The 1,000 true fan theory, first proposed by Kevin Kelly in 2008, states that an artist can make a living by having 1,000 true fans who are willing to financially support their work. These fans will buy every new product and merchandise, attend every live performance, and actively promote the artist’s work to others. According to the theory, if an artist can connect with and cultivate 1,000 true fans, they can generate a sustainable income without relying on traditional gatekeepers such as record labels or commercial radio.

The internet and social media have made it easier for artists to connect directly with their fans and build a fanbase. With web3 and NFTs it has become easy for artists to monetize their work, build their community, engage with their fans in more creative ways, curate immersive experiences for them and create new channels for distribution same with the help of web3 music platforms.

However, it almost feels like these artists are relying too much on these platforms for discovery and the method of distribution. These platforms seem like a great place to monetize and get discovered by collectors but they don’t seem to do much in terms of how music is consumed, community engagement, and creating instances for fans and artists to engage one-on-one.

We’ve thought very deeply about these problems at a.live, and wanted to break down how we’re attempting to make fans have more engaging and memorable interactions with the artists they collect from. There are 3 broad areas in how Alive aims to redefine the methods of music — consumption, social activities and ownership.

Music Consumption

2022 was the year that people stopped discovering music on Spotify and started discovering it on Tiktok, but even this feels fleeting and prone to fatigue. Whenever we’re asked to explain a.live to someone older, we just tell them it’s MTV- a place where you go regularly to discover and experience the joy of music.

Music to most people now is just ambient sound now but it doesn’t have to be and the tide is turning. As Ted Gioia notes, older music is now 70% of the US market, because people are fatigued with the sameness of modern music. We feel a renaissance of musical styles & creativity is just around the corner- where music will require more attention, allow listeners to play with and mold it in ways they can’t imagine, and much more.

There are metaverse-based music projects out there but they tend to feel more like ‘listening rooms’. They seem to lack a narrative flow, not many easter eggs, and no sense of the worlds adding to and augmenting the music — with the notable exception of the Travis Scott experience and some of Wave’s concerts. Alive enables this with a visually evocative and truly immersive way to experience songs.

We are working on making performances feel “real.” We are doing so by allowing our artists access to a wide variety of tools and features to be able to customize the worlds according to the needs of their drop. You can create everything from a Minecraft-like world to a fully realistic seeming world using our world-generating tools.

We are exploring next-generation avatar technology and recording volumetric video performances for select artists. This will allow listeners to truly “get up close and personal” with the performers.

If you can move closer to an artist, shouldn’t the sound change as well? If you’ve ever been to a concert, it’s almost visceral to feel the space you’re in. Even more so in a rehearsal room. We are incorporating spatial audio and other immersive features to enhance virtual concert experiences for fans. In the next quarter, we’ll bring this to Alive — every performance zone will have the ability for you to hear the music differently as you move around the space.

So far, these are aspects of making 2D music feel 3D. The big shift and one that gaming audiences almost expect is their experience changing each time and being able to control things.

We’ve made small steps towards this already, you can:

i) Customize your avatar

ii) Apply visual filters and build custom mounts (rides used to move around the world)

For example, one of our featured artists Dragaan’s world had a filter you could jump and catch- once you did, you could make the world’s visuals glitch like a VHS tape. You can collect these and customize your worlds. You could explore this world on a custom-made mount that looked like a swan.

iii) Change the music itself

You’re probably familiar with Ye’s Donda Stem player, and how it allows you to isolate instruments and change volumes to create your own remix, almost. Almost every song on alive has this as a built-in functionality that artists usually offer as a paid feature. The NFT purchase unlocks the stem player.

This is just the beginning, though- the ultimate goal of this is that you can change the songs almost beyond recognition, both visually and in terms of the audio. With user-controllable filters, in-game assets & audio tools (made as simple to use as Instagram) in the coming years, you can star in a music video of your favorite artist’s song. Think of it as Tiktok reels but for the metaverse.

Imagine having an “audio avatar” that you created by combining various audio and visual elements, and being able to take it with you anywhere on the internet as your personal signature. Even cooler if the result was a unique and unrecognizable mashup of “Yesterday” and “WAP” in the style of Meshuggah, without any prior musical knowledge. This is a soon-to-be reality with Alive.

Social activities & fandom

As previously mentioned, music is a social experience, and while live streams and metaverse experiences are enjoyable, they don’t quite capture that social aspect. That’s why we’re incorporating social hubs, where fans of a specific genre or band can come together in a space they design based on that theme. With the power of blockchain, these interactions can be permissionless and cross-platform, allowing for seamless continuation of token-gated chats across different platforms.

To add an extra layer of excitement, we’ll be incorporating elements of gamification and quests. With so much potential in the metaverse, we want to make sure there’s always something to build and explore beyond just virtual spaces. By incorporating a narrative into songs and offering things to collect and upgrade along the way, we believe we’ve found the answer.

Buying Merch is a big part of being a fan, and we want to extend that into the virtual world. Young people are already spending thousands on virtual items like emotes and skins, so just imagine the possibilities with a music metaverse.

Finally, we’re also exploring ways to introduce improved ways of social flexing. What if sharing your love for a band across social media or creating your remix earned you fan club points? This concept has already been executed on a small scale by bands like Avenged Sevenfold and Megadeth, but in a music metaverse environment, the possibilities are endless, with badges, levels, and more. The ultimate goal is to have fan clubs as DAOs, but that’s a topic for another day.

Another exciting aspect is the value of being an early supporter. What if being early had value? On Alive, if you purchase a song’s NFT at its release party, your presence, along with any dances, skins, or other virtual items, will persist forever in that world. This is the ultimate social flex, imagine being forever present in the release video for a classic song like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.

