"Ethereum is for Artists" - André Anjos (RAC), Dee Goens, & Jacob Horne

um coming back here and i'm gonna just do a quick introduction um i think we've now got uh andre andy and jacob on so um just talking about ethereum for artists and this is really uh one that i personally care a lot about um you know using ethereum for um for for artistic pursuits for creative pursuits through nfts has been something very very early um right from the beginning going all the way back to crypto punks if you remember those um and recently this is kind of recent inflection point where you're seeing more and more of this happen there's more happening both in the art scene and the music scene using ethereum to help artists um so i'd like to introduce uh andre uh who records this rac uh and d and jacob from zora zora is a company that is building the infrastructure that allows artists to take control of their creative work so welcome guys i'll turn the screen over to you and hand it over awesome thank you thank you for uh having us um i also just kind of want to take a moment to to say how awesome this like layout is with the like lo-fi beats and all that it's pretty sick i'm i'm pretty stoked about it um so uh thank you josh um i'm i'm andre i make music as rac um i've recently been working with the zora guys i don't know if you guys want to introduce yourselves jacob you wanna go first yeah i go first hey what's up my name name's jacob horn i'm one of the um the co-founders of zora really happy to be here today um i think we've got an awesome discussion to a lot to cover i think the the whole space for artists in particular i think has really kind of evolved probably like five or six times over in the past six months so i'm pretty hyped for this conversation and yeah i'll just let d introduce himself and we kind of like take it from there yeah i'm dee uh super excited to be here always love uh getting a chance to share the zora sauce with the community and getting to work with dre i run everything that's creators in community over at zora so if you're a creator and you're thinking about doing a drop holler at me if you're a community that's looking to engage your creator get excited really pumped about today's conversation and the future of zora and the intersection of kind of crypto and culture so uh yeah really really happy to share with you guys yeah so i guess like you know the theme of this conversation is uh ethereum is for artists and and i uh i think maybe to just give that a broader context uh i think it's important to at least address why why that's the case or like how we even got here or like why this is actually important um and i i don't want to dwell on this too much because like we can easily fill up uh four hours talking about the problems of the music industry or really the creative industry in general so um maybe i'll just like kind of talk about very quickly about like some of the issues the music industry and and and we can sort of talk about like how we're trying to solve that so okay where to begin um the music industry um i think it's fundamentally broken i think it's uh almost beyond repair at this point um we've sort of been in this cycle for the past about 70 years uh where um basically the the way that the industry is set up is like completely uh hostile to artists at this point um where they basically capture the entire um value of that the artist is creating and even with the birth of the internet we thought that that might shift over and it has to some degree but we're still dealing with sort of this like institutional level like uh the the problems basically and what i'm really talking about is sort of uh again like this is pretty pretty broad but um this is this is true in almost every every side of the the industry but basically like uh there's it's sort of filled with intermediaries uh their services and uh and and and corporations and you know various various people that basically take all all of the profit and uh and but i think the the average um uh the average uh artist gets about 12 percent of the income generated by their work so so you know uh so so to to me that that is uh that is very unfair um and and and and not to say that that the industry doesn't add value because i think they do i i i think it's important to acknowledge that but um i i think we're at a point where it simply has not uh it's just not working um and i think it's it's brought us to this to this kind of moment in time where we're like okay what can we do about this i mean there's there's various different services that are sort of popping up um and uh you know when when when i discovered uh ethereum in in about like late 2016 2017 i uh i became kind of obsessed with this idea of of disintermediation and and creating uh an infrastructure that was actually fair and that would actually allow a free market to flourish um and i think that's that's really sort of just the starting point um and uh you know i i i would actually love to to get the zory guys to sort of talk about it from their perspective but but basically that's how that's how we got here it's like sort of a fundamentally unfair unreasonable industry that is hostile to artists and now we have this technology that kind of cuts them out of everything and to me that's super exciting so yes i think like if we think about the reason why the music industry and almost every other creative industry is probably like that and our belief in perspective is that it's because it's built on the legacy like financial system the fiat financial system involves corporations intermediaries and it has all the characteristics that i think you know everyone in ethereum and d fire are completely aware for which is aware of which is you know it's opaque very limited access uh you know ends up being fundamentally unfair and you know the only people that can access the tools of finance and i think what the core tool that we're talking about unlocking for artists is ownership so and like the traditional system like corporations and institutions have a monopoly on creative ownership like for you dre you had to go to a record label in the earliest days of your career because they were the only ones that could cut a check but to cut that check and pay for your day-to-day living you had to give up 50 or more of the ownership over like the work and value that you're creating just right out of the gate um so i think like when we look to ethereum and what we're trying to do with zoro it's like well what happens if you can