involved propped up by enticing new money to enter into it. Its economy only exists via what would be considered market manipulation in the real, regulated financial world. And also the people running it are idiots who got hacked for over half a billion dollars in crypto, because literally everything in crypto is scammers all the way down.
I'm sure there were some people involved with Bernie Madoff who didn't know it was a scam and did something nice with the money they made. That doesn't mean we should pretend Bernie Madoff wasn't running a fucking scam. Yes, sometimes some people involved in a scam get out clean. That's literally how this kind of scheme works -- by seeming like a good thing for the early adopters, so as to lure in those later who will be left holding the bag.
posted by a faithful sock at 1:21 PM on April 20, 2022 [23 favorites]
The only thing that "people smarter than [you]" are spending their time on in these platforms doing is working out new and better ways to scam people.
Look: you seem really hyped about this. Unfortunately, it is a scam. No amount of walls of text from you is going to change that. Web3, NFTs, and everything out of the crypto-sphere is a scam. Everything. I don't care how much you think this time it isn't. I don't care how much you think actually this is helping [pick someone].
It is a scam.
It is a scam.
And given that you don't even know what "financialization" means, and that you're conflating commerce (like "buying a membership in a site") with financialization (turning everything into a financial vehicle used for speculation, in this case in unregulated markets that amount to gambling houses) -- maybe consider that you are in fact pretty under-informed on this?
We did this same thing last time we went around, but in that case with Axie Infinity. There was someone involved in an earlier crypto thread who was very adamant and very calm in explaining that actually it was helping people in the Phillipines, and you see all of us just don't understand, and, and, and, and, and.
And: yeah, turns out Axie Infinity, like every crypto scheme, is a fucking scam, only able to keep profits for those involved propped up by enticing new money to enter into it. Its economy only exists via what would be considered market manipulation in the real, regulated financial world. And also the people running it are idiots who got hacked for over half a billion dollars in crypto, because literally everything in crypto is scammers all the way down.
I'm sure there were some people involved with Bernie Madoff who didn't know it was a scam and did something nice with the money they made. That doesn't mean we should pretend Bernie Madoff wasn't running a fucking scam. Yes, sometimes some people involved in a scam get out clean. That's literally how this kind of scheme works -- by seeming like a good thing for the early adopters, so as to lure in those later who will be left holding the bag.
posted by a faithful sock at 1:21 PM on April 20, 2022 [23 favorites]
Well, agree to disagree, I guess! Neither I nor anyone behind Nina have any vested interest in more people signing up, unless you count $1.50 for every upload a Madoff-level scam. I'm actually not sure how you could, even in the most cynical light, formulate Nina's business model to be a scam unless you wanna call the US dollar a scam (a conversation I'd be delighted to have).
Never heard of Axie Infinity unfortunately!
I do know what financialization means, as well :) If you've been reading my posts in this thread about Nina, you'd see that they're not selling a speculative asset, and that I specifically don't support Web 3 projects that are based around selling speculative assets.
But, do you! Certainly not a gun to your head here. All I care about is helping artists carve out a more equitable space in this hellworld that is currently seeking to ensure that no one can live off making music ever again.
Anyways, sorry, I'll step out now. Appreciate all the people who've DM'd or tried to hold a good faith conversation in this thread. Hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day :)
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 1:41 PM on April 20, 2022
Never heard of Axie Infinity unfortunately!
I do know what financialization means, as well :) If you've been reading my posts in this thread about Nina, you'd see that they're not selling a speculative asset, and that I specifically don't support Web 3 projects that are based around selling speculative assets.
But, do you! Certainly not a gun to your head here. All I care about is helping artists carve out a more equitable space in this hellworld that is currently seeking to ensure that no one can live off making music ever again.
Anyways, sorry, I'll step out now. Appreciate all the people who've DM'd or tried to hold a good faith conversation in this thread. Hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day :)
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 1:41 PM on April 20, 2022
Nice to know that Matt Binder won't be running out of material any time soon.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 1:57 PM on April 20, 2022
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 1:57 PM on April 20, 2022
Thanks Cap!
Capt. The Mango: I think artists SHOULD be able to profit further from the market's inflation of their work. I think most artists would agree.
There's art as a conversation within a community and art as something people want to posess exclusively. Let's talk about the second one:
Say you put some art out there and Peggy Guggenheim buys one for $400, and a few years later says it is worth $1.5m. What does she owe you? Aren't all your other comparable works at least comparably valuable, and don't you owe her something for that?
I figure it breaks the spirit if not the rules of the NFT for me to agree to resell your art for $1 under a contract that's contingent on the purchaser putting $1.5m in a third-party or escrow account to be handed over later and giving you, the artist, 30% of $1. I can't see a way to profit from a system that's so easily gamed without reinventing courts and a system of governance.
posted by k3ninho at 1:59 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Capt. The Mango: I think artists SHOULD be able to profit further from the market's inflation of their work. I think most artists would agree.
There's art as a conversation within a community and art as something people want to posess exclusively. Let's talk about the second one:
Say you put some art out there and Peggy Guggenheim buys one for $400, and a few years later says it is worth $1.5m. What does she owe you? Aren't all your other comparable works at least comparably valuable, and don't you owe her something for that?
I figure it breaks the spirit if not the rules of the NFT for me to agree to resell your art for $1 under a contract that's contingent on the purchaser putting $1.5m in a third-party or escrow account to be handed over later and giving you, the artist, 30% of $1. I can't see a way to profit from a system that's so easily gamed without reinventing courts and a system of governance.
posted by k3ninho at 1:59 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
The funny thing about all this talk about making music into financial speculative vehicles so that artists theoretically might get rich is that, more often than not, actual people involved in music for the music itself rather than the exchange value or commodity fetishism are aghast at the idea. I remember interviews with the founders of Sarah Records, a British indiepop label that shut down in the 90s after releasing 100 singles, who are so aghast at the high prices that their old 7"s fetch on Discogs that they have occasionally contemplated going back on the promise of no-second-acts and doing another run of singles to sock it to the speculators. (They haven't done this, though they have put all their releases they have rights to on Bandcamp.)
On a similar tangent, so much of the NFT art out there is, quite frankly, garbage. It's almost as if the aesthetic value was irrelevant as it was meant to be the vape-fedora-bro equivalent of a wrapped canvas in a climate-controlled airside warehouse in Dubai; something whose aesthetic value is as irrelevant as the electrical qualities of a metal coin are.
posted by acb at 2:24 PM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
On a similar tangent, so much of the NFT art out there is, quite frankly, garbage. It's almost as if the aesthetic value was irrelevant as it was meant to be the vape-fedora-bro equivalent of a wrapped canvas in a climate-controlled airside warehouse in Dubai; something whose aesthetic value is as irrelevant as the electrical qualities of a metal coin are.
posted by acb at 2:24 PM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
The American art world has been trying to get the market on board with paying creators a percentage of the resale value of their works for decades now. This isn't a technological problem, it's a legal one. And surprise! The grifters in the art world are dead set against it, so it hasn't happened.
https://hyperallergic.com/153681/an-illustrated-guide-to-artist-resale-royalties-aka-droit-de-suite/
posted by lefty lucky cat at 2:26 PM on April 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
https://hyperallergic.com/153681/an-illustrated-guide-to-artist-resale-royalties-aka-droit-de-suite/
posted by lefty lucky cat at 2:26 PM on April 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
On a similar tangent, so much of the NFT art out there is, quite frankly, garbage.
They combine the artistic vision of a Unix admin with the sense of whimsy of an investment banker.
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:35 PM on April 20, 2022 [13 favorites]
They combine the artistic vision of a Unix admin with the sense of whimsy of an investment banker.
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:35 PM on April 20, 2022 [13 favorites]
I’m going to read this thread to catch up on details, but I wanted to put a little pin here to say that the “why” for all of these particular sites seems very thin. Another music browser is cool, but they don’t seem to make clear, simple cases for why being on the blockchain is a valuable secret sauce.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:38 PM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Going To Maine at 2:38 PM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
The funny thing about all this talk about making music into financial speculative vehicles so that artists theoretically might get rich is that, more often than not, actual people involved in music for the music itself rather than the exchange value or commodity fetishism are aghast at the idea.
If I'm to take Capt. The Mango at their word, the discussion should centre on modes of distribution and creating fair value exchange. Many here are pointing to why the examples provided are bad ideas, I'll leave that to the experts. But the question of reasonable compensation for artistic production is a good question, I just think we are conflating that with historic and existing models which are indeed predatory and/or unsustainable. And I'm not sure the way we use the term 'financialization' is clear at all times, or even consistent.
There are actual people involved in music who would like to make, if not a living, at least a measure of income. I'm all for hearing about ideas. From what I observe with friends who pay a subscription for Spotify, it's just insanely and seductively convenient. If you told teenage, Columbia House subscribing me that this would be the future of music, I would be astonished. I'm no subscriber to Spotify, I don't see how the majority of artists benefit from the model. In short, and going by the numbers, predatory capitalism relies on a sizable percentage of consumers to share in the predation.
posted by elkevelvet at 2:39 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
If I'm to take Capt. The Mango at their word, the discussion should centre on modes of distribution and creating fair value exchange. Many here are pointing to why the examples provided are bad ideas, I'll leave that to the experts. But the question of reasonable compensation for artistic production is a good question, I just think we are conflating that with historic and existing models which are indeed predatory and/or unsustainable. And I'm not sure the way we use the term 'financialization' is clear at all times, or even consistent.