Ownership

People keep referring to NFTs as the new ‘digital vinyl’, but why is this especially true? If it sits in your wallet and needs an app to play, how and why is it different from Bandcamp?

The answer lies in the metaverse, where millions of players already purchase in-game items. Imagine a world of music that can only be fully experienced and interacted with the added layer of ownership — that’s the future of vinyl for the next generation. Examples of this are already present in games like Guitar Hero and Beat Saber, where people are willing to pay large amounts to own single songs because the experience is significantly different from what streaming services offer. Not only will you have a place to store and showcase your music, but future versions of the app will also have user rooms for you to display and play back your collection.

A lot of OG web3 artists are experimenting with token-gated content, such as Josh Savage’s Love Letters, which offers multiple versions of each song, stems, and more for NFT holders.

StemsDAO’s NFTs that focus on remixing songs are another example, but it requires a knowledge of using a DAW like Garage Band. Currently, there aren’t any apps that allow users to easily access and share their content from different platforms in one place.

User-Generated Content is another fan feature we’ve been tinkering with at Alive. The revolution that Web3 and AI will bring is yet to be fully appreciated and shortly, anyone will be able to create “art” that rivals professional work. Imagine being able to rework music that you own in a manner that requires minimal technical knowledge and being able to create your own content, it will be possible with Alive very soon.

We aim to make music experiences intimate and ease-to-use for fans

Web3 technology has been a challenge for many music fans to embrace, but the team at Alive is determined to change that. Our platform is designed to make the experience of discovering and enjoying music as simple and intuitive as possible. With the upcoming mobile app and VR versions of Alive, you don’t need to worry about managing a wallet or paying with cryptocurrency. The benefits of web3 technology are integrated seamlessly, making the experience enjoyable and user-friendly.

We believe that by making the onboarding experience simple and immersive, more fans will be able to experience music in a new and exciting way on a.live. Our goal is to provide a platform that is accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise. By combining the latest advancements in technology with a focus on ease of use, Alive is poised to revolutionize the way people discover and experience music.

If you’re excited about what we’re building at Alive, check out our website and follow us on Instagram and Twitter to stay updated with our latest music releases, updates, and more…

There is so much conversation taking place right now about giving power back to artists through Web3, and through these conversations we are seeing a redefinition of what it means to be an artist today. However, changes in consumer behaviour around how content is used or valued can only happen when the form of consumption changes and becomes something that people are actively engaged with.

At a.live, we are keen to support artists through this and help usher in a new era of music consumption. The goal is to bring music fans and enthusiasts into the Web3 ecosystem and encourage them to actively participate in their favourite artist communities.

a.live is currently compatible for use on browsers only, we are rolling out a mobile application and a VR compatible version in the next few months.

The basic premise of a.live is simple- every song is a world.

These “song worlds” are dropped at a particular day and time, which fans can sign up to get notified for. The best part is that they can sign up using their social media accounts, email or crypto wallets — you don’t need any knowledge or own crypto to join a.live!

At the announced time of the release, fans (as their digital avatars) enter the song world which is a customised metaverse for each song. Unlike other metaverses, these are not static — they change as the song progresses. Fans can explore these worlds, break out in dance moves, pause in front of a screen to watch a video or simply float all while being in the song. They can also buy NFTs or a.live editions that the artist creates for their sing experience, and unlock access to a number of benefits such as exclusive content, offline/virtual community membership etc.

At a.live, we are all about creating these unique, interactive worlds in collaboration with an artist around their music and their vision for it. If you are an artist, read on for more on how it works. There are currently two types of song releases we can support on a.live:

1. Immersive song worlds: Imagine an interactive music video that guides fans on a journey through a song within a personalized and immersive world. The process begins by selecting a visual style as the primary reference for the world and incorporating core elements that will appear at relevant moments throughout the journey. The possibilities are limitless as we use proprietary world-building software that allows artists to choose from various visual styles such as voxel, photorealistic, anime, 2D, etc.

2. Artist performances: This is where we film live concerts and embed those performance into unique immersive worlds that align with the themes of the music. We are experimenting both with avatar performances and volumetric video, similar to the “bullet time” effect in the Matrix movie. This feature will debut in May, in conjunction with the 30th anniversary release of a well-known heavy metal band’s debut album.

Any additional audio, video, text, pdfs or images can be added into the world as bonus content. Any and all of this content can either be free (fully accessible and can be viewed by anyone exploring the world) or token gated for buyers (accessible only to those who buy it).

Some additional features to enhance each song release are:

1. Remixing- Much like the Donda Stem Player by Ye, fans can isolate each instrument for every song released on a.live. Building on this feature, we’ll allow artists to enable fans to remix and mash up songs by different artists into an NFT they can mint allowing for usage as they prefer -only personal use, commercial use or anything in between. Revenue that fans make from this can also flow back to the artist based on percentages they set.
2. Spatial audio- At a live concert or rehearsal room, what you hear changes as you walk around. Some instruments sound louder, or ring more clearly/differently than others. Simultaneously with the launch of the volumetric video feature, fans will be able to experience dynamic changes in the music as they move through the song worlds on a.live. This allows for a highly creative and unique audio experience.
3. Artists can link NFTs to their song worlds and they can be customised in a number of interesting ways.