rebuild or like kind of take this creative industry and then build it on top of this fundamentally open financial system which is it is transparent it's universally accessible it's programmable uh it's native to the internet where all this value is being created in the first place um which i think leads like you know we kind of see that the death of the creative industry and kind of the emergence of like the creative economy in one way and that's that's all built on top of ethereum um and what we're building on for zoro um so i think like where does that land us it's like well entirely new opportunity space because you get all the goodness of crypto mixed with the kind of like expansiveness of the creative industry and i think like we're in probably in day zero here like with i think like dre you've kind of pioneered the way a lot here and i guess idea i'd love to get your cut as well on this before we jump into maybe your journey as a pioneering artist in ethereum yeah for sure i mean i think you hit the nail on the head there's definitely a monopoly of ownership in the existing creative space whether that's music fashion you see sneaker customizers like people that we've worked with at zora along the lines of jeff staple who are getting similar to dre where it's 12 percent they're getting five dollars per sneaker sneakers are selling for 150 reselling for 2k um you know these sorts of issues i think are prevalent in the overall creator economy so any way that we can leverage ethereum um and you know the dynamicism that it adds to it to creator platforms like i think we're going to do that all that we can and i think dre as we're segwaying into that is is really just leading the way first on how you change ownership of your drops and ownership of your your product offerings but now even how you change ownership of your community and that medium and interaction again all powered by ethereum like this wouldn't even be possible without this amazing suite of tools that the community has developed and uh allowed us to leverage for creators like that yeah so i think uh dre you've had a very probably one of the longest artistic journeys in ethereum do you want to talk about the progression of like kind of projects that you've launched that's getting into the today like and i guess to like queue that up you started with the ego token three years ago and then just a couple of days ago you've launched the rac community token and like what you were trying to do at the start and now where you've landed at and like the learnings and the things you think are being unlocked across the way yeah absolutely so um okay so basically in uh like i mentioned in late 2016 i i just i i stumbled on a video of vitalik buterin talking about ethereum and i was like this is amazing this is it's gonna change the world you know like like i think a lot of people have that reaction and uh and i was like it's like so psyched for it i was like this is amazing it's so cool okay like i in my head i was like oh this this could uh apply to music in so many different ways um we can sort of build like this infrastructure level uh you know pipeline basically uh you know uh there's all kinds of issues in the music industry for for data and like it's all siloed off into different corporations that don't share information with each other like things like that there's all kinds of things that could be solved with this and i was like oh this is amazing so cool okay let me let me look at who's doing anything in this space and um i mean there were there were a couple projects but uh i basically uh found uh ujo music which they were part of consensus and uh you know i just reached out uh and uh and you know from there we started we we started to work on this idea which was actually like super basic if you really think about it but basically the idea was um i had an album that was going to come out it's called ego that's hence the name ego token or whatever um and the album was going to come out anyway and it was going to come out commercially and all the typical spotify you know whatever all the typical places was like why not additionally to that you know release it on ethereum like put it on a smart basically host it on ipfs uh you know create a smart contract that it's like if it if it's uh if uh ten dollars worth of ethereum are is deposited into this contract you get a link to i'd be like a downloadable link basically it's like very basic you know essentially we have this with bandcamp you know it's not like i didn't see it necessarily as like groundbreaking necessarily but i like the idea behind it and i i think um that's really what um what i was hoping to to sort of convey is like this idea of direct to like this direct kind of interaction where it's like i am i i created this product this album and i'm basically selling it directly to somebody and the only thing in the middle is a contract and um like a self-executing contract so and it'll in the it's up there for in perpetuity so i think it's pretty cool you know um unless ipfs goes down which i don't think i yeah yeah but um so okay so so that happened um i i thought that was quite successful we in in uh everybody that bought that album also got issued uh this token called the ego token uh at the time we were thinking about it uh nfts are still pretty new but it was the idea was actually it is some sort of an nft except it's not you know it's like the idea behind it the intent was there um so we we we basically gave the ego token to everybody that bought the album um off of ethereum and um you know and then then the bear market hits and uh you know a lot of projects started to fizzle out and ujo unfortunately was a bit of a casualty of that and um you know i sort of stayed involved and interested in the space in general and i look during that period i think i looked at various different you know like during this whole process we talked about like tokenizing publishing um ownership and like there's all kinds of ways to sort of you know apply this to ethereum but you know we were just uh i i still was like excited about it because like despite the price or whatever that's kind of irrelevant um like i people kept building and and i i think that's what really kept me kept me going um and interested in this space because i continue to see development regardless of price action or whatever so um during that period um you know i saw a bunch of projects kind of fizzle out there there was one in particular audience that has sort of launched a