There are actual people involved in music who would like to make, if not a living, at least a measure of income. I'm all for hearing about ideas. From what I observe with friends who pay a subscription for Spotify, it's just insanely and seductively convenient. If you told teenage, Columbia House subscribing me that this would be the future of music, I would be astonished. I'm no subscriber to Spotify, I don't see how the majority of artists benefit from the model. In short, and going by the numbers, predatory capitalism relies on a sizable percentage of consumers to share in the predation.
posted by elkevelvet at 2:39 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
NFT? No F**kin Thanks
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:55 PM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:55 PM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
NFT? No F**kin Thanks
The glitch-pop artist yeule said this on Twitter a while ago.
posted by acb at 3:13 PM on April 20, 2022
The glitch-pop artist yeule said this on Twitter a while ago.
posted by acb at 3:13 PM on April 20, 2022
elkevelvet: There are actual people involved in music who would like to make, if not a living, at least a measure of income.
Yeah! And I hope there's universal agreement that creators should be able to make a living from their creations.
Cpt. The Mango: I can promise you lefty lucky cat that I am not making anything like a living from this, and I'm not mad that people are assuming there's a gift :)
If I'm reading between the lines of what you've posted in this thread, you're a creator with a deep emotional investment in the idea of NFTs solving this problem. Unfortunately, previous distribution technologies did not cause this problem, and future distribution technologies will not magically solve it.
I have a reasonably good technical understanding of how <waving hands>this all works</waving hands> and how it's being misrepresented to artists. I hope you'll consider why hypothetical bad actors need artists (both to provide content and to act as evangelists) for this stuff, and that you'll be open-minded and extra careful, and also patient with those who (at first glance) may appear to be stepping on this dream.
posted by ArmandoAkimbo at 3:36 PM on April 20, 2022 [15 favorites]
Yeah! And I hope there's universal agreement that creators should be able to make a living from their creations.
Cpt. The Mango: I can promise you lefty lucky cat that I am not making anything like a living from this, and I'm not mad that people are assuming there's a gift :)
If I'm reading between the lines of what you've posted in this thread, you're a creator with a deep emotional investment in the idea of NFTs solving this problem. Unfortunately, previous distribution technologies did not cause this problem, and future distribution technologies will not magically solve it.
I have a reasonably good technical understanding of how <waving hands>this all works</waving hands> and how it's being misrepresented to artists. I hope you'll consider why hypothetical bad actors need artists (both to provide content and to act as evangelists) for this stuff, and that you'll be open-minded and extra careful, and also patient with those who (at first glance) may appear to be stepping on this dream.
posted by ArmandoAkimbo at 3:36 PM on April 20, 2022 [15 favorites]
I hope there's universal agreement that creators should be able to make a living from their creations.
what does universal agreement look like? because right now, universal agreement looks a lot like a lot of other stuff: if it's convenient, I too will exploit
posted by elkevelvet at 3:57 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
what does universal agreement look like? because right now, universal agreement looks a lot like a lot of other stuff: if it's convenient, I too will exploit
posted by elkevelvet at 3:57 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Literally costs money to upload your music.
This is all reminding me a bit of the prpblem of Open Access transformative agreements in academic publishing. With the added boondoggle of Blockchain.
I'll repeat what others have already said better: There is nothing about this that cannot be done more justly, effectively, and efficiently without NFTs and the Blockchain.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:15 PM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
This is all reminding me a bit of the prpblem of Open Access transformative agreements in academic publishing. With the added boondoggle of Blockchain.
I'll repeat what others have already said better: There is nothing about this that cannot be done more justly, effectively, and efficiently without NFTs and the Blockchain.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:15 PM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
Sorry, I just can't not mention this... acb, looks like yeule has also recently been complaining about speculation on a limited-edition physical release. Reminds me of someone :p
elkevelvet : discussion should centre on modes of distribution and creating fair value exchange
Yes! Absolutely. So many people are saying NFTs are a scam or its amoral to participate in their sale while not addressing the fact that the current system already is a scam, and it's already amoral to participate! I am not proud of the fact that my favourite artist gets $0.003 every time I listen to my favourite song, or that artists are supposed to be happy with a share like that.
k3ninho: Say you put some art out there and Peggy Guggenheim buys one for $400, and a few years later says it is worth $1.5m. What does she owe you? Aren't all your other comparable works at least comparably valuable, and don't you owe her something for that?
Well, I'd say she owes me a portion of the $1.5 million! Or at least I'd like to see some of that value realized, since most art that skyrockets in value does so because of market manipulation and soft promotion, not just value going up in a vacuum.
> I figure it breaks the spirit if not the rules of the NFT for me to agree to resell your art for $1 under a contract that's contingent on the purchaser putting $1.5m in a third-party or escrow account to be handed over later and giving you, the artist, 30% of $1. I can't see a way to profit from a system that's so easily gamed without reinventing courts and a system of governance.
I mean, you can certainly do that if you have the time and energy, but I'll point out three things: people already do this, victimizing artists; 30% of $1.00 is bigger than 30% of nothing; AND there's definitely easier and safer ways to launder money. I can't really think of why you'd agree to do this but it seems like something that could be solved on-platform.
lefty lucky cat: The American art world has been trying to get the market on board with paying creators a percentage of the resale value of their works for decades now. This isn't a technological problem, it's a legal one. And surprise! The grifters in the art world are dead set against it, so it hasn't happened.
Most art world grifters (read: institutions) are also virulently oppose NFTs so make of that what you will.
ArmandoAkimbo: If I'm reading between the lines of what you've posted in this thread, you're a creator with a deep emotional investment in the idea of NFTs solving this problem. Unfortunately, previous distribution technologies did not cause this problem, and future distribution technologies will not magically solve it.
I have a deep emotional investment in this problem being solved, but not necessarily NFTs being what solves it. I have no preference for NFTs over anything else, it just seems like a plainly good solution if developed wisely!
I'd love to see other projects that address the hideous inequity between what the market has decided music is worth and what musicians need to make a paltry living, but as of yet I haven't seen that. The closest thing is Bandcamp, which I dearly love, but I'll point out again that Bandcamp infuriated their userbase by selling themselves to Epic Games recently. I'll also point out that the venn diagram of people who are anti-Web 3 and people who were infuriated by the sale is something like a circle.
> I hope you'll consider why hypothetical bad actors need artists (both to provide content and to act as evangelists) for this stuff, and that you'll be open-minded and extra careful, and also patient with those who (at first glance) may appear to be stepping on this dream.
This is excellent advice! I think I've been fairly clear about advocating for projects that have absolutely minimal risks to artists and consumers, but your advice certainly bears repeating.
aspersioncast: Literally costs money to upload your music.
So does anywhere else! SoundCloud; monthly subscription fee to upload more than 2 hours of music. Bandcamp: a percentage of every single sale you make (except for on Bandcamp Fridays) to both Bandcamp and Paypal. DistroKid, CDBaby, and a million other services that help you upload to Spotify and Apple Music, et al., either a one-time fee, a monthly fee, or a percentage fee of your streaming revenue. YouTube I suppose is free, but your only way of making money on there is putting advertisements before your music.
> I'll repeat what others have already said better: There is nothing about this that cannot be done more justly, effectively, and efficiently without NFTs and the Blockchain.
I would love to hear ideas for this!
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 4:30 PM on April 20, 2022
elkevelvet : discussion should centre on modes of distribution and creating fair value exchange
Yes! Absolutely. So many people are saying NFTs are a scam or its amoral to participate in their sale while not addressing the fact that the current system already is a scam, and it's already amoral to participate! I am not proud of the fact that my favourite artist gets $0.003 every time I listen to my favourite song, or that artists are supposed to be happy with a share like that.
k3ninho: Say you put some art out there and Peggy Guggenheim buys one for $400, and a few years later says it is worth $1.5m. What does she owe you? Aren't all your other comparable works at least comparably valuable, and don't you owe her something for that?
Well, I'd say she owes me a portion of the $1.5 million! Or at least I'd like to see some of that value realized, since most art that skyrockets in value does so because of market manipulation and soft promotion, not just value going up in a vacuum.
> I figure it breaks the spirit if not the rules of the NFT for me to agree to resell your art for $1 under a contract that's contingent on the purchaser putting $1.5m in a third-party or escrow account to be handed over later and giving you, the artist, 30% of $1. I can't see a way to profit from a system that's so easily gamed without reinventing courts and a system of governance.
I mean, you can certainly do that if you have the time and energy, but I'll point out three things: people already do this, victimizing artists; 30% of $1.00 is bigger than 30% of nothing; AND there's definitely easier and safer ways to launder money. I can't really think of why you'd agree to do this but it seems like something that could be solved on-platform.
lefty lucky cat: The American art world has been trying to get the market on board with paying creators a percentage of the resale value of their works for decades now. This isn't a technological problem, it's a legal one. And surprise! The grifters in the art world are dead set against it, so it hasn't happened.
Most art world grifters (read: institutions) are also virulently oppose NFTs so make of that what you will.
ArmandoAkimbo: If I'm reading between the lines of what you've posted in this thread, you're a creator with a deep emotional investment in the idea of NFTs solving this problem. Unfortunately, previous distribution technologies did not cause this problem, and future distribution technologies will not magically solve it.
I have a deep emotional investment in this problem being solved, but not necessarily NFTs being what solves it. I have no preference for NFTs over anything else, it just seems like a plainly good solution if developed wisely!
I'd love to see other projects that address the hideous inequity between what the market has decided music is worth and what musicians need to make a paltry living, but as of yet I haven't seen that. The closest thing is Bandcamp, which I dearly love, but I'll point out again that Bandcamp infuriated their userbase by selling themselves to Epic Games recently. I'll also point out that the venn diagram of people who are anti-Web 3 and people who were infuriated by the sale is something like a circle.
> I hope you'll consider why hypothetical bad actors need artists (both to provide content and to act as evangelists) for this stuff, and that you'll be open-minded and extra careful, and also patient with those who (at first glance) may appear to be stepping on this dream.
This is excellent advice! I think I've been fairly clear about advocating for projects that have absolutely minimal risks to artists and consumers, but your advice certainly bears repeating.
aspersioncast: Literally costs money to upload your music.
