there exist very few great songs documented on the blockchain. no new genres have been invented which is disappointing given that clowncore is achieved by playing math metal dressed as a clown. you could argue that our own version of clowncore has been attempted by universal music group in the form of kingship, a band composed of 4 bayc avatars. their output has been scrubbed from the internet in embarrassment (if you can find it please send it to me). ‘minting' needs to be broken down into ‘media type specific’ behaviors. 'collect' is a weak value proposition in 2024 when I am writing this (it may come back around). 'support' is a little better but still not great. you could build a model where you are funding the next thing ('fund'), like super collector, which is also better than 'collect’. I got a peek at fam from iamnick.eth and I think it's moving in the right direction, which is to create ways beyond 'mint' or 'collect' to engage with music onchain, especially at the collective level. we need more music nft clients like fam, songcamp’s audiato & futuretape that open the door to behaviors that will click with people who aren't wealthy or just trying to support web3 as a concept. denying web3 music as a category is foolish. it is not uncommon for the medium to have a relationship to the content or message, some might even say that the medium is the message. mixtapes, AM radio, car commercials, rare japanese vinyl, 8 track, soundcloud, song used in prestige television closing credits - all of these mediums have a 'sound'. people will group web3 music into a category because of the distribution method. sadly, most of the publicized music in web3 doesn't really have a coherent much less cohesive sonic or visual identity. web3 music is mostly uncurious and unambitious. i don't have an issue with raw, under produced or technically unproficient work existing here. I wish more web3 music felt raw. the medium creates a huge opportunity to create visual and written context for the music and when people lean into this it is awesome and well received. Latasha & Gremlin are two artists who have a clear visual language that they've married to their sonics and it hits very hard. they are also both taking sonic risks and making types of music that doesn't exist in over abundance elsewhere. I don't want to mint pollen type beats or car commercial type beats or even 'i wish i was burial or two shell' rave type jungle house ass beats. I want web3 music to fucking slap and be new and to have a mechanic that is legible to regular people as a sensible way of engaging. if
that's "give me a couple bucks just because" that's absolutely fine - passing the hat around during the live set is a tried and true way of supporting music. we have enough tools to be able to build in that direction in a meaningful way, and we are failing musicians by not building in a direction that supports risk taking. I also fundamentally disagree with the notion that great music is common, that creativity should always be encouraged agnostic to quality or that artists should be coddled by their audiences. you have to earn a following, same as everywhere else. there are no shortcuts to making good music and never have been. good music, proficient music, well produced mixed and mastered music, is everywhere and this excess of supply has driven the price way down. there is really powerful and great pop music coming out of the major label system. writing/producing as a craft is concentrated and supported in small scenes that are outputting a very specific & great sound. once a good artist gets absorbed into the industry, the incentives warp dramatically in a way that almost immediately snuffs out the thing that made them special and stops them from innovating further. the economics of boundary pushing and risk taking get overwhelmed as soon as the first major check gets cut and then you're just trying to monetize a well known brand as content and manage reputational risk and downside. most of the best rap labels have mastered keeping the creative process away from the industry and utilizing majors for their distribution and label services while avoiding the kind of slow death encouraged by the content mill. there is a lot of possibility for experimental music and the risks associated with making experimental music have never been higher. the macroeconomic conditions that inspire that kind of movement have never been weaker in my lifetime. In the 90s you could write a song about walking on the sun built around a cute organ riff and never have to work again even if your band dressed like the cast of the movie clerks. we are currently in a difficult climate for creating great work and the need for great work has never been higher. the birdman must fly in any weather. we need experimental music onchain. we need onchain native genres. we need artists interested in exploring the containers for their music and mixing media together in unanticipated new ways. the blockchain has a character, the music
documented here could have a character, this could all mean something besides number go up. we need a point of view and a sense of community to get there. i’ve felt it at different times in different corners of the space; during a partybid for pussy riot’s ‘drink my blood’, minting loot from the contract, figuring out how to get a terraform to say ‘bing bong’ in fwb’s nft general chat at 4am. I’ve heard beautiful music here; tangling in headlights by urboiari, barely A lady ✧ raw jam by forrest mortifee. I think about these songs all the time. there were conditions under which this music might have been attributed its full value by market forces; in march of 2021 anything felt possible. I made my best music nft which was purchased for 65 $fwb by cooper turley. I made one good nft since then, which i gave to bradey from panther modern because he said he liked it in the fwb discord. why did my nfts get discernibly worse as i spent more time in the space? i was talking to a friend about nft collections and he asked me what exactly in the code made it so you could only make nfts that were profile views of animal cartoons. his exposure to nfts was so limited that he assumed there was something in the code forcing people to only make nfts that utilized a profile view of an animal drawing as their media. Its the same brain worm that executives at umg were dealing with when they decided to make 4 bayc avatars into a band (seriously if you can find any of kingship’s music please drop it in the comments). some version of this brain worm has found its way into my brain; on some level the gravity of capital convinced me that nfts had to be a certain way to succeed. that way is undeniably worse than the kind of experiments i was making during my first year on the blockchain. someone’s version of a music nft is definitely dead and honestly, thank god, because that stuff wasn’t fooling anyone. the capital was sourced before the product could mature, the cart was put before the horse. when we’re done clearing away the carcass of failed experiments like kingship we will have made space for what will come next. long live music nfts.