little bit after um ucho and i think they in in many ways they're they're sort of the spiritual successor and they sort of benefited from a lot of the ideas uh that that ujo built and i think ujo perhaps was just a little bit too early um i'm sure a lot a lot of people can relate that sometimes when you launch a product you're just it's just the timing can be can be kind of a big deal so um um okay yeah i feel like i'm i'm i'm carrying on too long but basically okay so our audience kind of uh you know succeeded there and um i more more recently got involved with them as well uh but so which eventually brought us to uh i think uh earlier this year where i finally wrote a new album like i kind of spent three years working on that and ready to kind of do that and like i obviously wanted to do something with with ethereum and you know to sort of continue that that path and uh actually one of the guys jack from ujo from the original team actually introduced me to jacob and we we started talking about this idea of uh tokenizing a physical product and um i i always thought it was a this is an interesting idea something we had talked about like back in the day and it's like how how do we do this like how how do we really you know make this accessible and easy and i feel like zora really kind of nailed it and um you know basically by the the model being you know you create a market for it first and then at a later date uh you can um you know some people can you can have sort of price discovery for this uh for this for this physical product uh using ethereum and you basically using unit swap at the time and uh which i think is pretty cool and um and then you know uh actually as of yesterday we opened up redemption so people will essentially burn the token and we're we're going to mail mail the uh mail the tape to them so they finally get the tape okay so so that the i guess maybe early this is somewhat in the begi the beginnings of the d5 you know uh stuff that started happening and uh people kind of traded this thing like crazy and uh i think we went from 20 bucks to 950 and like it was kind of a wild wild day for me i didn't expect that um but i think it sort of answered this really interesting question it's like what is the actual value of this at this limited edition good like if i if i set that price it if i came out of the gate it was like this tape is 450 people are like you are insane like you know this like this makes no sense at all but because we released it at 20 bucks and the market decided people were like pay fair i mean the market decided that this is the value of this cassette uh i mean maybe it's speculative sure but like that the market decided and like i didn't decide that the market did so i feel like that's a really interesting concept and something something that i love to say about this is like it turns out that music does have value because because so often we we've sort of been ingrained with this idea that recorded music doesn't have value that you're supposed to capture value through selling like t-shirts or something like that's ridiculous like like music has value you know like i don't know where we've sort of gone off this track but anyway i'll get off my soapbox on that but basically that kind of leads us to this moment where um you know where you know we sort of saw this moment like where we're applying markets to some degree uh you know in this tokenization like it it's sort of uh maybe a a way to measure it or a a a way to quantify it to some degree and i don't mean just financially i mean like like actually just you know if if uh if you own a token you there's some level of ownership over over this whatever it is whatever you decide it can be uh and and to some extent we saw that with defy like you know with governance tokens and yams and and like all kinds of fascinating interesting projects that popped up over the past you know a couple months um so which which kind of led us to this this path of uh of talking about the rac token which um you know i like basically like i i s in the in the midst of covid i um i again i have to sort of give this a broader context but basically like in the in the midst of covid i i started streaming a lot and i started going on twitch like three two to three times a week um doing four-hour sessions and and this sort of community evolved out of it and and it was it was very fascinating to me um something that i hadn't really experienced so i for example like i average about you know two and a half million uh unique listeners every month on spotify but i don't have any access to them i have no i can't even message them um i can't i've no no way to reach them um every once in a while spotify allows me to message them about tour dates but even then it's like heavily curated and they they get to basically edit whatever i say things like that so um so so now suddenly um this really powerful thing is happening where my community is like talking to each other and they're sort of bonding over that and like whether it's twitch chat then that moves into discord and maybe some of the youtube community also moved over and basically this this discord server started to become sort of a hub for for this emergent community that i you know i couldn't have faked this i couldn't have made this up like the maybe i might be my music was sort of the catalyst for it and and uh you know that was sort of the the reason why they brought people together to some degree but uh that uh you know once they're there now they're like playing games together they're sharing cat photos they're like sharing recipes for for like certain types of food like that we have like coders in there that do you know talk about that kind of you know it's a very diverse group of people and now there's sort of an immersion community and it's still relatively small but um you know i i found that to be super powerful and uh so okay password to uh you know this idea of tokenization and um it's like okay why don't why don't we just give them all a token why don't we give a token to everybody that supported me over the years through patreon through band camp through merch through basically anywhere where we can have an email you know or or like uh twitch subscribers like basically anything like that that we can we can reach them let's give them a toke and give them ownership of this community and let's let's try to create a community like let's try to sort of enforce that and give people uh you know a say in it and and have some sense of like