• Content encryption- Rather than having their files freely available as they currently exist for most Web3 music players, artists can choose to make any content free or only available to token holders on a.live. For token-gated content, the files are encrypted and placed on open storage which will only get decrypted if the file streaming software sees the NFT which gives the artist full control over what gets played, where, and by whom.
• Multichain- ETH or MATIC (the latter is good for Web2 artists whose users dont have crypto)
• Multiple pricing types (fixed, Dutch auction, bonded curve)
• Split royalties & secondary royalties
• The ability to set multiple license types for the use of their music- creative commons, commercial use or anything in between.
• Royalty sales
• Offline benefits- fan clubs, backstage access, etc. We’ll also come up with a fan points and artist token system shortly.

These immersive experiences, and the NFTs linked to them, fundamentally change how music is consumed. It revives the sense of discovery that fans once had with MTV, the allure of owning a physical object like vinyl, and gives artists more control over how their music is experienced, beyond traditional streaming methods. We anticipate this becoming a mainstream trend in the upcoming years, similar to the 30 million people who attended Travis Scott’s concert in Fn8 and can be extended to all artists

Join us on the journey- starting with our next drop, Dragaan’s “Never Again”. Sign up here and we’ll send you a reminder before it goes live!

What does immersive music mean, anyway? All music is immersive if you pay attention to it, in some sense or form. To us at a.live, it means anything that enhances the experience, either in an auditory or visual form, compared to ‘just’ listening.

The history of music was one of increasing sound fidelity and immersion for the first 100 years- each technical innovation enhanced the experience that listeners had with music.

In the beginning, music was mono- all the music came out of one speaker. Stereo was invented in the 1930s, and surround sound for movies shortly after. The labels kept trying to get fans interested in surround music multiple times- with quadraphonic LPs & reel to reel in the 70s (4 speakers),with several rock and jazz musicians leaning in heavily (Santana, Jeff Beck, Simon & Garfunkel).

Musicians tried again in the early 2000s with 5.1 (SACDs and DVD-audio), but somehow, it never caught on, because of the expense and complications of having multiple speakers in a living room space. Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree is the flag bearer for surround music till today, with almost every release out in surround, and several other artists remixed by him as well (King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Opeth).

Folks have asked Abhijit, our founder and CEO, several times whether it’s worth it- every time they do, he asks them to sit down in the listening chair, and listen to the Alan Parsons mix of “On the Run” from Dark Side of the Moon. He’s never had a second question after that!

Whether this trend changed around the early 2000s because consumers finally valued convenience over immersion, or whether other competing forms of entertainment like video, games, social media took over mindshare, is probably a long discussion. We’ve finally gone back to mono- most people listen to music on a soundbar if they’re not plugged into headphones.

We’re seeing another renaissance of surround music with Atmos and spatial audio on Apple Music- but not enough difference is audible or interesting to consumers yet. Will immersive visual forms change this?

For this, we’ll go back in time again- while most music has been accompanied by visuals (think of opera and Broadway), in the 20th century, the biggest mode of discovery for music was MTV- a whole new way of adding to music, beyond just the sound. In the beginning, music videos were a novelty, and no one really paid attention. David Byrne of the Talking Heads talks about this in his book “How Music Works”-

‘In the beginning, MTV needed content. Small bands like ours scrounged and made really cheap music videos that then had lots of airtime- and that’s how we broke through”.

It feels like today is another moment like this- with VR, AR and gaming led formats, artists can drive discovery and more importantly, more sustained engagement with their music.

We’ve all heard about the Travis Scott, Ariana Grande and Lil Nas X concerts in Fortnite and Roblox, and other VR concerts inside games (BTS in PUBG, WaveXR concerts), and how millions of people showed up for them. Radiohead went even further, and released a full-fledged version of their Kid A mnesia album on the Epic Games store- and in true Radiohead style, it was very mind-bendy, but despite that, we’ve only played it once.

One of the most interesting Web3 musicians doing worldbuilding with music is Supersigil- Alex Jone’s album release, which he’s funding with Spectres NFTs. It’s technically impressive and has a lot of thought in it, and feels the closest to art of all the releases so far. Yet somehow, this doesn’t feel mainstream yet. We believe that there are two reasons for this:

i) It’s not quite an ‘art form’ yet. This is our most common complaint about the metaverse in general- they’re just environments that you can walk around in- but what else? The easiest definition of the metaverse (apologies to Matthew Ball for simplifying it this much) is ‘a game without a game’. But if you take away the game, what do you have left? There has to be a mechanic that drives users to come back.

Our hunch is that there will need to be two things- a narrative form that changes and grows as the song goes on (side note- why isn’t there a great VR movie yet? If we solve that, we’ll solve this), and some sort of game mechanic. Guitar Hero & Beat Saber show that music gaming can be successful, but how do you apply that to a metaverse in a scalable way, without turning the attention to the game rather than the music? Pixelynx is probably the best answer so far to the second question- we’ll see more when the actual launch happens.

ii) It feels like a one-off- you watch the concert and you’re done (even if it’s really cool). People waited for the song to show up on MTV and watched it multiple times- what replaces that for music in the metaverse?

We’ll break some of these things in much more detail in the coming weeks- what needs to be there in the metaverse for it to work for music lovers, gamers and casual listeners?

Follow us on our socials linked here to stay updated!

In Lenin’s words:

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

While it’s not quite that dramatic just yet, and the worst is probably just getting started, we thought it might be a good time to take a deep breath and see where we are.

Many builders (like us!) looked on in bewilderment these past twelve months as companies that were really trying to build consumer applications or businesses that would bring millions onboard to Web3 and crypto get stalled by investors saying it’s “too early”, while obvious Ponzi schemes, pointless NFT PFP projects and yet another L1 that would never get traction got funded.