So does anywhere else! SoundCloud; monthly subscription fee to upload more than 2 hours of music. Bandcamp: a percentage of every single sale you make (except for on Bandcamp Fridays) to both Bandcamp and Paypal. DistroKid, CDBaby, and a million other services that help you upload to Spotify and Apple Music, et al., either a one-time fee, a monthly fee, or a percentage fee of your streaming revenue. YouTube I suppose is free, but your only way of making money on there is putting advertisements before your music.
> I'll repeat what others have already said better: There is nothing about this that cannot be done more justly, effectively, and efficiently without NFTs and the Blockchain.
I would love to hear ideas for this!
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 4:30 PM on April 20, 2022
It seems very likely that there’s a space out there for a Bandcamp alternative that gives artists a fairer shake, and I can see why people might turn to NFTs for that - it just seems more based in the idea that NFTs are cool rather than any substantial need for them. As others have noted in this thread, Bandcamp has shown that digital collectables are possible without the blockchain. (Though artists can remove music from Bandcamp, sucking it right out of your online collection, and that dang sucks.)
Not everything in the NFT space is deliberately meant as a scam, but it certainly seems like a lot of it is, and the choice to use an NFT to do something is consequently kind of de facto suspicious (The secondary art market aspect is definitely an interesting additional factor, although that’s presumably not anything inherent in the token itself, as Moxie Marlinspike discussed in his blog post). (Bandcamp could conceivably implement reselling dynamics and kick back money to artists, too.)
Taking it as a given that the folks behind Nina are sincere, I think my big concern is that the stablecoins themselves -ostensibly pegged to the dollar because the owners hold equivalent real assets- are mostly frauds and are at some point going to go off. See this rather hair-raising story from Zeke Faux at Bloomberg in October, 2021: “Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?”. I know less about USDT, but this little story from Jordan Atkins in July of 2021 also gives me the willies. This good faith effort is accessible to the public because of what sounds like a very unstable underlying structure.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:35 PM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
Not everything in the NFT space is deliberately meant as a scam, but it certainly seems like a lot of it is, and the choice to use an NFT to do something is consequently kind of de facto suspicious (The secondary art market aspect is definitely an interesting additional factor, although that’s presumably not anything inherent in the token itself, as Moxie Marlinspike discussed in his blog post). (Bandcamp could conceivably implement reselling dynamics and kick back money to artists, too.)
Taking it as a given that the folks behind Nina are sincere, I think my big concern is that the stablecoins themselves -ostensibly pegged to the dollar because the owners hold equivalent real assets- are mostly frauds and are at some point going to go off. See this rather hair-raising story from Zeke Faux at Bloomberg in October, 2021: “Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?”. I know less about USDT, but this little story from Jordan Atkins in July of 2021 also gives me the willies. This good faith effort is accessible to the public because of what sounds like a very unstable underlying structure.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:35 PM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I am not proud of the fact that my favourite artist gets $0.003 every time I listen to my favourite song, or that artists are supposed to be happy with a share like that.
The current bandcamp model would be that you pay the artist 90 cents and then can listen as much as you want. The challenge here, presumably, is really to just make a system that pays the current artist 97 cents, with 3 cents going to middlemen.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:38 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
The current bandcamp model would be that you pay the artist 90 cents and then can listen as much as you want. The challenge here, presumably, is really to just make a system that pays the current artist 97 cents, with 3 cents going to middlemen.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:38 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Going To Maine: The challenge here, presumably, is really to just make a system that pays the current artist 97 cents, with 3 cents going to middlemen.
Absolutely, with the added complication of ideally making this system resilient to outside takeover like Bandcamp is. Because now they've been acquired by Epic, who knows if, when, or how they're going to change! They might even get into Web3...
And this is where an open-source web platform running a blockchain actually becomes useful: if the community doesn't like the direction a platform takes, they can vote, they can fork, and they can preserve their community exactly as it is, or was.
I'll say it a million times though, Bandcamp is by far the closest to best thing we've got.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 4:51 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Absolutely, with the added complication of ideally making this system resilient to outside takeover like Bandcamp is. Because now they've been acquired by Epic, who knows if, when, or how they're going to change! They might even get into Web3...
And this is where an open-source web platform running a blockchain actually becomes useful: if the community doesn't like the direction a platform takes, they can vote, they can fork, and they can preserve their community exactly as it is, or was.
I'll say it a million times though, Bandcamp is by far the closest to best thing we've got.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 4:51 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
What does “forking it” mean here? Presumably not forking the chain itself, just making a new tool for transacting with it? Although, really, all tokens can presumably just be moved between wallets directly without using any marketplace (and dodging compensating the artists for resale value.) If it is an actual fork of the chain, then you get a fun dispute over which chain is real, which sounds like a LOT of hassle. (And, if Nina, etc. are the ones controlling the servers where the actual music files are hosted, I imagine they’ll be able to do something nasty to anyone trying to make an alternate version.
The best thing about the music blockchains really seem to be the aspirations and the business models. If they pay better than Bandcamp, godspeed I guess, but it does seem ever so rickety to me.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:08 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
The best thing about the music blockchains really seem to be the aspirations and the business models. If they pay better than Bandcamp, godspeed I guess, but it does seem ever so rickety to me.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:08 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm sorry if this isn't a good contribution to the conversation, but I love seeing "Web3" garbage get picked to absolute bits at Metafilter (which turns 23 in a few months!) where as a community, we've seen some shit.
I'm married to a choral composer with a decent amount of success in the US (enough to hire an assistant this year!), and I've had a distinctly Nine Inch Nails tinted view into music distribution and business, I've played basement punk shows, I've been to Interscope's offices in New York in the 90s, and a sheet music warehouse/print-on-demand factory in Missouri, I've sold enough of my own music on Bandcamp to pay for the mastering of my album. (Bandcamp takes a tiny cut because they provide value - and once a month, they don't even take that cut!)
Hitching NFTs to music is horseshit. Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem that hasn't already been solved more effectively. As a technology, even if it does solve a weird business need, it's on such a deep level that no one needs to hear the word. Imagine if people who bragged about being so smart they skipped college were going around in the 80s telling everyone to invest in EDI because it's going to revolutionize commerce, or if during the dot com boom, IRC was full of MBAs trying to convince you about how much money you could make with CXML.
Cpt. The Mango, you've been sold a bill of goods, and you're in deep. From the context of this thread, it seems like you're spending more time talking than listening. I mean, I kinda get it - I have friends who 'make music' with modular synths - I hope it's fun for you like that, all the best of luck.
...and for the record, I do not have accounts at Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc. for listening to music - only for publishing music, in order to manage artist pages. I don't stream with ads, I don't pay for streaming subscriptions, I try to buy as directly from artists as I can, and spring for the deluxe physical editions when I really like the music (not always vinyl though - that has its own super problematic ecological problems) because I'm an archaic weirdo.
posted by Leviathant at 5:43 PM on April 20, 2022 [14 favorites]
I'm married to a choral composer with a decent amount of success in the US (enough to hire an assistant this year!), and I've had a distinctly Nine Inch Nails tinted view into music distribution and business, I've played basement punk shows, I've been to Interscope's offices in New York in the 90s, and a sheet music warehouse/print-on-demand factory in Missouri, I've sold enough of my own music on Bandcamp to pay for the mastering of my album. (Bandcamp takes a tiny cut because they provide value - and once a month, they don't even take that cut!)
Hitching NFTs to music is horseshit. Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem that hasn't already been solved more effectively. As a technology, even if it does solve a weird business need, it's on such a deep level that no one needs to hear the word. Imagine if people who bragged about being so smart they skipped college were going around in the 80s telling everyone to invest in EDI because it's going to revolutionize commerce, or if during the dot com boom, IRC was full of MBAs trying to convince you about how much money you could make with CXML.
Cpt. The Mango, you've been sold a bill of goods, and you're in deep. From the context of this thread, it seems like you're spending more time talking than listening. I mean, I kinda get it - I have friends who 'make music' with modular synths - I hope it's fun for you like that, all the best of luck.
...and for the record, I do not have accounts at Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc. for listening to music - only for publishing music, in order to manage artist pages. I don't stream with ads, I don't pay for streaming subscriptions, I try to buy as directly from artists as I can, and spring for the deluxe physical editions when I really like the music (not always vinyl though - that has its own super problematic ecological problems) because I'm an archaic weirdo.
posted by Leviathant at 5:43 PM on April 20, 2022 [14 favorites]
you can wait until Amazon is run on Web3
Given how much of Web3 is run on Amazon, this would be quite a trick for them to pull off. Ouroboros-like even.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:10 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Given how much of Web3 is run on Amazon, this would be quite a trick for them to pull off. Ouroboros-like even.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:10 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
you've been sold a bill of goods
It's kind of funny that 'sold a bill of goods' original meaning was 'bought some goods sight unseen based on a listing, but never recieved the thing itself', whereas NFTs are basically literally buying a bill of goods, but somehow the purchaser doesn't mind.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:50 PM on April 20, 2022 [13 favorites]
It's kind of funny that 'sold a bill of goods' original meaning was 'bought some goods sight unseen based on a listing, but never recieved the thing itself', whereas NFTs are basically literally buying a bill of goods, but somehow the purchaser doesn't mind.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:50 PM on April 20, 2022 [13 favorites]
I'd just like to point out that that in crypto, and especially in NFTs, a "scam" just means that the person who got scammed was not the one who was originally supposed to get scammed, and it happened sooner then was initially planned.
posted by signal at 8:17 PM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by signal at 8:17 PM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
The best thing about this thread is that I learned about a new filesystem. I don't know what this says about me, that this is the most exciting thing to happen all day.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:55 PM on April 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:55 PM on April 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
Saying that anything touched by "web3" and NFTs is irredeemable garbage out the gate is not vote against musicians or any other artists. It's a vote for a degree of sanity, which can accompany literally any opinion on how musicians and artists should be paid.