So good to see so many folks who I respect in the comments here. Similar to Chris I’m not sure I have much to add other than to acknowledge this all really resonates.
🥹🥹 tank you Yuri. so glad that recording touched you. honestly, I just love minting music NFTs bc I feel like I can do whatever the fuck I want on here - its a public record of my demos ;; they get to have a life, in many cases where they most certainly wud not have otherwise. just airdropped u the latest btw :3 appreciate yous.
so cool how the simply tweak of throwing this into a "bloggish" UI as you say completely changes the relationship with and actions ppl are taking with the published work. Looking at this post on Zora.co and seeing all the long and thoughtful comments in the comments section feel soooo good and *never* would have happened directly on the zora.co ui
agree and wish there was more of a sonic 'scene' here. obv still plenty of time for stuff to emerge.
wish there was more raw stuff too. the forrest track is moving as hell.
as far as this price/supply meta, it doesn't seem interesting or innovative to me. need more real experimentation and interaction w the new mediums available and less shouting about skeuomorphic takes on what we should do.
i don't care what it's called. i care that it means something to me and maybe explores some new ground.
The thing that got me into onchain stuff in the first place was the relational aspect - the ability to fix intangible things and their relation to each other and to people in virtual space. I like the sentiment of artists "exploring the containers of their music" because that was my own primary reason for getting in to all this stuff, and it's the reason I am still around. The *interaction* is "the sound" of onchain music for me. If it's not utilising the composability, the modularity or the relational aspects in some way then it's just distribution. Don't know if I am making sense, but the feeling of an open space to explore is "the sound" to me. Traversing an uncharted territory and finding likeminded people along the way to follow or befriend is "the sound" to me.
Anyways, appreciate this new place, appreciate your peptalk, appreciate all the possible futures.
I think it can be an exchange, like its free, raw, like downloading of zshare off a blog, but i not only get to own it and collect, but can try and give something back either when I can or by helping amplify it. consumers are the pathway, if minting could help motivate or add to the frictionless pace of how information can move, but better track it, then everyone wins.
kingship has no music, only m&ms — I like to think of music NFTs as a subculture & place in one, kind of like how we viewed soundcloud or beatport in their heyday. solid solid points made.
Dear Coop:
It ruffled feathers because when it comes to music the way you have moved and shifted narratives loudly is always as far from organic & authentic as it gets. I have no doubts you’re a fan of music, but you don’t move as someone who respects culture & or anything organic, I’m sure you’ve made the people around you money from music, but you, me & everyone else knows it’s never been organic, from botting sound, to boosts.. You’re an intelligent human & no one can deny you’re business savvy, but you’re strategies & influence are not used for good of music or artists in the ecosystem. It’s blockchain, it’s all transparent. VC’s & Founders, Protocols & Friends is who you serve. You know in your heart this an objective truth so of course you ruffled feathers, you’re the loudest voice & you have of history of not being a net positive for culture, art, music. Wish you could understand, but your actions & words have done the most harm to “this ecosystem” 🫂
"We've noticed this model is actually more profitable in the long-term as it creates opportunities for anyone to come in whenever they want - without having to worry about there being no copies left or being priced out due to it being out of someone's budget" - coopahtroopa
It's a strong point that is also counter intuitive (at least to me, when i was first introduced to it). I kinda intentionally didn't get into pricing here because I think it's secondary to content but ultimately it's a pretty personal thing. from the artist side, being asked to lower your price or feeling market pressure to conform to a low price point can have deeper meaning than just the metrics. Price point can be symbolic of worth even if the data bears out that a lower price point will have higher overall revenue. The meaning of that revenue, in the form of one person's belief, has a different meaning than 10 people valuing the work differently.