This week, we finally got the answer. Jason Choi on Tangent, one of the most no-nonsense funds around, tweeted about it:

Jason Choi on Twitter: "That some L1s made a Faustian bargain and are paying the price for it. https://t.co/vOB8z0Aks7 / Twitter"

That some L1s made a Faustian bargain and are paying the price for it. https://t.co/vOB8z0Aks7

Jason Choi on Twitter: "poignant shower thoughts / Twitter"

poignant shower thoughts

Jason Choi on Twitter: "The state of crypto VC- and why we started @tangent_xyz / Twitter"

The state of crypto VC- and why we started @tangent_xyz

Incentives are not aligned in the Web3 ecosystem- onboarding users, building actual use cases, and PMF are secondary to the two holy altars of a liquid asset that can be sold immediately, and 2% of fees raised for enormous funds that will probably do middling returns, but need to deploy very large sums of money. What would you do as an investor- invest in the next generation of social or gaming that will take 5 years to take off, or an L1 that gives you cash immediately even if it slowly dies off within 2 years?

Until this week.

The devastation that Luna, 3AC and FTX have wreaked on the ecosystem will have enormous consequences.

• On liquidity and solvency of the core crypto use cases - defi most of all, as well as the idea of the financialization of everything.
• More importantly, regulations, especially CBDCs, will have another round of ammo to shoot with, even if the failures we’ve seen are those of centralisation, not of defi. It will be harder and harder to reconcile with the ideas of crypto as an inflation hedge or store of value, even if it may be true in the long run.

One part of the system, however, will grow and flourish, and for reasons that have as much to do with changing human behaviour as with Web3 infrastructure. “The Fourth Turning” by William Strausse and Neil Howe, published in 1997 posits a 80-year cycle of generations, with 4 “turnings” having a 20 year period of prominence. The ‘hero’ generation (Gen Z perhaps?) becomes of prime importance around 2026 or so. Even without these heavier philosophical underpinnings, we can see the beginnings of this occurring.

Social media, despite seeming pervasive, actually is in decline. Tiktok reported its first quarter of user decline, Meta is in crisis, and the craziness at Twitter needs no further elaboration, of course. The constant attention cycle of social media, and the over-abundance of content stimulation is already beginning to tire us. And as it does, tangibility, connection with smaller groups that we actually care about, and deeper engagement with the things we really care about, will begin to take centre stage more and more obviously.

Two social media apps that went viral this year showcase this really well- BeReal, which forces you to take impromptu pictures in a one minute slot every day, and Gas (currently #1 on the App Store), which lets you send positive messages to your friends anonymously and check who has a crush on you. These are the antithesis of Instagram and Facebook, really- both almost force you to care, and focus on, a more ‘authentic’ you.

Web-based and social media content creators/ influencers such as YouTubers, podcasters, vloggers and bloggers have also cultivated massive platforms and a captive audience which now gives them the ability to use their wealth and popularity to launch other creators. This is explained as the next phase of their brand growth and by extension the next phase of the creator economy in this piece by Ted Gioia who says it very well:

A Creator-Driven Culture is Coming- and Nobody Can Stop It.

Gioia uses the example of Mr Beast to illustrate that single creators can now succeed and thrive because giant corporations or record labels are no longer necessary to bear the cost & effort of financing, content creation, and distribution.

So what does Web3 have to do with all of this?

Web3 enables decentralisation, social clout, identity, as well as the new forms of consumption the metaverse and gaming bring. But what we’ve seen so far in Web3 consumer products is an ‘X for crypto’- Farcaster is decentralised Twitter, Audius is a (barely) decentralised Spotify, and Sound is an on-chain Soundcloud.

However, as native forms of consumption emerge that will embrace the changing trends of deeper and more authentic engagement with people and things you actually care about, we will see far more interesting and impactful examples of harnessing Web3 technology to truly empower creators and value art as more than just a financial asset.

These tenets of enabling creators, giving power back to them, and creating platforms that value discovery, true immersion and a sense of joy while engaging with art, are central to what we’re trying to build at a.live.

In news from a.live this week, we are back with our regular blog programming after a brief hiatus. We’re also posting daily content on Twitter and Instagram with some big announcements coming soon, so give us a follow to stay upto date!

Why do young people buy vinyl, in an era where all the music in the world is available on demand for $10/month?

Among old-school record types, there have long been suspicions that many new fans buy vinyl for a collectible thrill but never actually drop a needle.

“We noticed during Covid that we got a lot more mail-order complaints like, ‘The jacket has a 10th-of-an-inch bend on the corner,’” said Brian Lowit of Dischord Records, the Washington label behind post-punk icons like Fugazi. “We ask them if the record is playing well and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know, I just keep it in the shrink wrap.’”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/arts/music/vinyl-records-delays.html

Despite urban legends about ‘warmth’, ‘detail’ and such , the truth is that it usually doesn’t sound better than digital. For most music, see the horrific impact of the loudness wars on audio quality. Most certainly not on the $100 Crosley turntables that are impulse purchases at Urban Outfitters.

So why do we buy it?

There are several reasons- tangibility, nostalgia, the TRULY BEAUTIFUL artwork, the idea of collecting something, signalling your tribe (which is why categories like punk and metal overperform in vinyl sales compared to streaming).

That’s why sales have seen a massive resurgence in the past 5 years- to the point that manufacturers can’t keep up with capacity — the waiting time for pressing a record from large plants is now over a year.

But for all the ‘cool factor’ that vinyl exudes, it’s constrained by both capacity (there’s only so much vinyl you can press) and price ($30–50 for an album feels like a LOT). Is there a case for creating digital forms of consumption that feel tangible, and how do we do it?