Think about some outsider artist who releases some music and vanishes and then gets popular 20 years later. It'd be neat if they could start receiving some money for all the secondary sales of their music.
But in the age of digital distribution and infinite replicability, why not just get that revenue from first party sales? Why impose artificial scarcity in a way that picky benefits your customers? Even if you get a cut of future secondary sales, that's a cut. If you just sold normal digital audio files, there is no secondary market and you can take the entire pie of any current and future sales instead.
Signed, a musician.
posted by Dysk at 10:23 PM on April 20, 2022 [13 favorites]
Think about some outsider artist who releases some music and vanishes and then gets popular 20 years later. It'd be neat if they could start receiving some money for all the secondary sales of their music.
But in the age of digital distribution and infinite replicability, why not just get that revenue from first party sales? Why impose artificial scarcity in a way that picky benefits your customers? Even if you get a cut of future secondary sales, that's a cut. If you just sold normal digital audio files, there is no secondary market and you can take the entire pie of any current and future sales instead.
Signed, a musician.
posted by Dysk at 10:23 PM on April 20, 2022 [13 favorites]
Like this whole project sounds a lot like it could fundamentally be summarised as "you don't want evil platforms selling your music on your behalf and giving you a cut, you want random NFT buyers/speculators selling your music on your behalf and giving you a cut! but with less control!"
Resale inherently hurts the artist. By letting the artist take a cut of resale, you are at best turning that market into basically the same thing as the very evil platforms you're railing against. How about, since digital music isn't scarce we stick with the model that we have of selling licenses to use the music. You can't resell your Bandcamp purchases, because you don't own it, the artist still does. That is a good thing for artists. Copyright helps artists here! If someone wants to buy their music they have to go to buy it from your Bandcamp page (or your personal website). Allowing randomers to resell it is inherently sending customers for the music to someone other than the original artist.
posted by Dysk at 10:34 PM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
Resale inherently hurts the artist. By letting the artist take a cut of resale, you are at best turning that market into basically the same thing as the very evil platforms you're railing against. How about, since digital music isn't scarce we stick with the model that we have of selling licenses to use the music. You can't resell your Bandcamp purchases, because you don't own it, the artist still does. That is a good thing for artists. Copyright helps artists here! If someone wants to buy their music they have to go to buy it from your Bandcamp page (or your personal website). Allowing randomers to resell it is inherently sending customers for the music to someone other than the original artist.
posted by Dysk at 10:34 PM on April 20, 2022 [5 favorites]
lefty lucky cat: https://hyperallergic.com/153681/an-illustrated-guide-to-artist-resale-royalties-aka-droit-de-suite/
TIL another thing I've been ignorant about, great link, thank you!
aspersioncast: I'll repeat what others have already said better: There is nothing about this that cannot be done more justly, effectively, and efficiently without NFTs and the Blockchain.
Capt. The Mango: I would love to hear ideas for this!
The marginal cost of digital reproduction means perfect copies can be made for almost no energy cost. This platform will be competing with the convenience of unencumbered art -- like not having to pfaff about with keys and passwords. Early Netflix out-competed piracy by being more convenient and more reliable, as did iTunes Music Store and others. It's gone the other way, now I have to pay for more than 3 services and then find which has that show I want to watch or the high-fidelity/studio master recording I want to give money to artists for making... it's inconvenient again. Expect any crypt you put exclusive artwork in, then share the digital archive, to be cracked at some date later on. As such, "digital rights management" platforms are a broken concept: here is a locked thing and its key, to use the locked thing you must transform it into an unlocked thing.
Maybe the details can be hashed out elsewhere but ... the existing free-at-point-of-use and free-as-in-liberty software exists to:
* store the artwork in encrypted digital format on a bit torrent or Interplanetary Filesystem record
* have headers to the crypt use multiple encryption keys (some number you resell as exclusive access, others you keep for janitorial duties)
* have secure storage for the encryption keys
* you license keys to people...
+ for limited time so you can expire keys or sunset the system, and
+ have a user agreement that they can sell onward their licence
+ subject to you getting a cut and
+ you removing the key they have when replacing it with one for the customer they sell to, but
+ sharing keys or leaking the artwork is breach of this licence and will get your keys revoked.
posted by k3ninho at 10:50 PM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
TIL another thing I've been ignorant about, great link, thank you!
aspersioncast: I'll repeat what others have already said better: There is nothing about this that cannot be done more justly, effectively, and efficiently without NFTs and the Blockchain.
Capt. The Mango: I would love to hear ideas for this!
The marginal cost of digital reproduction means perfect copies can be made for almost no energy cost. This platform will be competing with the convenience of unencumbered art -- like not having to pfaff about with keys and passwords. Early Netflix out-competed piracy by being more convenient and more reliable, as did iTunes Music Store and others. It's gone the other way, now I have to pay for more than 3 services and then find which has that show I want to watch or the high-fidelity/studio master recording I want to give money to artists for making... it's inconvenient again. Expect any crypt you put exclusive artwork in, then share the digital archive, to be cracked at some date later on. As such, "digital rights management" platforms are a broken concept: here is a locked thing and its key, to use the locked thing you must transform it into an unlocked thing.
Maybe the details can be hashed out elsewhere but ... the existing free-at-point-of-use and free-as-in-liberty software exists to:
* store the artwork in encrypted digital format on a bit torrent or Interplanetary Filesystem record
* have headers to the crypt use multiple encryption keys (some number you resell as exclusive access, others you keep for janitorial duties)
* have secure storage for the encryption keys
* you license keys to people...
+ for limited time so you can expire keys or sunset the system, and
+ have a user agreement that they can sell onward their licence
+ subject to you getting a cut and
+ you removing the key they have when replacing it with one for the customer they sell to, but
+ sharing keys or leaking the artwork is breach of this licence and will get your keys revoked.
posted by k3ninho at 10:50 PM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I think it's a fiddle.
posted by pompomtom at 12:11 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by pompomtom at 12:11 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
The web has been around for like 30 years now and we keep having the same arguments about digital scarcity. A lot of people seem to still be invested in fitting that square peg into this round hole!
posted by JHarris at 12:18 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by JHarris at 12:18 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
The amount of money that these web3 sites pay to artists is ZERO.
You know what Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp and every other exploitative service have in common? They pay artists their pittances in actual money.
Artists don't get a penny from these web3 sites. They get magic beans. And then in order to try to turn those beans into money they can actually pay their rent with, they have to go out and help find more suckers to sell the magic beans to.
The user instructions for every single one of these operations can be reduced to:
The beans come in different colours. Some of them burn different amounts of energy. Some of them are "pegged to the dollar", which is just a claim that someone will pay you a certain price for those beans. But they're all magic beans. You can't pay your rent with them unless you help get more people to buy magic beans.
The artists, the music, the high-falutin' debate about fairness in the industry, everything else in this thread is all completely irrelevant, except for one point:
Remind me who's exploiting the artists here?
posted by automatronic at 12:34 AM on April 21, 2022 [14 favorites]
You know what Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp and every other exploitative service have in common? They pay artists their pittances in actual money.
Artists don't get a penny from these web3 sites. They get magic beans. And then in order to try to turn those beans into money they can actually pay their rent with, they have to go out and help find more suckers to sell the magic beans to.
The user instructions for every single one of these operations can be reduced to:
- You're a customer wanting to buy? Here's how to exchange your money into magic beans to pay with.
- You're an artist wanting to get paid? Here's some magic beans; find someone to give you money for them.
The beans come in different colours. Some of them burn different amounts of energy. Some of them are "pegged to the dollar", which is just a claim that someone will pay you a certain price for those beans. But they're all magic beans. You can't pay your rent with them unless you help get more people to buy magic beans.
The artists, the music, the high-falutin' debate about fairness in the industry, everything else in this thread is all completely irrelevant, except for one point:
Remind me who's exploiting the artists here?
posted by automatronic at 12:34 AM on April 21, 2022 [14 favorites]
>> Out of interest in keeping this as meta as possible, however, I will be shortly selling this quote as an NFT.
> As is my right, I demand a 30% resale stake in the NFT you mint. I will enjoy my 30% of $2.00 greatly.
Not intended as a gotcha, but this specifically is where the concept starts to unravel for me: on what basis would you claim 30% of an NFT that someone else mints? If someone makes a link with a hash of your comment and starts selling it on a blockchain, why would you have any right to object?
Or to be more practical: if someone starts listing your music on every NFT music platform and keeping all the money, but with better SEO than you, how and why would you object? They're not selling copyrights, they're just selling hashes.
Of course you would object, because listing other people's music is crappy in human terms, but it would be tricky, because the service has been built on a technology whose overriding goal is to be Tor for money: a technically worse service than the clear net, but avoiding legal contracts and attribution of actions to individuals.
So whatever legal trademark rights you had that were being violated would be, by design of the system, very difficult to enforce. Instead what seems to happen with OpenSea is that you'd appeal to the terms of service for the centralized service that runs the frontend, and if they chose to they would delist the "infringing" NFTs in their parallel private trademark system and sabotage their value.
So ... there's an out-of-band centralized service calling balls and strikes on which things have value and what your rights are as an artist, but different from Bandcamp because no legal rights attach to anything, just that centralized service doing whatever it finds profitable. And the people who launched it are cool on Twitter, but if real money starts to move they can be bought by whoever. This seems like not something you will necessarily be happy to have exist in a few years, but something that if it does take off will be hard to shut down or fork.
You can play out similar scenarios with other aspects of the Tor-for-money choice. Like, another way "On Bandcamp you basically buy an NFT" isn't true is what happens if your account is stolen. If someone broke into your Bandcamp account and stole things of value, Bandcamp could reverse the transactions, and if they didn't you could sue them. (Although there'd be less incentive to, because Bandcamp isn't running a securities market.) But if you invest in artist-themed financial securities on a Tor-for-money platform, and the value of your securities happens to go up so that you become a target for hackers, and your securities are stolen ... well, too bad. You're on a trading platform that made the choice from the start, for some reason, that thefts should be impossible to reverse and as difficult as possible to attribute to real humans.
