Listeners are the Record Label in Co-Creation Web3-landia - Garett Laugavitz

well thanks so much for having me i really appreciate you uh having me here at east denver um so yeah my talk today is on music nfts and i see a few forces converging um that's gonna give way to potentially like a pretty great media flipping so the few forces are you've got the democratization of music creation tools ever since the advent of garage band making music is easier than ever um but we now have nfts in this new form of ownership over that music and there's tons of just fomenting discontent with the spotify's of the world paying pennies for streams and not allowing artists to to earn their due so we're just going to be riffing on that today it's just a bit about me i'm garrett go by kinshasa uh surname 5000 i'm a pixel artist uh web3 entrepreneur and figma maximalist there's me punk 2260 stay punk working on cipher um cypher is a collectible hip hop music nft dap so we produce algorithmic beats rappers rap over them and mint them um lazy minting style so that the artist isn't putting up any money to put their work out there we've got a super cool community just tons of eclectic people from all over the world coming to our discord too and we rap twice weekly over our bot bumping the beats in the voice channel and just tipping people out for a spit and fire um it's super fun just seeing people come out of their shell and sharing their story being vulnerable um so yeah we're really really excited to make some headway there and um we're launching a bring your own beats marketplace too in a couple months that allows producers to upload beats and rappers can audition over them right in the app and it's interesting because it's the way to match make talent in an interesting way we'll be talking about co-creation a little bit and why that's so powerful but it allows the beat maker to be the taste maker as to who gets minted and mastered and finally sold on the marketplace so it's an interesting way to get people to collaborate so i gave this talk recently to some vr folks uh just trying to unpack what is blockchain why is this so seminal um and i painted this picture about the hammurabi ledger okay so you're in ancient babylonia you see that right in the town square there's the hammurabi code law of the land posted there for all to see you know ignorance allah is no excuse eye for an eye type right well you look past the hammurabi code and you see there's another tablet and it's laid down and you see there's a just a huge sequence of these blocks as far as the eye can see you look up closer and there's just these kind of cryptic messages inscribed in it so you're kind of intrigued and you walk you walk to the end you finally get there and you see these guys laying these tablets you know dude what's going on and you know he just tells you yeah we just arbitrarily enter these entries into this these stone tablets about every 10 minutes we just kind of agree on and uh write these into these tablets every 10 minutes like clockwork that is essentially blockchain you know they're just these your itpal might tell you this is just glorified databases but what they are in effect is yeah a database that only does half of what a database does you know they only do four things and four things only create read update delete well with blockchain we can only create and read records this leaves us with digital marble um and that's pretty wild like this is a seminal as writing itself um and just to look at like a textbook definition then of what blockchain is i kind of consider them a new medium you know not quite a store of knowledge in and of themselves like a book but a more specific book you know a store of record a ledger and it signals new notions of ownership enabling new sources of value creation value capture and a store of value in the underlying currency powering the network but when it comes to nfts blockchains in conjunction with decentralized file hosting like are we for instance is the perma web this is a store of knowledge this is really potent stuff that we now have this shared truth of of reality and in the context of nfts with ipfs this is kind of the gold standard of decentralized file hosting i consider that not a store knowledge but a store of co like these artifacts of cultural consequence because when you put something out on web3 and you have that hello world moment putting something out into the internet of value um it's a special thing and you know not all of it is special this is a throne a pixel chain ipad because i think of nfts as sort of the internet of shape we now have digital stuff we have an internet of x of everything but nfts represent stuff we can actually own i love gifting nfts to people because i i live for that caveman moment they're like looking at it on their phone like whoa so i own this this jpeg it's actually pretty novel um and what in the context of music nfts we're seeing a pretty dramatic format shift right so this analogy breaks down a little bit because nfts can be a wave file or an mp3 but we're seeing this transition from cds to mp3s to nfts and this is uh pretty profound because it in essence makes the listener the label because what's happening right now we have similar technology to what torrents were back in the day ipfs is kind of a glorified torrent but rather than stealing from the artists we love we're pushing value up and bypassing the labels supporting artists directly they're having more take-home pay and that is in essence creating um a virtuous loop where the listener now doesn't just enjoy the music but they have something economically to gain they're actually the ones bankrolling and backing those artists and have some economic up potential um from doing that and music nfts can represent a pretty big market i don't see it cannibalizing streaming and doing away with it but it's bringing out ownership back we now don't have to rip off the cellophane off the cd but we can own those those things again and so streaming represents north of 10 billion dollars you know hip hop and r b is like a third of all streaming it's actually a pretty sizable um market but when when you think about nfts um and in the context of music we actually derive intrinsic value from owning and supporting artists and having a piece of them um so there is more to life than lambos is my point um it's not just that nfts can be a tool for speculation and backing artists in a kickstarter like way um but they're they're these cultural artifacts we need to value and finally give back to artists what their what their do is um and one of the things nfts are doing is also making they're filling the chasm um between making it and not as an artist it's always kind of been this um this dichotomy of of succeeding in music having to be a mainstream success but with nfts we're finding these smaller tribes of super fans that are backing these artists and actually you're finding you can have an audience of ten a hundred a thousand fans and make more money than you have on spotify historically so um you've got a pretty saturated media landscape like i mentioned since the advent of garage band it's been easier to make music than ever but now we have these ways in which we can find people that we resonate with and support them directly one other piece i wanted to touch on is what web3 can do to unlock collaboration so with cypher we're experimenting with this bring your own beats marketplace i mentioned and we're able to actually do what record labels haven't been able to do automatically is smart splits split sheets that actually divvy up what chunk of the the song creation process you had a hand in and being able to split those revenues up um seamlessly is pretty powerful but when you think about leveraging the network effects of more people collaborating on an album or a song um you're able to kind of get more attention to those those that media and one of the north stars too and what we're doing is unbundling the song so i think seeing the creative process unfold with how a song came to be what the lyrics inspiration was those rough drafts can roll up on polygon off chain and then the final mint is the finished product but you can resonate deeper with those artists by kind of getting a window into the creative process um so yeah that definitely went quick i'm just really excited to to keep jamming on music nfts and i think music nft spring is coming so really really excited to to keep going on this journey and uh yeah i'm kinshasa 5000 get at me if you want to chop it up on music nfts or anything else so thanks so much