I'll use John Henry as an example here - you buying this for 65 $fwb profoundly changed my life in a way that is difficult to measure. And that impact is uniquely linked to the fact that your bid felt like an important signal of belief to keep going. It was a powerful enough signal that it prompted me to quit UMG and eventually start working at FWB. Would minting a bunch of editions to different people have had the same impact? i doubt i would have gotten enough $fwb to join the discord this way and that would have had a major impact on my trajectory.
All this is to say that there are forces that are only visible from the artist side that transcend the data. You're objectively correct with the point you're making - the dune dashboard is pretty undeniable - but there are also metrics we don't measure on Dune that really matter.
It means the world to me to start having this conversation in long form onchain instead of on twitter. let's keep it going.
I take a lot of responsibility for the overhype of "Music NFTs" as they were originally known. The reality is I'm extremely passionate about music and wanted to see a world where songs were being valued the same as pfps and other forms of art onchain that frankly felt less thought out and half baked.
I've been collecting music onchain for the better half of 4+ years at this point - and am still collecting music pretty much everyday.
My POV stemmed from the fact that there are not new people coming into the space excited about the idea of minting their music or people collecting it organically because they love it.
For a space to work - it needs to be able to support recurring, organic behavior that is not dependent on any expectations of profits or utility. I believe we are the closer to that now than we ever have been.
And this is why I think "Music NFTs" as a meme are dead. To me - "Music NFTs" represented the 2021 logic of selling a very small number of limited editions for a very high price. The current meta of unlimited open editions feels like a much healthier place to grow from. There seems to be a misconception that because the editions are cheap (typically 0.000777 ETH but I think even this is high) that the music is undervalued or worthless.
We've noticed this model is actually more profitable in the long-term as it creates opportunities for anyone to come in whenever they want - without having to worry about there being no copies left or being priced out due to it being out of someone's budget. Data here - dune.com/coop_records/coop-recs
We've managed to onboard 100 artists in 2024 - leading with the narrative of low stakes, low pressure and low expectations. We actively push back on the use of the word "NFT" as its polarizing and intimidating to anyone who didn't make a bag in 2021. It's a much healthier starting point and exposes artists to the space by getting them paid without having to cater to a brand new group of supposed "superfans" who are largely just people trying to flip for profit at the end of the day.
Had no clue my post would ruffle so many feathers - I thought we were all on the same page based on onchain data in 2024 across the board and saw it as an opportunity to start a new narrative about healthier beginnings using the learnings of the past two years in a bear market.
John Henry is a banger. Proud to be a collector of what you consider to be your best Music NFT.
those who love it will keep showing up and creating no matter what. don't ever lose the soul and essence of how you move/ walk it out or i'm fly to you and have talk.
let's check-in on 07/16/2025, 07/16/2026, 7/16/2027, 7/16/2028, 7/16/2029, 7/16/2030, 7/16/2040, 7/16/2045, 7/16/2050, etc. etc. etc.
buildinginpublic
there exist very few great songs documented on the blockchain. no new genres have been invented which is disappointing given that clowncore is achieved by playing math metal dressed as a clown. you could argue that our own version of clowncore has been attempted by universal music group in the form of kingship, a band composed of 4 bayc avatars. their output has been scrubbed from the internet in embarrassment (if you can find it please send it to me).
‘minting' needs to be broken down into ‘media type specific’ behaviors. 'collect' is a weak value proposition in 2024 when I am writing this (it may come back around). 'support' is a little better but still not great. you could build a model where you are funding the next thing ('fund'), like super collector, which is also better than 'collect’. I got a peek at fam from iamnick.eth and I think it's moving in the right direction, which is to create ways beyond 'mint' or 'collect' to engage with music onchain, especially at the collective level. we need more music nft clients like fam, songcamp’s audiato & futuretape that open the door to behaviors that will click with people who aren't wealthy or just trying to support web3 as a concept. denying web3 music as a category is foolish. it is not uncommon for the medium to have a relationship to the content or message, some might even say that the medium is the message. mixtapes, AM radio, car commercials, rare japanese vinyl, 8 track, soundcloud, song used in prestige television closing credits - all of these mediums have a 'sound'. people will group web3 music into a category because of the distribution method. sadly, most of the publicized music in web3 doesn't really have a coherent much less cohesive sonic or visual identity. web3 music is mostly uncurious and unambitious.
i don't have an issue with raw, under produced or technically unproficient work existing here. I wish more web3 music felt raw. the medium creates a huge opportunity to create visual and written context for the music and when people lean into this it is awesome and well received. Latasha & Gremlin are two artists who have a clear visual language that they've married to their sonics and it hits very hard. they are also both taking sonic risks and making types of music that doesn't exist in over abundance elsewhere. I don't want to mint pollen type beats or car commercial type beats or even 'i wish i was burial or two shell' rave type jungle house ass beats. I want web3 music to fucking slap and be new and to have a mechanic that is legible to regular people as a sensible way of engaging. if
that's "give me a couple bucks just because" that's absolutely fine - passing the hat around during the live set is a tried and true way of supporting music. we have enough tools to be able to build in that direction in a meaningful way, and we are failing musicians by not building in a direction that supports risk taking.
