Music Distribution Models for Web 3 Emily Lazar

hey everyone i'm emily lazar and yes we're talking about music distribution in nfts and web3 right now um i front the transmedia project september morning that's what i look like on stage if you guys want to know it takes three hours of makeup time to actually look like that it's uh it's quite a feat but but it works out well people kind of like it and so i kind of want to talk about music web 3 nfts and why they're so important to musicians and especially independent musicians and like the freedom that they kind of grant independent musicians in order to like talk about web 3 music distribution we kind of have to talk about web 2 music distribution a little bit because i think that you guys kind of need to know why it's so important and what web 2 has kind of done to musicians and their financial status in music um so just to talk a little bit about me and like what i am and what i do um september morning is a transmedia project that means that it is a project that is based off of a central storyline with central characters and that project permeates into all different types of media like comic books graphic novels live performances music media uh like uh merchandise um nfts and other things and it all kind of central um is centralized around a story line and tells that storyline um across the board and for me it was really important to do something like this in music because when i came into the music scene um streaming was just starting uh musicians weren't making money in web 2. they weren't like making any money in web 2 streaming the streaming platforms were just taking a lot from the artists and um because of that it was like making artists just stay on the road for a very long time like eight months out of the year which is what we had to do for many many years just to kind of keep the band up and running um we're a medium-sized rock metal band we're not like up there with you know slipknot or something like that but we still like perform with them and tour with them rob zombie slip knot five finger death punch and stuff like that but our guarantees are a lot lower um in music for us the guarantee was uh was here and then making our money on the road was all about merchandise and merchandise was about two three times more than the um the actual guarantee so for us that was kind of like why we were on the road to sell that t-shirt to do that live performance to sell that t-shirt so it was a really backwards sort of thing to give you a little background of streaming services and why they're not really giving us enough money spotify gives you 0.00818 cents per stream amazon music gives you zero zero four zero two apple gives you point zero zero eight title point zero one two eight four youtube point zero zero two cents per stream so if you understand how many streams you're going to need to actually make enough money to go to starbucks and buy a coffee it's a lot so that being said and knowing like how music is and like how much it costs to like make an album which is about 20 grand for my band um that's a lot of streaming that's a lot of music that's a lot of stuff that you have to get done and and put out there so that you can actually make that revenue unless you go out on the road for eight months like i said so we were out on the road for about eight months out of the year um then covet hit and uh that killed a lot of a lot of bands kind of died during covid because you know they were reliant on that um that touring revenue and because they couldn't get it they could not survive um i was really lucky because in 2014 i was um in a recording studio in vegas with kane sherko and um we were writing some songs and kane was like hey uh do you know about this bitcoin thing and i'm like what's the bitcoin i don't know what bitcoin was but he he was talking to me about it and he was like um yeah it's this you know cryptocurrency and this and that the other thing and i was like you know what whatever and i put some money in some bitcoin and i put in a wallet and then i went on the road and i didn't even think about it i didn't think about it i just sat in that wallet i started touring and touring and touring and touring covet hit and i was like crap i don't have any money and then i saw that wallet and i was like oh crap i have some money and all of a sudden i was like you know what maybe i should learn more about this cryptocurrency thing maybe i should learn more about this bitcoin thing maybe i should understand it a little bit better so i jumped onto clubhouse and i think we all have been on clubhouse especially during the pandemic we all lived on clubhouse a lot of me and a lot of nft people were just like on there 24 7. i mean i would fall asleep with clubhouse in the background and wake up and some people were talking and it was just like a whole thing and we were talking about crypto and we were talking about bitcoin and um we were talking about nfts and i didn't really know what an nft was january 2021 i was like i don't know what this is but i have a transmedia project and i do graphic novels through image comics and top cow comics and mark sylvestre is my business partner and we have this whole storyline and we have all this stuff and we have music and we have this and that the other thing and how can i use nfts to propagate my story and to make some money when i'm not on the road because i'm not on the road right now so fast forward a couple months i learned about nfts daily blockchain news picks me up as the first female rock metal musician to mince and sell an nft on blockchain yay i made a dollar i made more than a dollar actually i made a lot more than i like ever made last year um in nfts than i ever made on touring for the past like six years so that was like really really a good thing um and i wasn't on the road at all last year by the way well actually that's not true we went out for like a month but kovitz shut everything down we had all these cancelled performances we had a cancel festival with incubus that was just trashed we went all the way down to florida to play it we got there we unloaded our gear we set up i'm sitting there backstage and the manager comes the tour manager comes over to me and he's like so we're not playing and they didn't even pay us so we lost a lot of money on that tour um but it doesn't matter because i made the money on nft so i was okay so for me i was thinking when i got into nfts i was like what am i going to do with these things like how am i going to use it to tell my story how am i going to use it to like actually help with music and like pushing music that narrative of independent musicians like owning their own music and owning their own masters and how can i use that to kind of like um propagate my story and make some money off of it so i took my graphic novel artwork and animated it and stuck some music on it and i thought to myself i was like you know when we tour as i told you guys our guarantees are like and our merchandise is like so why don't i use the nft which is selling art right now everybody was buying art art art art you know music wasn't like a big nft thing back then you know it was just kind of coming out so i was like okay why don't i use this art to like sell the music so i did did something where i took the art and i put it on there and i animated it and i put the music to it and then i had it on open c and it was running like a gif and then i did an unlockable where you got the download of the music with the nft and that was pretty cool because people actually started learning about my band that didn't know about rock music didn't know about metal music didn't know about whatever they were just like hey this is actually really cool and if you know anything about rock music and the musical landscape right now you know that we're a very niche market it's not like urban music or edm or anything like that and everybody in nfts was doing