What seems to happen in those cases is that people go to the FBI, and hope that the FBI has sufficient global surveillance to find the culprits. Which is a weird relationship to the state -- we've opted out of banks and contracts and legal rights, and are channeling those resources instead to global cops who can try to unwind socially-bad transactions after the fact. Again, not clear we'll be happy to have done that, potentially hard to stop.
I think where this leads is what we actually want are artist cooperatives: groups that have clear legal rights and responsibilities, including clear legal structures that prevent concentration of power or co-option of the mission. This would be the up front version of the shadowy "whoever" who calls balls and strikes on NFT minting now. And, like, maybe they end up using decentralized database technology under the hood, if it really offers lower transaction fees or an easier way to validate that they are following their legal obligations or whatever. But which database technology they are using would be about as relevant to their branding as which credit card processor Bandcamp is using.
Would it be good for a cooperative like that to run a resale market? I'm not sure! Do artists really want the bargain bin right next to the new album?
posted by john hadron collider at 6:50 AM on April 21, 2022 [6 favorites]
> As is my right, I demand a 30% resale stake in the NFT you mint. I will enjoy my 30% of $2.00 greatly.
Not intended as a gotcha, but this specifically is where the concept starts to unravel for me: on what basis would you claim 30% of an NFT that someone else mints? If someone makes a link with a hash of your comment and starts selling it on a blockchain, why would you have any right to object?
Or to be more practical: if someone starts listing your music on every NFT music platform and keeping all the money, but with better SEO than you, how and why would you object? They're not selling copyrights, they're just selling hashes.
Of course you would object, because listing other people's music is crappy in human terms, but it would be tricky, because the service has been built on a technology whose overriding goal is to be Tor for money: a technically worse service than the clear net, but avoiding legal contracts and attribution of actions to individuals.
So whatever legal trademark rights you had that were being violated would be, by design of the system, very difficult to enforce. Instead what seems to happen with OpenSea is that you'd appeal to the terms of service for the centralized service that runs the frontend, and if they chose to they would delist the "infringing" NFTs in their parallel private trademark system and sabotage their value.
So ... there's an out-of-band centralized service calling balls and strikes on which things have value and what your rights are as an artist, but different from Bandcamp because no legal rights attach to anything, just that centralized service doing whatever it finds profitable. And the people who launched it are cool on Twitter, but if real money starts to move they can be bought by whoever. This seems like not something you will necessarily be happy to have exist in a few years, but something that if it does take off will be hard to shut down or fork.
You can play out similar scenarios with other aspects of the Tor-for-money choice. Like, another way "On Bandcamp you basically buy an NFT" isn't true is what happens if your account is stolen. If someone broke into your Bandcamp account and stole things of value, Bandcamp could reverse the transactions, and if they didn't you could sue them. (Although there'd be less incentive to, because Bandcamp isn't running a securities market.) But if you invest in artist-themed financial securities on a Tor-for-money platform, and the value of your securities happens to go up so that you become a target for hackers, and your securities are stolen ... well, too bad. You're on a trading platform that made the choice from the start, for some reason, that thefts should be impossible to reverse and as difficult as possible to attribute to real humans.
What seems to happen in those cases is that people go to the FBI, and hope that the FBI has sufficient global surveillance to find the culprits. Which is a weird relationship to the state -- we've opted out of banks and contracts and legal rights, and are channeling those resources instead to global cops who can try to unwind socially-bad transactions after the fact. Again, not clear we'll be happy to have done that, potentially hard to stop.
I think where this leads is what we actually want are artist cooperatives: groups that have clear legal rights and responsibilities, including clear legal structures that prevent concentration of power or co-option of the mission. This would be the up front version of the shadowy "whoever" who calls balls and strikes on NFT minting now. And, like, maybe they end up using decentralized database technology under the hood, if it really offers lower transaction fees or an easier way to validate that they are following their legal obligations or whatever. But which database technology they are using would be about as relevant to their branding as which credit card processor Bandcamp is using.
Would it be good for a cooperative like that to run a resale market? I'm not sure! Do artists really want the bargain bin right next to the new album?
posted by john hadron collider at 6:50 AM on April 21, 2022 [6 favorites]
Hi all, thanks for sharing this here, @zenon. I particularly appreciate the 2006 link :).
I made the Future Tape prototype to better understand what's going on:
a) what artists are sharing music in this fashion
b) what does it sound like
c) does it matter that the music is being released this way
d) what role does all the crypto pricing stuff play in this small space
e) is this stuff, in some sense, real
f) if you can play these tracks on your phone (see iOS beta), does that matter?
What role can music NFTs play in the larger music industry? I don't think they'll solve all of the musicians' problems, but I think they can change some industry expectations. I've gathered some notes in a twitter thread, if you are curious.
Those of you who've pointed out that all this stuff can be built sans-blockchain are correct, but do consider why 15 years of Bandcamp later, there's not even an API where a third party can interact with my library (for a better playback experience, or some ticket presale app, for example).
There are lots of real limitations faced by centralized services in terms of funding/monopoly desires/power/labels/bad product management, so I am open to even a weird roundabout way for new stuff to be built outside of these constraints.
posted by fascinated at 7:20 AM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
I made the Future Tape prototype to better understand what's going on:
a) what artists are sharing music in this fashion
b) what does it sound like
c) does it matter that the music is being released this way
d) what role does all the crypto pricing stuff play in this small space
e) is this stuff, in some sense, real
f) if you can play these tracks on your phone (see iOS beta), does that matter?
What role can music NFTs play in the larger music industry? I don't think they'll solve all of the musicians' problems, but I think they can change some industry expectations. I've gathered some notes in a twitter thread, if you are curious.
Those of you who've pointed out that all this stuff can be built sans-blockchain are correct, but do consider why 15 years of Bandcamp later, there's not even an API where a third party can interact with my library (for a better playback experience, or some ticket presale app, for example).
There are lots of real limitations faced by centralized services in terms of funding/monopoly desires/power/labels/bad product management, so I am open to even a weird roundabout way for new stuff to be built outside of these constraints.
posted by fascinated at 7:20 AM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
fascinated: I'm honestly not trying to be hostile, but I want to point out why this is not just "a weird roundabout way for new stuff to be built".
The fundamental reason why you should not interact with any crypto block chain is very simple: even if you aren't personally trying to enact a scam, you are enabling scammers by enticing new people to enter into the crypto coin ecosystem.
Here's the thing: cryptocoins have a massive liquidity problem.
There's a bunch of early movers into the space who are basically dragons sitting atop a mountain of pretend money in the form of crypto coins, the vast majority of which have been obtained (and continue to be obtained ) via fraud, scams, rugpulls, etc. The problem is, these coins are quite limited in what you can do with them. You can't pay rent with them. You can't buy groceries with them. In most cases, you can at best gamble with them, or trade them for a tiny number of online services.
The dragons desperately want to convert their pretend money into real money.
So why don't they just ... do that? Obvious answer: because it isn't worth anything, really. Nowhere near enough real money is coming into the system to allow them to cash out at the supposed "value" of their holdings.
The only way for them to cash out for more than they cashed in at is to get someone else to cash in at a higher price than they originally paid.
So, if you build a new service to try to let artists sell their art for cryptocoins, all you're doing is enabling those dragons to cash out. What you're creating is this very basic chain of events:
1. Your fan, because they want to support you, has to buy cryptocoins with real money. Your fan has now allowed the dragon to liberate some of the "value" in their holdings into real money. The dragon is happy!
2. Your fan gives you the cryptocoins, and gets your art in return. Your fan is happy!
3. Now you are holding cryptocoins, which you again cannot use to pay rent, buy groceries, pay for studio time, etc. So ... now what?
Now you have to convince someone else to inject money into this system so you can cash out.
And if you're wondering: "hey, what if nobody else is willing to inject money into the system?", the very straightforward answer is you get fucked and you're the one left holding the bag. The dragon doesn't care, though, because they got paid up front.
posted by a faithful sock at 8:47 AM on April 21, 2022 [8 favorites]
The fundamental reason why you should not interact with any crypto block chain is very simple: even if you aren't personally trying to enact a scam, you are enabling scammers by enticing new people to enter into the crypto coin ecosystem.
Here's the thing: cryptocoins have a massive liquidity problem.
There's a bunch of early movers into the space who are basically dragons sitting atop a mountain of pretend money in the form of crypto coins, the vast majority of which have been obtained (and continue to be obtained ) via fraud, scams, rugpulls, etc. The problem is, these coins are quite limited in what you can do with them. You can't pay rent with them. You can't buy groceries with them. In most cases, you can at best gamble with them, or trade them for a tiny number of online services.
The dragons desperately want to convert their pretend money into real money.
So why don't they just ... do that? Obvious answer: because it isn't worth anything, really. Nowhere near enough real money is coming into the system to allow them to cash out at the supposed "value" of their holdings.
The only way for them to cash out for more than they cashed in at is to get someone else to cash in at a higher price than they originally paid.
So, if you build a new service to try to let artists sell their art for cryptocoins, all you're doing is enabling those dragons to cash out. What you're creating is this very basic chain of events:
1. Your fan, because they want to support you, has to buy cryptocoins with real money. Your fan has now allowed the dragon to liberate some of the "value" in their holdings into real money. The dragon is happy!
2. Your fan gives you the cryptocoins, and gets your art in return. Your fan is happy!
3. Now you are holding cryptocoins, which you again cannot use to pay rent, buy groceries, pay for studio time, etc. So ... now what?
Now you have to convince someone else to inject money into this system so you can cash out.