The most obvious contender is Bandcamp, which created a whole class of ‘indie’ musicians who would release their music on the platform as either vinyl, CDs or digital downloads. The first two (ie vinyl and CDs) are the same as buying anywhere else, with the added warm fuzzy glow of ‘supporting’ the artist. The third (digital downloads) is ‘digitally native’ and frankly, we’ve never gotten it- it doesn’t feel like a particularly different experience from streaming, albeit with more convenience and the aforesaid warm glow.

There are many, many artists who’ve built audiences on the platform, however, and there’s a lot to be said about the discovery and curation Bandcamp built. Does this truly move the needle, though, and make digital music feel tangible? Their inability to scale beyond a point and eventual acquisition by Epic suggest otherwise.

Of all of Web3 music’s early experiments, perhaps the attempt to make music ‘tangible’ and different from what’s come before is the most fulfilling. The first projects were 1:1 or editions- while these are still financially successful, they feel very much like early products. The recent Muse NFT drop on Serenade, for example, feels like a great way to increase fan awareness. But the product itself feels- meh? It’s not fundamentally different from a Bandcamp download, with the addition of changeable artwork to appeal to Web3 collectors. The lack of bonus content is likely to make it chart eligible- which it is! The first NFT to do so, but still.

There are a bunch of other products that are doing really interesting things, however, that truly use what Web3 can unleash. It’ll be interesting to see which of them ‘break through’ to mainstream users.

1. Algorithmically generated, generative and ‘version’ music- Taking the NFT idea of 10,000 PFP editions, some platforms, like Async, allow artists to build up music that’s composed of multiple versions that all end up sounding different. This is a really interesting example, and we can see the appeal of this to collectors, but sadly each of the versions don’t sound particularly different.

2. Remixability- What Web3 truly enables is the idea of opening up your content to other people to tinker with and remix with your music, with 2 key features:

a) Permissionlessness- If you wanted to sample music to create a remix or mashup today, you would have to specifically seek a license from the original creator, and negotiate what they would get from the revenues you make. This makes it really hard for anyone but professionals to do- there is nothing quite out there with the ease of Tiktok’s precursor, Music.ally (just pick a song and dance or lipsync to it!) In Web3 music, it’s trivial for musicians to set what kind of third party their music may be used for when they upload music- this could be completely cc0, cc0 with attribution, non-commercial use, or full commercial use. This is a game changer, but with caveats- today, it’s only possible to track usage ‘on-chain’, in projects that are explicitly Web3. As the space evolves, it will become easier to track off-chain use, on regular streaming platforms and so on.

b) Ease of use- There are a few projects that have tried to make it easy for anyone to tinker with music as a hobbyist- Eulerbeats with their sample-based NFTs, Arpeggi, which allows anybody to start using an on-chain music studio, and ‘mint’ it for sale once they’re done, or Endlesss, which allows musicians to collaborate in real time. The last two feel geared towards musicians, still- it’ll take a UX breakthrough to allow ‘anyone’ to do this in real time. AR/VR is a great way to do this- ‘throw’ samples at the wall and see them merge in real time. (stay tuned!)

3. Metaverse stuff- Finally, to circle back to our original point about ‘tangibility’ There’s nowhere to display your music, to give it real meaning. There are some online NFT galleries to showcase your collections (some of them are really cool!), but they feel ‘static’, and there are no real users coming to these anyway.

Where is the social aspect, the joy of turntable.fm from 10 years ago, where you could hang out and listen to music together? (Again *cough* stay tuned!)

We’re still in the very early days of web 3 technology and still have a long way to go in terms of a standard format of consumption. While we are yet to see which of these experiments break through to mainstream users and stick as the preferred method, it’s so much fun to explore all of them and usher in a new era of digital living.

In news from a.live this week, we are well underway with release party #3 coming up this Friday. You can sign up here to get notified about all of a.live future release parties in your preferred channel of communication.

Our release parties are one-of-a-kind multiplayer experiences in virtual worlds of songs we co-create with artists, and you also have the chance to collect limited a.live editions at the end of the song by purchasing the bundles of unique content that artists put out in relation to their song worlds.

As always, historical context is nice to have, and “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. In this article (and the follow-up must read book ”The Death of the Artist”), William Dereiewicz argues that the entire history of mass media (including recorded music) is a blip in history. Being paid for the consumption of art by the masses is not the norm, nor is it a right. Instead, patronage has been how art has been funded since the beginning of civilization — we see examples ranging from the late middle ages/early modern ages in princely courts in India, or throughout the ages in various European countries and more modern patrons of jazz like Nica Rothschild and Tony Taylor.

What should artists do, then? The book suggests that a new word be coined for the role of the artist today- “producer”. Produce your art, and find the equivalent of the Emperor of Austria to bankroll your inner Mozart. Actually, you don’t even have to look that hard- on the Internet, each of us can be 1/1000th of the Emperor of Austria (h/t Kevin Kelly and Li Jin).

There are more recent lessons available than the Emperor of Austria, of course. Here’s our mandatory history lesson about the four primary ways artists can create distributed patronage of their art:

1. Collateralising past content- David Bowie, that great harbinger of the future, created Bowie Bonds in 1997, in partnership with the Prudential Insurance Company (not at all a rock’n’roll thing to do, somehow). The bonds raised $55 million by offering investors royalty payouts from the US income of 25 of his past albums. The proceeds were used to buy back the masters to his music from his former manager- in theory, to increase the payouts available to bond holders. Proponents of artist independence and this form of ‘crowdfunding’ usually stop the story here, because the sequel is less exciting.As mp3 piracy grew in the early oughts, the income from Bowie’s royalties plummeted, and the bonds were downgraded to just above junk bond status. By 2007, however, iTunes came to the rescue, and the bonds were redeemed, without default. There’s an important lesson in this story- we’ll get it to when we get to #web3solvesthis.
2. Crowdfunding future work- We were reminded of this story because, for the first time, Abhijit (our CEO) has binge watched a Netflix series- The Sandman. In 2012, Amanda Palmer became the first person to raise a million dollars on Kickstarter for her next album- the genius of this was that there was something for everyone, from $1 to $125. In 2012, music crowdfunding was one of the biggest categories on Kickstarter, and also the most likely to be successfully funded.