belonging you know and um i mean that's basically as far as we got and like of course we have like all kinds of ideas and i feel like i've been talking for a while so you guys should definitely jump in here but but basically like we we launched a couple days ago we gave it all to all retroactively to all all these people that supported me over the years and now we're just starting to you know first steps getting people kind of on board getting used to the technology and um you know learning from that and hopefully building tools and and things that that matter to us you know and and and that aren't just giving it to instagram or or twitter or whatever you know so it's like we're creating our own little social graph which i think is interesting yeah i think to like kind of frame what's happening here like uh we kind of speak about like three levels of ownership there's kind of like uh at the base level there is the products and the artworks and the the creative output that's being created by artists so you know we started with like physical goods and for you that was like the cassette tape i think like nfts and like crypto artworks or internet native artworks like definitely fit in this category of like okay we're actually building ownership over things that can now be like kind of captured in these different types of tokens and can be held by the community used by the community the second level above that which we've just kind of pushed into is like the communities or the brands of the creators themselves it's like okay like there is a there is a group of people who just like love and want to be a part of like the rac community um kind of like the bay hive or you know piccolo like the hive or the swifties or the beliebers now they're just rac token holders yeah but like yes if like musicians like there are these massive communities but it's like it's obviously the same thing for fashion brands as well like all these brands have like whole followings um and groups of people who like who want to unite in some way and then obviously like the level above all that where you can kind of like invert it it is um like the system itself so the value system being like zoro then built on top of and empowered by ethereum and i think like the community piece is particularly interesting because it's like this two-way ownership so like you were saying that you move into twitch you've got patreon ig spotify you know all these different platforms where your communities kind of come together and interact with you in different ways but you have and not until i guess rac token you did not have a single place where you could actually own that community like the best you could do is i'm going to get an email list and maybe compile that together and you know i think a lot of people on twitter talk about this like how do i exit from like twitter into like some space where i can own my community in like one spot uh but i think like tokens are the perfect mechanism for that because if you think about the community end of that spectrum they don't want to deal with like an email list or get like updates from you and email back that's a shitty platform in you know stuff it's a great platform but it's like shitty for the purpose we're talking about um so the ownership is like you kind of having this like single unified space to bring your community together as one but then for your community it's like they kind of have an incentive to take that jump with you because they are getting ownership in it too so it's like oh i don't have to give away my email and do this thing i'm actually getting something that might have real tangible value and could empower me to like go build alongside you know the coders in your discord or the people sharing that stuff whatever it is which is kind of crazy it's like it does feel like like a new paradigm in a way where it's like community creator now have this like one place like unifi and i think like if what's happened in d5 is any clue it's like you know with wi-fi it's like all right now you have like people have this token and now they feel empowered to go like create the logo for this thing well compared to like submit a pr in this github because i'm like i have ownership in this community i think what we will see for artists is like well what does it mean for artists and community to start creating as one or like the line between those two things being blurred um i'd love to get like a d i know you've got thoughts here too like i'd love to get your take on like how do you think that plays out or or like what this kind of community token piece looks like with um with the rac launch that we just kind of got out a couple days yeah for sure i think uh dre touched on this and you've touched on this as that second layer of ownership it's a new medium for direct to consumer so dre now doesn't have any platform in between him and his community it's just if you hold this token you're now a member of the community and i think that's super unique in being able to aggregate everybody across these platforms um and in the future i always talk about this at zora i think culture on a whole like the like the culturally relevant industry whether that's entertainment music or fashion um draping a pioneer is just waking up to the community organization alignment and incentives um that are kind of tucked into crypto i think crypto has some of the most powerful communities arguably in the world there's no place really like it on the planet and its ability to your point jacob to give people that reason to organize themselves or that reason to take the jump to the new platform and that reason being the ownership itself in that community i think that's something very unique to crypto people join pre-sales people you know coordinate around a dev and then figure out how to get a logo and then they get it on coin gecko and like these are all random people that you never met and that you probably will never meet all coming together to create value together now imagine what that would be like if it was in pursuit of a grammy or an oscar or like some of the more amazing real world outputs um i think we're just now starting to scratch the surface there like we wrote this in the manifesto that these communities if they get organized and aligned properly um they could build cities like the imagine if the beehive or the swifties had a shared bank account you'd be seeing taylor swift get her masters pretty easy or you'd be seeing you know statues of beyonce all over houston