like urban or edm and i'm over here doing rock music like hi but i was number 18 on the music charts on openc last year you guys so i mean it worked out people learned about it they started getting the music and then i was like okay so this works i can use the art to like move that narrative with the music and like get that out there to sell so the only thing that's wrong with it is there weren't enough people there were like five five pieces sold here five pieces sold there five pieces sold there which is great don't get me wrong because of the cost basis of everything like and how much i was getting back in return roi but the only problem was that vanity metric that vanity metric man that one's not good because you need that vanity metric to tour you need to know that there are more people than not out there that are interested in your music because if you're actually doing a show and i'm sitting here doing a show and i have the five people that bought my nft that's not enough we need like hundreds and hundreds of people so i looked at what was going on in generative art and i was like okay so these guys are selling like one thousand two thousand three thousand five thousand pieces that's a vanity metric i can get behind so how do i stick my music in there and get that going on with the generative sort of situation so for me i started a project called september's monsters september's monsters there it is yeah it's sold out um yay uh it's a thousand pieces we started um with a thousand pieces um you know there's a lot of projects out there that did ten thousand this and that but i was like you know this is music and this is like my first time doing this thing and i really want to do it right and i also want to like give a lot of value to my collector because to me the brilliance of music nfts really comes down to the utility behind it what you can really use those music nfts to do and there's so much you can use the utility so much and so these monsters they look cute that's me in the middle and then we have all these different ones and it kind of goes along with the storyline of september morning if you're not familiar with that i'll just give you a little elevator pitch september morning is a human reaper hybrid she gives good souls second chances at life by swapping them out into other people's bodies when they die in doing so she kind of messes with fate who's the antagonist in the book and fate wants to get all the good souls out of the out of the world and keep all the bad souls that the world will self-destruct so september is trying to save all those good souls so she starts an epic war between the living and the dead so in september's monsters one of the reapers that's under fate is chasing her and he's stitch and stitch is the master of space and time and stitch takes september and fractionalizes her timeline into a thousand different timelines so you get a thousand different looking septembers and we took a lot of like pop art references because i'm a huge comic book nerd i mean i love lord of the rings i love batman i love everything so we took a bunch of different references and stuck them onto the septembers and made our own little septembers did a thousand of them and then i said okay we're going to put music with these so i tokengated a channel on my discord and i said hey if you buy this thing right you go on my discord you connect your wallet and you get free music for life in perpetuity i will keep on putting music into that channel and you guys can keep downloading it and you actually like own that music now i'm not talking about publishing i'm not talking about anything like that i'm talking about actually owning like the download and like that's something that streaming is kind of like nixed for a lot of us right you don't really own it you just stream it and like i don't know there's something to be said about being able to do something with a song anywhere anytime you want to and i kind of like that it gave it a little bit more value so we did that in the channel i also gave a download of my graphic novel so you get that as well and we just got greenlit for another graphic novel through image comics which is going to be coming out later this year so that will go on to that channel as well so i keep on putting more and more and more and more into the project that being said it's not just that project right it's not just those downloads it's irl stuff too because i'm a touring musician i'm gonna go back on tour i'm actually going back on tour in about a month um with orgy if you know that band it's like an industrial metal man so we're gonna go out on the road with those guys for like a month month and a half and i'm using this as a way of linking web 2 irl to web 3. so when you have a september morning monster and you come to the show you get 20 off our merch you get access to vip like uh acoustic performances if we do those before our show you get access to any type of special thing that we do with the shows that you would have to pay something extra for if you hold a monster you get you get the velvet rope treatment you get that opened up so that's how we kind of like link that we're going to be doing co-apps as well we're going to be doing special merch just for the monsters there's a lot of things that we can do that utility utility utility utility and when you own your own music and you own your own mastering that's the freedom you get you get direct to consumer we can do whatever we want with these things we can we can do like i don't know matt from avenge sevenfold did a golf outing for his deathbats club so we could do a golf outing i mean i don't play golf very well i play golf like crap but like you know you understand what we can do there's so much we can do with this utility and it's really important the direct to consumer no third parties again in web 2 the breakdown of uh the money goes like this it goes platform all the way down to artist in web 3 it goes artist all the way down to platform and that's the narrative that we want to stick to i really think that web 3 is an amazing amazing thing for independent musicians independent artists i think that it gives you freedom financially um you don't have to be a slave to the road anymore you can take that money you can like do so much with it like we're totally revamping our whole entire stage show for this year um i remade all of our costuming and if you remember what i look like on stage it's kind of crazy so there's a lot to do with that costuming there is so much you can do with web3 what do i think that we should do with web too like what what should we do yeah what should we do um going forward with web2 and and how is that going to like kind of come into web3 well it's already coming into web3 we see labels trying to get in there we see uh we see pub houses trying to get into in there but i really think that if we keep our narrative and keep our independent musician and independent artists narrative very strong we can kind of fight that and make sure that we keep on top and it still goes artist to platform and not platform to artists and i think that's one of the most important things that we really need to watch out for but as far as what can we do in web 3 from here on out i really believe that there are no limitations in web3 you can do whatever you want with the utility it's kind of like throwing spaghetti against the wall you just see what sticks you see what your customer wants you see what your collector wants and then you kind of do that so the only limitations really in web 3 are the ones that we put on ourselves the ones that we put in our own minds so be creative be independent own your own stuff own your own music own your own publishing and then you can do whatever you want with it and you can make that money and you can move forward with your career um yeah i'm emily lazar thank you guys so much for hearing me speak and uh yeah have a good day you guys gm gm