And if you're wondering: "hey, what if nobody else is willing to inject money into the system?", the very straightforward answer is you get fucked and you're the one left holding the bag. The dragon doesn't care, though, because they got paid up front.
posted by a faithful sock at 8:47 AM on April 21, 2022 [8 favorites]
Look, an NFT is nothing more than a record on a blockchain that says the file at some URL or another is the property of some schmuck who burned a ton of energy and magic beans to make that record. The file at that URL can be downloaded by anyone with the URL. Once that file is downloaded, it can be copied. It can be backed up. It can be altered. It can be shared, infinitely, without any financial (or financialized) transaction taking place. Multiple people can own multiple records all pointing to the same file. It doesn't matter. If that URL is accessible, the file is downloadable, and can be copied. The scarcity is 100% artificial.
If I buy an song as an NFT (which I won't), I can download the file, something that has to be done in one way or another, to listen to it. If there's some kind of bullshit DRM standing between me and the file, I can take the audio output of one device, play the song, and save that audio stream as a file on another device, effectively copying it. I can then send the song to a friend. I can create a Torrent for the song. I can burn it to a CD. I can chop it up into samples and make a new work out of it.
But the end result is the same... this file that some schmuck owns is still just a file that can be copied ad infinitum and in doing so, it no longer is scarce. The record saying that schmuck owns that file is meaningless now. I could have all the fucking Bored Apes I want without spending a single cent on any cryptocurrency because the files are out there, on various torrent sites, because there is no digital scarcity. The entire premise of the NFT is meaningless because the file someone claims to own is just a file sitting on a web server somewhere. The blockchain holds only the record of the transaction and a pointer to that URL. (And good thing too, because if the blockchain had the actual data in it, we'd eventually need more energy to compute the damn thing than we could ever harvest. Not that blockchains are a good thing!)
All these promises of what NFTs can do for artists are absolute fucking bullshit because the entire premise of the technology is predicated on a falsehood. "Right-click and Save As..." to steal an NFT is a joke, but like the best jokes, it's also true. If you want to support an artist for their work, we don't need a new, energy-hungry technology to serve as some bullshit distributed ledger full of receipts that point to files on web servers... just give the artist real fucking money. Even if there's a middleman taking a percentage off the top, nearly every artist that isn't infected with NFT/Crypto brainworms would happily take real money in their real bank account over magic beans that fluctuate in value and can't be used to pay rent.
posted by SansPoint at 8:53 AM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
If I buy an song as an NFT (which I won't), I can download the file, something that has to be done in one way or another, to listen to it. If there's some kind of bullshit DRM standing between me and the file, I can take the audio output of one device, play the song, and save that audio stream as a file on another device, effectively copying it. I can then send the song to a friend. I can create a Torrent for the song. I can burn it to a CD. I can chop it up into samples and make a new work out of it.
But the end result is the same... this file that some schmuck owns is still just a file that can be copied ad infinitum and in doing so, it no longer is scarce. The record saying that schmuck owns that file is meaningless now. I could have all the fucking Bored Apes I want without spending a single cent on any cryptocurrency because the files are out there, on various torrent sites, because there is no digital scarcity. The entire premise of the NFT is meaningless because the file someone claims to own is just a file sitting on a web server somewhere. The blockchain holds only the record of the transaction and a pointer to that URL. (And good thing too, because if the blockchain had the actual data in it, we'd eventually need more energy to compute the damn thing than we could ever harvest. Not that blockchains are a good thing!)
All these promises of what NFTs can do for artists are absolute fucking bullshit because the entire premise of the technology is predicated on a falsehood. "Right-click and Save As..." to steal an NFT is a joke, but like the best jokes, it's also true. If you want to support an artist for their work, we don't need a new, energy-hungry technology to serve as some bullshit distributed ledger full of receipts that point to files on web servers... just give the artist real fucking money. Even if there's a middleman taking a percentage off the top, nearly every artist that isn't infected with NFT/Crypto brainworms would happily take real money in their real bank account over magic beans that fluctuate in value and can't be used to pay rent.
posted by SansPoint at 8:53 AM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
I avoid this topic with a family member, they're pretty deep into this.. in fact, I have every expectation that this coming Monday I will be presented with some kind of crypto-coin wallet as a gift, and not sure how I'll respond.
The family member likes to talk about the day currency will fail, central banks will fail, and only crypto can save us. On some level I greatly appreciate the idea of developing better systems of capturing value and exchange, but nothing we've seen with crypto-currencies and the associated concepts in NFTs, "web3".. there's nothing there that suggests we are solving a damn thing. And a good portion of this thread is simply a reiteration of that point, in varying lengths of sentences and descriptions.
I still appreciate the discussion, and the idea of one day making the current financial environment less shitty is a good idea, however we make it happen.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:12 AM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
The family member likes to talk about the day currency will fail, central banks will fail, and only crypto can save us. On some level I greatly appreciate the idea of developing better systems of capturing value and exchange, but nothing we've seen with crypto-currencies and the associated concepts in NFTs, "web3".. there's nothing there that suggests we are solving a damn thing. And a good portion of this thread is simply a reiteration of that point, in varying lengths of sentences and descriptions.
I still appreciate the discussion, and the idea of one day making the current financial environment less shitty is a good idea, however we make it happen.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:12 AM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
>...why 15 years of Bandcamp later, there's not even an API where a third party can interact with my library
https://bandcamp.com/developer
I was using Bandcamp APIs for some work I was doing with the Amanda Palmer (I know, it was a long time ago) crew over a decade ago.
posted by Leviathant at 9:12 AM on April 21, 2022 [9 favorites]
https://bandcamp.com/developer
I was using Bandcamp APIs for some work I was doing with the Amanda Palmer (I know, it was a long time ago) crew over a decade ago.
posted by Leviathant at 9:12 AM on April 21, 2022 [9 favorites]
dragons sitting atop a mountain of pretend money
Are they dragons, or just garden variety scammers?
At the extremes, all money is pretend, though, isn't it? It's just that some money is a fantasy with real consequences, when nation-states protect it with guns and bullets — or the scaled up equivalent in 2022. Would, say, Putin launch nukes if he is unable to illegally trade Bitcoin scrip for real money that can stop or slow bread riots?
That kind of inflection point is probably when cryptoscrip has to be treated as something serious that invokes those metaphorical dragons, instead of the usual gaggle of drug-addled con artists the media gushingly calls gurus.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:46 AM on April 21, 2022
Are they dragons, or just garden variety scammers?
At the extremes, all money is pretend, though, isn't it? It's just that some money is a fantasy with real consequences, when nation-states protect it with guns and bullets — or the scaled up equivalent in 2022. Would, say, Putin launch nukes if he is unable to illegally trade Bitcoin scrip for real money that can stop or slow bread riots?
That kind of inflection point is probably when cryptoscrip has to be treated as something serious that invokes those metaphorical dragons, instead of the usual gaggle of drug-addled con artists the media gushingly calls gurus.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:46 AM on April 21, 2022
So I have a dumb question about many of the various web3isgoinggreat phishing scams. Many of them involve a step of convincing the mark to "connect their wallet" (1, 2, 3, ...) that let's the scammer then run off with all of the funds. Why is this even a possibility? Shouldn't all of the cryptography happen locally so that you don't have to trust any other parties? What absolute muppets designed these systems to allow remote applications to gain access to the keys protecting the assets?
I'd also ask "Why are the keys even available outside of a secure hardware enclave anyway?", although these things never seem to be about building actually secure systems with realistic threat models and instead always trade speed for security...
posted by autopilot at 10:17 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'd also ask "Why are the keys even available outside of a secure hardware enclave anyway?", although these things never seem to be about building actually secure systems with realistic threat models and instead always trade speed for security...
posted by autopilot at 10:17 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
"do consider why 15 years of Bandcamp later, there's not even an API where a third party can interact with my library"
That's fair, I'm not unresponsive to this concern, I'd love to see more interoperability.
That said... what's stopping that from happening?
Is it a legal issue (which new tech would eventually be constrained by as well)?
Is it a technical issue (which would justify a technical answer)?
Is it that the people who could currently do the thing haven't shown interest in doing the thing?
It sounds like the last one, which makes the obvious rejoinder of "We solve this by wanting to do the thing!". But then... why hasn't someone already wanted to do the thing? And/or why not build the thing without adding all of these questionable techno-economic epicycles?
So it sounds like, then, that the issue is specifically the people *who could currently do the thing* aren't interested, and the people that are interested aren't able to do the thing (rights, market power, network effects, etc.). Ok, again, not uncommon, very understandable situation.
Except then, that suggests the sticking issue is "we want to take the ability to do the thing from the people who have it", and the purpose of the epicycles comes into clarity, as it's hoping to be a point of leverage for that transfer of power. And I think that does drive a *lot* of cryptocurrency dreams. Hint: If someone is capable of getting rich off a given plan, it's incapable of being as transformative as promised, as the re-concentration of wealth is a regression in itself. "Tear down the old barons, & put me/someone else in place as a new baron" isn't a transformation, it's a market coup.
At its most aspirational, I would love some of what's dreamt about in all this. That's a big part of why I pay close attention to it, & am as harsh on it as I am. For all of the author's greater issues, "Meditations on Moloch" was influential to me & I think a significant portion of issues in the world fit into that pattern. But "Join up with Moloch, & it promises you'll get to influence it in favor of the lesser evil" is exactly how it gets you & co-opts all those aspirational desires, & then you're sacrificing everything you love in hopes that some diamonds can be forged out of all that ash.
Post-script, in response to autopilot: I think Moxie Marlinspike's impressions on Web3 is relevant there. In short, everything centralized around platforms for ~reasons~, & decentralization is rarely practiced.
posted by CrystalDave at 10:25 AM on April 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
That's fair, I'm not unresponsive to this concern, I'd love to see more interoperability.
That said... what's stopping that from happening?
Is it a legal issue (which new tech would eventually be constrained by as well)?
Is it a technical issue (which would justify a technical answer)?
Is it that the people who could currently do the thing haven't shown interest in doing the thing?