So what changed? Why isn’t every artist funding their career in this way? We don’t actually have concrete answers- Kickstarter rug pulls? The fading of crowdfunding as something people want to support? The most obvious answer seems to be that most artists are not interested in or equipped to manage projects of this complexity.

3. Ongoing patronage- As we’ve mentioned in an earlier article, Patreon is not a great fit for musicians, mostly for the same reasons. The flywheel of needing to share ‘content’ (ugh how we hate the word) on a schedule, is not ideal for music, and is better geared to podcasts, teaching and so on. More casual forms of interaction are probably easier AND better, because they deepen the relationship. Matt Heafy, the drummer for Trivium, makes $10,000 chatting with his fans on Twitch- this is more than he makes on

4. Co-ownership- If you combine these in some ratio or the other, you get a ‘fan-owned’ band. The Grateful Dead, Phish & other jam bands are probably the best examples from the past. Web3 has actually moved the needle quite substantially on this, and reimagined what a ‘band’ can be- more on this in a second.

So how does #web3solvethis?

Collateralising past content seems to be the first, and easiest, win- that’s what royal.io, Opulous and the like have tried to do. But this still uses Web2 rails, and as we’ve seen in previous articles, the pie is still small, even if you try to spread it around more and ‘democratise’ it.

But the more important lesson from the Bowie drop is- its impossible to predict technology futures, and you’ll get wild volatility in the short and medium term, especially in the boom’n’bust Wild West that Web3 is. Whether artists, collectors and fans will hold on long enough remains to be seen.

Crowdfunding, ongoing patronage and the idea of co-ownership seem to overlap in Web3 for us. The idea of fan DAOs, band DAOs, label DAOs and creator coins to fund different types of work, reward different roles played by collaborators and create entirely new mechanics is really the most exciting thing Web3 can bring. Songcamp’s 4 seasons have been thrilling and really moved the needle on what is possible, especially Headless Chaos, the 77-member project that launched a few months ago.

The only problem is- this still feels like ‘work’- when will we cross over to when it’s as fun as being on someone’s Twitch channel, or a fan club? That’s when the true potential of this will be realised, as artists find fans willing to be patrons, to contribute to the music, to outreach, and to creatively deconstructing and reconstructing their work in ways they couldn’t earlier.

To use the overused Marshall McLuhan quote, the medium is the message. And until we find Web3 native modes of consumption, mainstream adoption will remain elusive, and limited to financialisation of assets.

In news from a.live this week — we have officially launched our public beta and you can explore our worlds here. It’s such a thrill to count down to the release party every Friday and congregate with other virtual avatars in these song worlds, but even if you miss the release party you can explore later at any time and even coordinate with your friends to log in at the same time and make it a private party multiplayer experience!

We kicked things off with Esabalu’s release party of her song “Be Okay” on 19th August, and will be following up with a new song and artist every week. Coming up this Friday on 26th August is Huyana’s “Is it you.” We’re learning new things with every release and only see it getting better with every weekly drop.

We’re officially in the future, because here we are, inviting you to join an epic virtual party later today.

The a.live team is very excited to share that our first release party is coming up in just a few hours, and it would mean the world to us if you could join! Here are the details:

When: 12pm PDT/3pm EDT/12:30am IST (20th August)

Who and what: Featuring Esabalu’s single, “Be Okay.”

Where and how:

1. Go to www.alive.house from a computer browser and sign up to get a reminder to join the release party just before it begins.

2. Create an account by signing in (email or Metamask).

3. Customize your avatar to experience our song worlds and to save your progress.

4. Show up to the release party!

At the end of the release party, you’ll be able to buy (using either crypto or fiat payments) exclusive editions of special content bundles that the artist has set up, related to the song you experience, and unlock special features when you revisit this song world in the future. These “digital deluxe” editions are unique and limited — so get your hands on them before they sell out!

a.live on Twitter: "it's official! we are ALIVE! sign up and join us for the release party! @esabalumusic drops 'Be Okay' on our platform at 12pm PDT/ 3pm EDT/ 12:30am IST! register on https://t.co/l3USZAWORG from your PC web browser NOW! #esabalumusic #musicnft #metaverse #web3 pic.twitter.com/mi2IBJ8fU4 / Twitter"

it's official! we are ALIVE! sign up and join us for the release party! @esabalumusic drops 'Be Okay' on our platform at 12pm PDT/ 3pm EDT/ 12:30am IST! register on https://t.co/l3USZAWORG from your PC web browser NOW! #esabalumusic #musicnft #metaverse #web3 pic.twitter.com/mi2IBJ8fU4

We’ll be dropping a new song every week on Friday, featuring artists across the world and across different genres. See you on a.live!

The Grateful Dead formed in the early 1960s, and yet, they still have among the most active fan clubs in the world, and add new fans each year. How did they do this?

In 1965, the band started playing at Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests- these were not just performances, but community activities where the lines between the artist and the audience blurred. For close to 50 (!!!) years, the band has never raised ticket prices, famously going to war with Ticketmaster over the latter’s extortionate fee structures. Even today, you can see Dead & Company for $35.