I also fundamentally disagree with the notion that great music is common, that creativity should always be encouraged agnostic to quality or that artists should be coddled by their audiences. you have to earn a following, same as everywhere else. there are no shortcuts to making good music and never have been.
good music, proficient music, well produced mixed and mastered music, is everywhere and this excess of supply has driven the price way down. there is really powerful and great pop music coming out of the major label system. writing/producing as a craft is concentrated and supported in small scenes that are outputting a very specific & great sound. once a good artist gets absorbed into the industry, the incentives warp dramatically in a way that almost immediately snuffs out the thing that made them special and stops them from innovating further. the economics of boundary pushing and risk taking get overwhelmed as soon as the first major check gets cut and then you're just trying to monetize a well known brand as content and manage reputational risk and downside. most of the best rap labels have mastered keeping the creative process away from the industry and utilizing majors for their distribution and label services while avoiding the kind of slow death encouraged by the content mill.
there is a lot of possibility for experimental music and the risks associated with making experimental music have never been higher. the macroeconomic conditions that inspire that kind of movement have never been weaker in my lifetime. In the 90s you could write a song about walking on the sun built around a cute organ riff and never have to work again even if your band dressed like the cast of the movie clerks. we are currently in a difficult climate for creating great work and the need for great work has never been higher. the birdman must fly in any weather.
we need experimental music onchain. we need onchain native genres. we need artists interested in exploring the containers for their music and mixing media together in unanticipated new ways. the blockchain has a character, the music
documented here could have a character, this could all mean something besides number go up. we need a point of view and a sense of community to get there. i’ve felt it at different times in different corners of the space; during a partybid for pussy riot’s ‘drink my blood’, minting loot from the contract, figuring out how to get a terraform to say ‘bing bong’ in fwb’s nft general chat at 4am. I’ve heard beautiful music here; tangling in headlights by urboiari, barely A lady ✧ raw jam by forrest mortifee. I think about these songs all the time.
there were conditions under which this music might have been attributed its full value by market forces; in march of 2021 anything felt possible. I made my best music nft which was purchased for 65 $fwb by cooper turley. I made one good nft since then, which i gave to bradey from panther modern because he said he liked it in the fwb discord. why did my nfts get discernibly worse as i spent more time in the space?
i was talking to a friend about nft collections and he asked me what exactly in the code made it so you could only make nfts that were profile views of animal cartoons. his exposure to nfts was so limited that he assumed there was something in the code forcing people to only make nfts that utilized a profile view of an animal drawing as their media. Its the same brain worm that executives at umg were dealing with when they decided to make 4 bayc avatars into a band (seriously if you can find any of kingship’s music please drop it in the comments).
some version of this brain worm has found its way into my brain; on some level the gravity of capital convinced me that nfts had to be a certain way to succeed. that way is undeniably worse than the kind of experiments i was making during my first year on the blockchain.
someone’s version of a music nft is definitely dead and honestly, thank god, because that stuff wasn’t fooling anyone. the capital was sourced before the product could mature, the cart was put before the horse. when we’re done clearing away the carcass of failed experiments like kingship we will have made space for what will come next. long live music nfts.
Incase the links don’t load properly:
[clowncore](www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR_rPd_ufK4)
[tangling in headlights by urboiari](opensea.io/collection/deer-tangling-like-ivy)
[barely A lady ✧ raw jam by forrest mortifee](zora.co/collect/eth:0xdffd47af914c4fb80f58db83e9c0c5fb7d6dfa be)
[my best music nft](opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xabefbc9fd2f806065b4f3c237d4b59d9a9 7bcac7/1653)
[one good nft since](foundation.app/mint/eth/0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1 C48a5405/37994)
wish there was more raw stuff too. the forrest track is moving as hell.
as far as this price/supply meta, it doesn't seem interesting or innovative to me. need more real experimentation and interaction w the new mediums available and less shouting about skeuomorphic takes on what we should do.
i don't care what it's called. i care that it means something to me and maybe explores some new ground.