It sounds like the last one, which makes the obvious rejoinder of "We solve this by wanting to do the thing!". But then... why hasn't someone already wanted to do the thing? And/or why not build the thing without adding all of these questionable techno-economic epicycles?
So it sounds like, then, that the issue is specifically the people *who could currently do the thing* aren't interested, and the people that are interested aren't able to do the thing (rights, market power, network effects, etc.). Ok, again, not uncommon, very understandable situation.
Except then, that suggests the sticking issue is "we want to take the ability to do the thing from the people who have it", and the purpose of the epicycles comes into clarity, as it's hoping to be a point of leverage for that transfer of power. And I think that does drive a *lot* of cryptocurrency dreams. Hint: If someone is capable of getting rich off a given plan, it's incapable of being as transformative as promised, as the re-concentration of wealth is a regression in itself. "Tear down the old barons, & put me/someone else in place as a new baron" isn't a transformation, it's a market coup.
At its most aspirational, I would love some of what's dreamt about in all this. That's a big part of why I pay close attention to it, & am as harsh on it as I am. For all of the author's greater issues, "Meditations on Moloch" was influential to me & I think a significant portion of issues in the world fit into that pattern. But "Join up with Moloch, & it promises you'll get to influence it in favor of the lesser evil" is exactly how it gets you & co-opts all those aspirational desires, & then you're sacrificing everything you love in hopes that some diamonds can be forged out of all that ash.
Post-script, in response to autopilot: I think Moxie Marlinspike's impressions on Web3 is relevant there. In short, everything centralized around platforms for ~reasons~, & decentralization is rarely practiced.
posted by CrystalDave at 10:25 AM on April 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
On the Bandcamp tangent: I would love to see a Bandcamp API for downloading my various purchases automatically. Currently my workflow is to right-click them in the receipt page and save the ZIP files, and run a Python script that unpacks them and places the files into the right place (a process which used to be manual).If I could run a script that would list my most recent purchases, download those and then do the rest, that would be ideal.
posted by acb at 10:35 AM on April 21, 2022
posted by acb at 10:35 AM on April 21, 2022
Shouldn't all of the cryptography happen locally so that you don't have to trust any other parties? What absolute muppets designed these systems to allow remote applications to gain access to the keys protecting the assets?
I think the mistake here is conflating cryptocurrencies and cryptography. As I understand, the only real relation is the hashing of big numbers in proof-of-work schemes. Interacting with the blockchain to see your currency is hard (and you don't really want to risk losing your million-dollar file or have to remember some horrible hash), so people use third party APIs and wallet managers to keep track of their data. (And, presumably, to link together multiple crypto wallets on multiple blockchains.) The Moxie Marlinspike blog post I mentioned earlier is a pretty breezy and fun review of this.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:04 AM on April 21, 2022
I think the mistake here is conflating cryptocurrencies and cryptography. As I understand, the only real relation is the hashing of big numbers in proof-of-work schemes. Interacting with the blockchain to see your currency is hard (and you don't really want to risk losing your million-dollar file or have to remember some horrible hash), so people use third party APIs and wallet managers to keep track of their data. (And, presumably, to link together multiple crypto wallets on multiple blockchains.) The Moxie Marlinspike blog post I mentioned earlier is a pretty breezy and fun review of this.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:04 AM on April 21, 2022
moxie's blog post is an excellent writeup on actually trying to use the web3 morass and finding that the decentralization is mostly a lie. However, there is quite a bit of cryptography in (most?) cryptocurrencies; bitcoin's "wallet addresses", for example, are hashes of public keys and transferring coins from one wallet to another requires signing the transaction (which includes the hash of the destination key). The miners also do cryptographic signature validation to confirm that a) the public key used to sign the transaction hashes to the one that received the coins in the first place, and b) that the coins haven't already been spent.
The transaction signing is the sort of wallet operation that seems like it should ideally be done in a secure enclave, with physical presence detection and per-signature prompting, rather than an easily transferred software key that is handed over to a third party by "connecting your wallet".
posted by autopilot at 11:57 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
The transaction signing is the sort of wallet operation that seems like it should ideally be done in a secure enclave, with physical presence detection and per-signature prompting, rather than an easily transferred software key that is handed over to a third party by "connecting your wallet".
posted by autopilot at 11:57 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
Question for fascinated, or others with some knowledge of the music streaming + NFT space: how do performing rights organizations (PROs, such as BMI and ASCAP) fit into this equation? My understanding is that they will demand a cut for performance royalties per streamed play, and I think it amounts to something like 10% of gross revenue. This is a significant upkeep cost to be factored in alongside server costs, etc. It's one thing for a music streaming service to say that it's organized an NFT solution for artists to get paid, but it's another to say that the solution takes care of such organizations' demands (which don't care about NFTs or anything but collecting cold hard $ the old fashioned way).
A service could argue that it's an online music store for buying music outright, rather than a streaming service (which is Bandcamp's argument that has apparently been convincing so far for them not needing to pay the PROs). However, it seems like these services allow infinite streams of any of their music without cost to the user, and with no control from the artist over that streaming, which cuts strongly against that claim.
I've only looked into Nina so far, but this line from their FAQ seems telling (bold emphasis is mine):
All of this is not getting into my take on NFTs for music generally, which is already quite explored in this thread (but I'll just say that Moxie's blog post linked upthread has been brought up a few times for good reason, it's worth the read). Just curious on what I see as the math not quite adding up, which usually means to me that there's some smoke-and-mirrors going on in terms of who really pays what, and how, and what the ultimate goals of the company are.
posted by naju at 12:36 PM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
A service could argue that it's an online music store for buying music outright, rather than a streaming service (which is Bandcamp's argument that has apparently been convincing so far for them not needing to pay the PROs). However, it seems like these services allow infinite streams of any of their music without cost to the user, and with no control from the artist over that streaming, which cuts strongly against that claim.
I've only looked into Nina so far, but this line from their FAQ seems telling (bold emphasis is mine):
After a one time fee, releases on Nina are permanent. This fee handles Solana and Arweave's transaction and storage cost (~$2.50 + $0.01/MB). Nina takes no additional fees to publish a release. (Currently, all transaction costs for artists are subsidized by Nina)That sounds like a circumspect way of saying "don't worry, our venture capital backers have covered the bill for this. At least for now." If their current model of unlimited streaming with a modest one-time fee is sustainable only through the generous support of their VC funders, then it's fundamentally not sustainable in the long-term. Which is the dilemma with a lot of music streaming ventures. It also seems like they might be reliant on their music catalog being made up of unknown music artists, rather than already successful artists with their tangle of various pre-existing label, distro/publisher, and/or PRO relationships that must be dealt with. And I just don't see any music streaming platform taking off, NFT or not, without some hard-hitting prestige names on the catalog. Not AAA artists necessarily, but at least Bandcamp-level indie buzz.
All of this is not getting into my take on NFTs for music generally, which is already quite explored in this thread (but I'll just say that Moxie's blog post linked upthread has been brought up a few times for good reason, it's worth the read). Just curious on what I see as the math not quite adding up, which usually means to me that there's some smoke-and-mirrors going on in terms of who really pays what, and how, and what the ultimate goals of the company are.
posted by naju at 12:36 PM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
@Leviathant: You are right, Bandcamp has had the artist/label/distributor-facing API tools for years, but really not much for listeners. Which is why @acb and others have built various hacks (things get pretty wild if you search for bandcamp on github). We don't really have to live like this, it sucks.
@CrystalDave: I wish the things that companies do/don't do made this much sense or were this intentional. It's probably a blend of lack of resources and legal constraints, but the part that really stands out is the lack of desire to develop
@naju: It's complicated as you pointed out, but at the moment most of the artists participating have the ability to grant a pretty broad license to these platforms for this kind of playback, and they don't typically post previously released work which can come with such strings. Honestly, it's exciting that it's difficult for artists on large labels to participate in this space, so that these smaller artists can get some outsize results.
posted by fascinated at 2:30 PM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
@CrystalDave: I wish the things that companies do/don't do made this much sense or were this intentional. It's probably a blend of lack of resources and legal constraints, but the part that really stands out is the lack of desire to develop
@naju: It's complicated as you pointed out, but at the moment most of the artists participating have the ability to grant a pretty broad license to these platforms for this kind of playback, and they don't typically post previously released work which can come with such strings. Honestly, it's exciting that it's difficult for artists on large labels to participate in this space, so that these smaller artists can get some outsize results.
posted by fascinated at 2:30 PM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
"you don't want evil platforms selling your music on your behalf and giving you a cut, you want random NFT buyers/speculators selling your music on your behalf and giving you a cut! but with less control!"
Right?
"The "free market" doesn't work so the only solution is to move to an entirely unregulated even freer market!!"
work which can come with such strings
Sigh. "Such strings" - meaning the money collected from streaming services & radio stations & etc. by performing rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI and distributed to the songwriters - are legally mandated royalties owed to them. As in, copyright LAW of the United States (and, of course, other countries plus I think the EU has a collective agreement) says songwriters must be paid if their song is streamed.
> I'll repeat what others have already said better: There is nothing about this that cannot be done more justly, effectively, and efficiently without NFTs and the Blockchain.
I would love to hear ideas for this!
Well, one idea would be that an awful lot of the roots of royalty payment and basic minimums are enshrined under law and enforced by government bodies (like the Copyright Royalty Board who are in the middle of a battle with the streaming services who are trying to drastically reduce their rates and covered under pretty standard contract law so that musicians can and have - MANY times - sued labels and publishers and whoever else if they're getting screwed.
In short, so far it seems like the people most enthusiastic about this idea have little or no actual knowledge of the current laws and regulations and policies and practices covering how musicians get paid. They're all just, "Hey, they're getting screwed, especially the little guys !!!"
Which, I mean, cool, thanks for your support, but I'm not gonna trust that you have good ideas about how to fix a thing if you don't know how it works in the first place. I don't just randomly take a hammer to my car engine when it won't start.