The band started newsletters for “deadicated” fans when no one else was focused on this, and they were among the first bands to start a native app of their own- The Dead Tour 2009 ALL ACCESS.

Since the very beginning, the band has empowered fans to freely record and distribute their concerts, make and sell their own merch with a small licensing fee, and much more, without trying to control them (this feels oddly proto Web3/cc0).

How do we build fan clubs of this resonance and lasting power at internet scale? Artists at different times have tried to do this in different ways, but they somehow fizzle out over time.

How does #web3solvethis?

Two strong ways stand out:

1. Subscriptions: How could fans financially ‘support’ the bands they love on an ongoing basis? This is different from ‘specific purpose’ financing like crowdfunding projects and royalty shares, which we’ll cover separately.
2. Attribution: Fans can support the musicians they love in ways that are non-financial too- how could this be rewarded? How do you make sure this type of attribution or “fandom” works as intended at internet scale?

We’d like to point out that neither of these address the problems of discovery and the actual rewards folks get in return for their fandom, but we’ll address that a little later.

Let’s look at how people have done fan clubs/communities in Web3 today- the biggest examples being BAYC, Loot or Nouns DAO, of course, but also some musician fan clubs. In GTM (go to market) terms, flipping the usual strategy seems to have worked (at least in a bull market).

Raise token → Attract people who want to back your project → Find ‘utility’ → Rinse and repeat

But this certainly hasn’t solved the PMF (product market fit) problem — who is the kind of ‘fan’ artists have attracted through this? Are they actually interested in the product, or musician?

This is a tricky one to prove or disprove. Let’s take, for example, BAYC. Acolytes would claim that the brand has broken through to the mainstream backed by their initial fans, and all their innovations over the past year (executed at commendable hyperspeed) such as MAYC, Apecoin, the Otherside, certainly speak to some real traction.

But is this a ‘consumer’ brand yet, notwithstanding the fact that you can now buy their T shirts on Etsy or the streets of Miami? At a.live, the collective response so far is mostly 🤷‍♀️

In any case, moving on from the abstractions of who is a ‘real’ fan or not, Harberger tax offers a ‘financial incentive’ mechanism to reveal preference in the best traditions of Web3, where all relationships are financialized. We’ve often wondered why more projects haven’t included these in their tokenomics- possibly because the ‘number/price goes up’ reasoning suffices for now, and PMF conversations can be pushed till later (or at least till crypto winter bites).

Harberger taxes have a really simple underlying concept: every owner must self-assess what they believe is the fair value of their asset each year, and be willing to sell at that price. In addition, they pay a tax rate of X per cent on the assessed value to ensure their self-assessment is not arbitrarily priced out of the market, and exacts a real economic cost to them.

Harberger taxes came up to take care of people keeping plots of land vacant for future speculation, and are also really good for application in metaverses, which (today) seem to be vacant and seeking a use-case (why are people paying upwards of $600k for a metaverse home next to Snoop Dogg?)

The most prominent example we’ve seen in crypto is this fascinating site: set a price you are willing to sell the art at (after purchasing) and pay 5% of the value each year to the original artist.

Let’s see how this works for fan clubs (and kind of for subscriptions too).

Let’s say an artist wants to set up the ‘Cult of Band X’- similar to what Avenged Sevenfold have done with the Deathbats Club, a community of 10,000 fans token gated through NFTs who get access to exclusive content, tickets and so on. This is a really great mechanic, but how do you make sure these are people who actually care about the music and just haven’t come there for the speculation?

1. Sell the initial membership NFT- This is the ‘fundraise’ to fund what is being built out for fans
2. Members must set a resale price- ‘Truest’ fans will likely not want to sell at any price, and set something ridiculous as the resale value. The casual fans will be ok to let go for a price, and speculators for another. There’s also the option of setting up multiple tiers with different rarity/pricing, to make sure that the right fan type is being attracted for each tier. The interesting thing is that the Harberger tax itself (say 5% of the resale price set up) acts as the annual subscription fee, as an annuity in perpetuity. It ‘feels’ right, and aligned to the interests of all groups involved — fans, artists and (sigh) speculators.

This still has real problems, in that it limits the artist’s audience to the true fans who can afford high initial prices and/or high annual subscription fees. But that’s just like the real world, right? It’s hard for most folks to get Shakira to dance at their wedding.

This can partially be fixed with ‘attribution’ and permissionlessness, to answer the question of “Why does this need Web3?” Essentially, if a fan completes activities across the internet to evangelise a musician, create fan art, or ‘grind’ for them in whichever way artists want to enable, it unlocks rewards or a certain tier of access.

Apps like Fave have tried to do this for superstar acts like Taylor Swift by aggregating fan behaviour across the internet and rewarding them with points that accrue towards that artist. This is far easier to do in a post Web3 world, where anyone can sign in with Ethereum and log their activities towards evangelizing an artist, should they so please. *

This is actually crucial to understanding why Web3 is different, because users can choose to log in and therefore signal that they want this behaviour recorded (and potentially rewarded), as opposed to Web2 where cookies make it harder to opt out (and they don’t reward anyone).

*Technically, you can do this without Web3 through Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), but it somehow feels like both of those are converging since Web3 tools enable other things besides just identity.

Coming to the elephant in the room- rewards. Why do fans want to grind for rewards? Creator coins (through things like Rally) already exist and have some traction, but it’s traction of the “Web3” kind- ie sell first, PMF later. They’re also wide open to Howey Test issues- is this an unregulated security? Stay tuned- the SEC is asking these questions now.