and so i think that these are the sorts of opportunities that we'll see in the future for community tokens as people start to wake up just how powerful that organization and alignment is um when you have that ownership piece yeah absolutely um i i just one last thing to add is like that that glue that comes from from like uh you know collective ownership is super powerful and like we've seen that uh probably more on the financial side of you know defy and and i mean even early on with um you know different uh projects even from the 2017 era you know but uh even to some extent ethereum you know if if uh if you've sort of fell into this space you kind of want to see it succeed and i i think that's it's sort of like these multiple layers and and and i mean obviously there's some negatives breeds a little bit of tribalism sometimes but you know like for the most part i think it's a generally positive thing uh in a way to sort of organize and and create value for each other um i i i'm just we were maybe gonna take some questions i don't know because we got a couple minutes left or um yeah we should yeah we've got a couple minutes left um if we have any questions in the chat we can definitely facilitate that um i'll just ask uh our team behind the scenes what we're seeing in the chat i don't have all the windows open at the same time the magicians yeah i didn't mean to put you guys on the spot i was just like i mean i've got a question while we're waiting here um uh one thing i'm kind of curious about so like you know you just said um uh you know if if they have had a token you know you'd see people using that to you know fund construction of statues uh in houston um how do you think those communities will interact right because one thing you know whenever once everything's in the market you you know you can have interactions between these communities you can have people trying to increase or decrease the price of someone else's token i mean imagine two artists are having some sort of beef and their totally financialized communities uh are trying to kind of interact with each other in maybe a positive or negative way like what do you imagine there like in your craziest scenario of what this looks like when it's all financialized uh well i think like the first piece the first part of that question was like how do people how do the beehives actually organize what does that look like like tokens really are like minimum viable doubt in a way it is like okay let's just get ownership into people's hands here and like that's giving them this kind of like loose reason to start interacting with each other i can very easily see a progression where you know an rac token or or a brand token like same fame or even real real world existing brands like supreme or something like that they were to take on this method the progression is okay now we have this collective ownership in this thing now how can we start to collectively allocate pool you know use capital to take on some shared endeavor as a community so i think like i would imagine that they in that beehive case is like well you have some subset of that community like use things like dao's um as a way to start like pulling and allocating that capital together obviously there's a lot that needs to happen in the world for that to change like the very loose time we have between physical and digital is like let's create a token redeemable for something it's going to take a lot for you know a dow to pay a physical construction site and maybe we're not even maybe it's not even physical it's like what we're talking about is you know the beehive funding the construction of like statues and in crypto voxels with the central and yeah like a virtual exhibit or something like that we're applying all these kind of like you know world 1.0 physical concepts into what's going to happen in the virtual world of time um it's great like how big does this get i mean i think the creative industry has been facing all these like real problems but i think like there's no reason that this same model of like distributing ownership and giving communities control over capital couldn't apply to literally everything uh yeah you know like we we just kind of like published out like manifest so yesterday like we do think that like any collective endeavor of like humanity can be taken on by just giving ownership of in control of like communities to the communities themselves that sounds kind of circular but like there's been no way for communities to own themselves prior to crypto they've always been disintermediated by well they're being intermediated or um by like corporations or platforms so i think like yeah as big as it can get i mean it should be the new way of like organizing period like cooperation as a model is dead now it's all about like community ownership and dowsing yeah what is what can the internet do with that scale who knows i want to like sneak one thing in for the interaction piece between communities i had this thought today actually and i was like man community tokens introduced this really strong concept of accountability to creators into communities i think you sometimes see that playing out in personal tokens but it's it's kind of cool that like i don't know if a community token or a creator token god like this is a crass example but i'm going to say it but like r kelly r kelly all that hits the fan like everybody's dumping their community tokens and r kelly's community is now worth nil as it should be because he committed what are virtually atrocities right i think that's a new accountability mechanism where now the creator is directly tied to like like the community has real ownership of the creator value almost whereas in the sense of like the label they might let r kelly continue to make music and whatnot and like yeah we won't buy it but like he's still getting supported to some extent right um so there's like a dangerously strong accountability mechanism that i think we'll see prove out there which is kind of cool like it's cool on the up and it's cooling it down which i think will be really unique awesome yeah well thanks guys uh we are out of time there were more questions in the chat i mean i encouraged all y'all to go join the chat i mean there's an event discord too there's tons of people who want to work on kind of creative projects music projects about music about art so as much as you guys want to hang out on the discord and give people ideas we'd love to see that so thank you so much for joining us today