The thing that got me into onchain stuff in the first place was the relational aspect - the ability to fix intangible things and their relation to each other and to people in virtual space. I like the sentiment of artists "exploring the containers of their music" because that was my own primary reason for getting in to all this stuff, and it's the reason I am still around. The *interaction* is "the sound" of onchain music for me. If it's not utilising the composability, the modularity or the relational aspects in some way then it's just distribution. Don't know if I am making sense, but the feeling of an open space to explore is "the sound" to me. Traversing an uncharted territory and finding likeminded people along the way to follow or befriend is "the sound" to me.
Anyways, appreciate this new place, appreciate your peptalk, appreciate all the possible futures.
i feel so similar i don't have much to add here
thanks for this
boy you know the way to my heart. that line *hits*!
It's a strong point that is also counter intuitive (at least to me, when i was first introduced to it). I kinda intentionally didn't get into pricing here because I think it's secondary to content but ultimately it's a pretty personal thing. from the artist side, being asked to lower your price or feeling market pressure to conform to a low price point can have deeper meaning than just the metrics. Price point can be symbolic of worth even if the data bears out that a lower price point will have higher overall revenue. The meaning of that revenue, in the form of one person's belief, has a different meaning than 10 people valuing the work differently.
I'll use John Henry as an example here - you buying this for 65 $fwb profoundly changed my life in a way that is difficult to measure. And that impact is uniquely linked to the fact that your bid felt like an important signal of belief to keep going. It was a powerful enough signal that it prompted me to quit UMG and eventually start working at FWB. Would minting a bunch of editions to different people have had the same impact? i doubt i would have gotten enough $fwb to join the discord this way and that would have had a major impact on my trajectory.
All this is to say that there are forces that are only visible from the artist side that transcend the data. You're objectively correct with the point you're making - the dune dashboard is pretty undeniable - but there are also metrics we don't measure on Dune that really matter.
It means the world to me to start having this conversation in long form onchain instead of on twitter. let's keep it going.
I've been collecting music onchain for the better half of 4+ years at this point - and am still collecting music pretty much everyday.
My POV stemmed from the fact that there are not new people coming into the space excited about the idea of minting their music or people collecting it organically because they love it.
For a space to work - it needs to be able to support recurring, organic behavior that is not dependent on any expectations of profits or utility. I believe we are the closer to that now than we ever have been.
And this is why I think "Music NFTs" as a meme are dead. To me - "Music NFTs" represented the 2021 logic of selling a very small number of limited editions for a very high price. The current meta of unlimited open editions feels like a much healthier place to grow from. There seems to be a misconception that because the editions are cheap (typically 0.000777 ETH but I think even this is high) that the music is undervalued or worthless.
We've noticed this model is actually more profitable in the long-term as it creates opportunities for anyone to come in whenever they want - without having to worry about there being no copies left or being priced out due to it being out of someone's budget. Data here - dune.com/coop_records/coop-recs
We've managed to onboard 100 artists in 2024 - leading with the narrative of low stakes, low pressure and low expectations. We actively push back on the use of the word "NFT" as its polarizing and intimidating to anyone who didn't make a bag in 2021. It's a much healthier starting point and exposes artists to the space by getting them paid without having to cater to a brand new group of supposed "superfans" who are largely just people trying to flip for profit at the end of the day.
Had no clue my post would ruffle so many feathers - I thought we were all on the same page based on onchain data in 2024 across the board and saw it as an opportunity to start a new narrative about healthier beginnings using the learnings of the past two years in a bear market.
John Henry is a banger. Proud to be a collector of what you consider to be your best Music NFT.
those who love it will keep showing up and creating no matter what. don't ever lose the soul and essence of how you move/ walk it out or i'm fly to you and have talk.
let's check-in on 07/16/2025, 07/16/2026, 7/16/2027, 7/16/2028, 7/16/2029, 7/16/2030, 7/16/2040, 7/16/2045, 7/16/2050, etc. etc. etc.
MOOD tonight. this still goes HARD (stank face energy)
i miss you roy hargrove
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfILgLkfnMs&ab_channel=TheRHFactor-Topic
keep going and stay heartFULL,
David T Phung
07/16/2024
x.com/studio_daddy/status/1796254157877436645?s=46&t=vXs_JZn8PJrQc6nfdn92XQ
[tangling in headlights by
urboiari](opensea.io/collection/deer-tangling-like-ivy)
[barely A lady ✧ raw jam by forrest
mortifee](
be)
[my best music
nft](opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xabefbc9fd2f806065b4f3c237d4b59d9a9
7bcac7/1653)
[one good nft
since](foundation.app/mint/eth/0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1
C48a5405/37994)