The question/conflict we keep coming back to is - how can artists make sure only fans show up for this, and avoid over-financialization of creator coins/fan behaviour? Or maybe they don’t make sure only fans show up, and this is what the future actually looks like- people grinding to financialize things they were willing to click on for free? Axie and Stepn have showed us this is what (some) people want- the jury is out.

At a.live, we’re trying to be fan/artist first in a somewhat fun, harmless way, at least- we encourage grinding to complete levels in a song and upgrade yourself as a player, but for now, these are cosmetic only. As we start moving to making this about fan rankings for a band/genre/whatever else (a proto-DAO, if you will- to be discussed in a future article), we’re sure there are new challenges we’ll face.

In news from the a.live world this week — have you checked out Abhijit’s (our Founder/CEO) twitter yet? He’s sharing insights twice a week on music, web 3 and the metaverse and we’re here for it!

To keep up with a.live’s upcoming beta launch in a few weeks, give us a follow on our channels.

For starters, the size of the recorded music industry has remained stagnant over the last 20 years, while the amount of music available has increased exponentially. This problem isn’t spoken about very much, but is key to understanding what can change.

There are two critical reasons for this:

1. Fans spent $10 on one CD 20 years ago, and now get all the music in the world for that amount, that is assuming that fans even bother with that and don’t use the ad-supported layer of streaming services or Youtube. Naturally, if the pie stays the same, the payout to each artist reduces.

2. But the number of artists have gone up, and so has the amount of content available. Moreover, with the advent of social media it’s become incredibly easy to create, release and distribute music. As a result, nearly 20% of songs on Spotify have never been heard (even by the artist’s mother)!

This puts an immense amount of pressure on artists to break through. We’ve all seen Halsey’s impassioned Tiktok message about her label forcing her to make reels go viral as a precondition to releasing a song. But this is only the tip of the iceberg — paid playlists, a multitude of managers and intermediaries mean that only 12% of the music industry’s revenues flow to artists (even more amazingly, this number was 7% pre-internet!)

Here’s how it breaks down:

With all the shifts in formats, consumption patterns and the world at large, what do all these parties do (especially labels)? As Ted Gioia points out, labels made sense in a world where physical distribution and marketing were key but aren’t really needed in the traditional sense anymore.

This doesn’t imply that aggregators/intermediaries are not needed, as it’s become clear with all the conversation around decentralization in web 3 there are many, many roles that artists are not equipped to do or are interested in doing. But more than this, are these modes of consumption and revenues adequate/enough?

Let’s contrast this with the gaming industry’s revenue mix. According to this article by Ilker Koksal in 2020, the free-to-play model has enabled the gaming industry to grow at an incredible rate over the past 20 years, while making most of it’s revenue through in-game items (like cars, weapons, character skins etc) which are in high demand and are purchased with real money.

In fact, about half of Fortnite’s nearly $2.5 billion revenue in 2018 was amassed from customers buying Battle Passes and other in-game items which they purchased by converting their real money into “V-bucks.” This was proof that video game companies could make billions in revenue through the free-to-play model, without really charging any upfront cost to customers as well.(Ben Gilbert for Business Insider) Video games let gamers access the game for free, and yet, they’re massively profitable. Why? Because they make you buy things that either connect to your intrinsic or extrinsic motivators (here’s more on these from our previous article).

This raises an important point for the consumption of music- streaming platforms are more or less giving the music away for free to the people who’ll listen to artists casually, but why aren’t there models for monetising other things that artists can offer?

Our entire Twitter feed is full of people asking for actual use cases of Web3 in the real world (H/T Stephen Diehl). Taking inspiration from the “free to play” model, here are some ideas:

• Subscriptions & fan clubs: Fan clubs were huge pre-internet, and didn’t require hyper-scale. Web2 diffuses everything by making everything about scale.
• Funding of content: Crowdfunding was briefly a thing for music albums, but it hasn’t taken off, because long term linkages to artist success weren’t built.
• Merchandise: Physical merch requires upfront capital, distribution and a host of other things. What can we learn from gaming in building real digital merch for music?
• Deluxe editions & exclusive content: Physical deluxe editions have been popular for a long time- unfortunately, very few people have physical media anymore. Digital deluxe editions as files that you just download to your computer don’t make sense- but what does?
• Collateralisation & financialisation of music: This is linked to crowdfunding above, but meta labels, royalty streaming collateralisation and so on are just starting to show us other possibilities.
• Hyper-scaling live music: Livestream (& metaverse) concerts were supposed to grow user audiences, but this hasn’t really happened. It’s hard to recreate the visceral nature of live music in your room- but what you try to build something new, instead of just recreating a live concert?
• User generated content: IP (especially around sync and performance rights) have been the bugbear of trying to create any meaningful UGC around music. Can on-chain attribution, permission-less licensing & royalties help?
• AI & generative music: This will be the next step- in a streaming world where marginal revenues tend to zero, how do you make more money from the same consumer? More use cases (exercise, dance, games) are emerging.

The truth is- Web3 and the metaverse (much as we hate using the latter term) do actually have compelling use cases for all of the above, in ways that existing paradigms or platforms don’t do well. In the next article, we’ll look at all of these use cases in some detail and try to build a model of the world that we could create for music.

In news from the a.live world this week, we’ve stepped up our social media game as we gear up for our beta launch in August. We will be dropping one track per week through release parties where you can fly through the world of the song as created in partnership with the artist and creator of the song, and interact with it in a way that’s never been done before. To keep up with these releases, give us a follow on our channels.

The music industry changes its dominant format every 11 years- from wax cylinders to vinyl to cassettes to CDs to iTunes to streaming.

Say hello to a.live — the next generation music format. An interactive, immersive environment to experience music in like never before.

Check it out HERE.