Which THEN means that this whole NFT/blockchain music idea (which is still pretty incoherent) is starting to sound like a lot of other "disruptor" ideas. Where it's being sold as "give power & dough to the little guy by getting rid of the middleman" (Uber: earn extra cash in your spare time with your own car! AirB&B: pay for your vacation by renting out your own home while you're gone!) but it doesn't take long to turn into "run a business without any regulation or oversight or legal protections for the "little guy"."
posted by soundguy99 at 3:29 PM on April 21, 2022 [7 favorites]
Right?
"The "free market" doesn't work so the only solution is to move to an entirely unregulated even freer market!!"
work which can come with such strings
Sigh. "Such strings" - meaning the money collected from streaming services & radio stations & etc. by performing rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI and distributed to the songwriters - are legally mandated royalties owed to them. As in, copyright LAW of the United States (and, of course, other countries plus I think the EU has a collective agreement) says songwriters must be paid if their song is streamed.
> I'll repeat what others have already said better: There is nothing about this that cannot be done more justly, effectively, and efficiently without NFTs and the Blockchain.
I would love to hear ideas for this!
Well, one idea would be that an awful lot of the roots of royalty payment and basic minimums are enshrined under law and enforced by government bodies (like the Copyright Royalty Board who are in the middle of a battle with the streaming services who are trying to drastically reduce their rates and covered under pretty standard contract law so that musicians can and have - MANY times - sued labels and publishers and whoever else if they're getting screwed.
In short, so far it seems like the people most enthusiastic about this idea have little or no actual knowledge of the current laws and regulations and policies and practices covering how musicians get paid. They're all just, "Hey, they're getting screwed, especially the little guys !!!"
Which, I mean, cool, thanks for your support, but I'm not gonna trust that you have good ideas about how to fix a thing if you don't know how it works in the first place. I don't just randomly take a hammer to my car engine when it won't start.
Which THEN means that this whole NFT/blockchain music idea (which is still pretty incoherent) is starting to sound like a lot of other "disruptor" ideas. Where it's being sold as "give power & dough to the little guy by getting rid of the middleman" (Uber: earn extra cash in your spare time with your own car! AirB&B: pay for your vacation by renting out your own home while you're gone!) but it doesn't take long to turn into "run a business without any regulation or oversight or legal protections for the "little guy"."
posted by soundguy99 at 3:29 PM on April 21, 2022 [7 favorites]
I fully agree that crypto/web3 is scammy nonsense, and should be avoided, but I do not really get the argument that being paid in crypto is worthless.
If someone gives you $2000 worth of Ethereum or whatever it is a pretty simple process to turn it into $2000 minus a few bucks for transaction fees in a couple of minutes.
Yes there are liquidity issues when you are talking about the people who own huge amounts of the stuff. prices are not stable, and it will likely crash at some point, but right now if you have the stuff, you can pay your rent and eat food.
posted by St. Sorryass at 4:02 AM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
If someone gives you $2000 worth of Ethereum or whatever it is a pretty simple process to turn it into $2000 minus a few bucks for transaction fees in a couple of minutes.
Yes there are liquidity issues when you are talking about the people who own huge amounts of the stuff. prices are not stable, and it will likely crash at some point, but right now if you have the stuff, you can pay your rent and eat food.
posted by St. Sorryass at 4:02 AM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
"Sure, it's a pyramid scheme, but it won't fall apart until I've passed the burden onto someone else" feels like a thing that shouldn't require explaining as to why it's both a deeply unethical statement and also literally what every person who gets fucked by a pyramid scheme thinks right before they get fucked.
Being involved in crypto at all makes you complicit in the scam, and also risks you becoming the ultimate person holding the bag.
posted by a faithful sock at 5:02 AM on April 22, 2022 [5 favorites]
Being involved in crypto at all makes you complicit in the scam, and also risks you becoming the ultimate person holding the bag.
posted by a faithful sock at 5:02 AM on April 22, 2022 [5 favorites]
You don't get the argument that being paid in magic beans is worthless, because it's so easy to find people who can still be convinced to buy magic beans. And yeah, you've gotta be careful not to sell too many of them at once, and sooner or later the word will get around that they're worthless, but right now if you have magic beans you can pay your rent so this is fine really.
That's honestly your argument here?
posted by automatronic at 7:21 AM on April 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
That's honestly your argument here?
posted by automatronic at 7:21 AM on April 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
If someone gives you $2000 worth of Ethereum or whatever it is a pretty simple process to turn it into $2000 minus a few bucks for transaction fees in a couple of minutes.
So why not just ask for the $2k, skipping the overhead and environmental costs? Whether it is Ethereum or whatever else, cryptoscrip is only worth something when there is another sucker willing to trade real money for your scrip.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:00 AM on April 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
So why not just ask for the $2k, skipping the overhead and environmental costs? Whether it is Ethereum or whatever else, cryptoscrip is only worth something when there is another sucker willing to trade real money for your scrip.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:00 AM on April 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
I am not really trying to make an argument, like I said crypto is is scammy nonsense, and should be avoided. I work in digital art, and I have spent a *lot* of my professional life over the past year talking clients out out of getting involved with this stuff.
I just think that some of the well deserved pushback is getting to the point where, the facts are getting misunderstood or exaggerated to the point where the argument becomes counterproductive.
If you jump into a conversation in an artist community where people are still on the fence about participating in crypto stuff and tell them that ETH is fake money that you will be unable to spend, a lot of people are going to ignore whatever else you have to say, because their actual experience has been seeing people making and spending it just fine.
I never know how to approach this kind of thing, and I would never bring this kind of thing up out in the wider internet where I might be undermining someone's anti crypto argument in front of people who might be influenced.
It gets frustrating though, This conversation that has been going on for years and believe it or not does have some nuance to it, is impossible to have because everyone who is "on my side" of the argument but who's knowledge or involvement of this stuff come from watching that Folding Ideas video, wants to jump in and dunk on some crypto bros.
This of course also means that pro crypto artists spaces get less and less likely to listen to any opinion outside of the hype machine, and just turn into these horrible whirlwinds of desperate true believers and they grifters who feed on them.
posted by St. Sorryass at 7:19 PM on April 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
I just think that some of the well deserved pushback is getting to the point where, the facts are getting misunderstood or exaggerated to the point where the argument becomes counterproductive.
If you jump into a conversation in an artist community where people are still on the fence about participating in crypto stuff and tell them that ETH is fake money that you will be unable to spend, a lot of people are going to ignore whatever else you have to say, because their actual experience has been seeing people making and spending it just fine.
I never know how to approach this kind of thing, and I would never bring this kind of thing up out in the wider internet where I might be undermining someone's anti crypto argument in front of people who might be influenced.
It gets frustrating though, This conversation that has been going on for years and believe it or not does have some nuance to it, is impossible to have because everyone who is "on my side" of the argument but who's knowledge or involvement of this stuff come from watching that Folding Ideas video, wants to jump in and dunk on some crypto bros.
This of course also means that pro crypto artists spaces get less and less likely to listen to any opinion outside of the hype machine, and just turn into these horrible whirlwinds of desperate true believers and they grifters who feed on them.
posted by St. Sorryass at 7:19 PM on April 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
*You don't get the argument that being paid in magic beans is worthless, because it's so easy to find people who can still be convinced to buy magic beans. And yeah, you've gotta be careful not to sell too many of them at once, and sooner or later the word will get around that they're worthless, but right now if you have magic beans you can pay your rent so this is fine really.
That's honestly your argument here?*
Whilst I’m certainly not pro-crypto, you can use Paypal and Venmo to buy and sell crypto at this point. I rather suspect that us crypto hawks are understimating how easy it is to move dollars into and out of crypto at the moment. That doesn’t mean it’s not funded on scammy bull, it does mean that if you buy something with crypto and then get your cash out (as opposed to hanging out waiting to get rich, you will be fine. In other words, being paid a small amount in magic beans isn’t worthless but you should un-magic bean them ASAP.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:12 PM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
That's honestly your argument here?*
Whilst I’m certainly not pro-crypto, you can use Paypal and Venmo to buy and sell crypto at this point. I rather suspect that us crypto hawks are understimating how easy it is to move dollars into and out of crypto at the moment. That doesn’t mean it’s not funded on scammy bull, it does mean that if you buy something with crypto and then get your cash out (as opposed to hanging out waiting to get rich, you will be fine. In other words, being paid a small amount in magic beans isn’t worthless but you should un-magic bean them ASAP.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:12 PM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
This of course also means that pro crypto artists spaces get less and less likely to listen to any opinion outside of the hype machine
Sounds a bit like that particular horse has already bolted, not sure what closing the door now will achieve.
In other words, being paid a small amount in magic beans isn’t worthless but you should un-magic bean them ASAP.
I mean yeah, if you have no moral qualms with being part of the scam and legitimising the whole thing. You might be fine, but it will ultimately be at someone else's expense. You can find pretty safe ways to participate in many other pyramid and ponzi schemes too, and they tend to all be predicated on being a fairly small time player and getting out quick. That you personally might get screwed is still true if unlikely, but that's hardly the point.
posted by Dysk at 8:59 PM on April 23, 2022
Sounds a bit like that particular horse has already bolted, not sure what closing the door now will achieve.
In other words, being paid a small amount in magic beans isn’t worthless but you should un-magic bean them ASAP.
I mean yeah, if you have no moral qualms with being part of the scam and legitimising the whole thing. You might be fine, but it will ultimately be at someone else's expense. You can find pretty safe ways to participate in many other pyramid and ponzi schemes too, and they tend to all be predicated on being a fairly small time player and getting out quick. That you personally might get screwed is still true if unlikely, but that's hardly the point.
posted by Dysk at 8:59 PM on April 23, 2022
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posted by acb at 8:45 AM on April 20, 2022 [42 favorites]