Empowering Artists with Distributed Ownership Maria Tangarova; Aubrey Anderson

hey everybody how's it going thank you guys for having us hey guys hi cookie all right we are the song that owns itself before we get into our presentation we have a little surprise along the way so be sure to download the algrand wallet so you can go to this qr code on either side of us we kind of have a present for you guys later make sure you create an account so yeah something exciting is coming um so a little bit about us hi everyone my name is maria tangarova um so i started my career out in the music industry i come from a 4th gen family of classical musicians started out doing a couple things uh went to the recording academy um made my way to capital music group um and now i'm a web3 vc at chapter one um i'm aubrey i'm a nerd um i'm currently the cto at the new computer corporation um which is one of the founding sponsors of the song that owns itself and i built and code and i have a dev team and i'm a bona fide nerd but also i was a touring musician for 15 years so when it comes to this project it's particularly resonant with me so it's no secret that today's creator consumer dynamic is really unfair under monetized and unsustainable and we really kind of lost control and that's simply because artists are creating for communities that are not designed to sustainably support them so if we take a look um at the trifecta of the current music industry um you have centralized hierarchies thinking about record labels how they're structured so usually the big guys are at the top beating up the little fish limited fan participation so usually the artist fan dynamic is super one-sided and then you have inequitable profit sharing so the infamous 360 deals that leave artists um really out of pocket so stowy solves this problem um aubry will kind of get into this a little bit later but we actually wrote a white paper within the white paper we touched on these eight key problems that stewie solves we kind of have two favorites that we want to touch on this will be up on stowy.org so you guys will able will be able to kind of reference it you can also take a picture of it if you'd like but starting off with nps so think of this as like word of mouth each song will actually be able to reward anyone who helps it achieve its purpose and its purpose is to basically spread the word and get everybody to listen to it if you spread the word then it will reward you and kind of create a cool feedback loop another one is moral rights so the contract law will actually enforce the smart contract as opposed to having statutory and governmental interventions so these are kind of the few things we've identified again this will be available on our website so by definition what the heck is story.org stowy.org is a micro dao we call it kind of an mdow for short creation tool with robust transaction support and membership tokens so tldr any creator can seamlessly create micro dao's as an on-chain smart contract tokenize engage and activate their community and then seamlessly reward their supporters essentially at the click of a button on stowy.org so ideally any collaborative project can be a stowy um we are just starting with music so the the project that is at stowy.

org or has been up until today um grew out of a series of conversations we had with george howard who's one of our advisors about um just the problems that he's seen in the music industry over the last 20 some years he founded tunecore and so he's like goes way back with trying to solve this problem um and he's had this bug about like well could media be self-hosting or self-owned and what would that look like with the assistance of blockchain technology and the concept of the dao we thought like oh that might actually be realistic now maybe for the first time ever so last summer we all kind of went into devland and we wrote the white paper to try to outline what the aspects of this monster might be um but we also built a proof of concept uh that ran on ethereum and uh the band superposition who were grammy grammy-nominated just amazing musicians and crypto nerds and um they attached themselves to the project and created a song for us and we collaborated with them during the song creation process with their management with their team of people who recorded produced the song the assets and all that stuff um and it was a really unique opportunity to take everybody's concerns into account uh and it wasn't just another case of kind of technology people trying to imagine what creative people are gonna need building some form of that and then being like what do you think um so it was a highly collaborative and really energizing process the the result i don't know if you saw some of you probably did um it launched back in july uh and it was an interactive uh experience that you could ask the song what it wanted you we filled uh gpt3 with a bunch of concerns of the song and you could you could interact with the song talk to it find out what it's concerned what its concerns were and what its interests were and if you unlocked all those things it would give you participation in the dow as a reward in the form of a token like a token drop essentially that you could you could bring over to yourself it was really fun and people far outlasted the attention span that we expected they would pay to it um many people spend hours just hassling the song about like whether it like james brown all kinds of stuff um uh also it's it's it's it's an exciting day today because that that story that launched back then is uh live today on foundation as an nft so this is our first experiment everything about the song that owns itself is kind of an experiment but today we're seeing what it would be like to like move through that whole life cycle all the way to the point where you launch as an nft the the song um there's amazing creative uh attached to the nft as well it's really really cool um go check it out and like be part of history it's major um and overall that that experience was a huge success it far outpaced what we expected from the proof of concept and i lost my mic oh there it is hey it's got to be plugged in um but through the experiment we also learned a ton about this ecosystem and the requirements to actually do this at any kind of scale um we ran into some like three really core problems that have been very hard to to to solve um the first one we're all super familiar with which is just transactional cost and unpredictability and basically the gas fees associated with doing not only token movement but just simple calls to smart contracts are getting progressively more and more expensive it's really uh painful for anybody who's been building uh complex applications we also found that with a broad uh the token distribution for stowy number one it was hundreds of people that are members of that tao and we find that at the lower levels of token ownership there's a point where we just can't pay people what they're owed so the song moves money through or moves uh value through and ideally it would get evenly distributed based on all the token holders but there's these lots of thresholds where you're like well i can't really send you forty dollars in eth because it's just it's gonna cost me 45 to do that there's lots of people working on solutions lots of people in this room probably working on solutions to that problem on the ethereum network but for us like the the scaling it kind of is is not not sustainable and you know we're also dealing with artists who are sensitive to the environmental footprint of the content that they're creating and uh what how that manifests digitally and the overall cost of of the work uh people used to stress out about vinyl i'm old enough to think about like oh you know the environmental repercussions of vinyl we're in a whole another category with blockchain um we're looking at uh the research around web3 at the same time and as an outgrowth of this project we've made lots of friends and interesting introductions our friends at water and music did this study in december about you know how's web 3 going and what a fans want and we found this kind of eerie lineup with what fans want and the problems that we hit uh fans basically are concerned number one about environmental impact um this i think is a real surprise for a lot of people working in in web3 space they're like yeah it's just one of those things we'll figure it out later but no for from the fan perspective we got to figure it out right now um cost fluctuation and the sort of tentative nature of the transactions uh also very stressful for people just regular people if you're not crypto native um and things cost twenty dollars one day and sixty dollars another day and you can't really parse why it's very off-putting um on-ramps utility all super super important to people and so we thought long and hard about how to deal with this and what to do and we tried the type of transactions that we need to perform on a bunch of different networks did a ton of research and we ended up here um al grand is a a reasonably new network um and it's it's unique in a bunch of different ways um and when we moved the runtime for the song that owns itself over to allgrand everything just worked and was fast and we were like oh man this is amazing and over the implementation of the last six months it's gotten more satisfying and more amazing so that's a pretty good trend as a as a nerd um today snowy.org is live on the algrand network and the results of this heavy lift to port from ethereum over there are bearing fruit so we picked al grand uh both because it had alignment with what we were hearing from the fans uh and the end users and the participants what we were hearing from the musicians and what algorithm themselves have been talking about for the last year and change which is in a proof-of-stake concept you should be able to have stable and extremely low uh transactional overhead um for end users this translates to like it's always 0.00 i'll go to transact no matter what i do it's huge it's like predictable constant easy peasy they have a commitment to carbon responsibility that at least in my opinion is second to none it's uh amazing it's built into the chain from the lowest possible level um and we're like are you really doing this and the answer is yes it's it's amazing it's purpose-built to be carbon responsible they're carbon neutral today um and the general education and utility boxes are also ticked for us where the on-ramps into algorithm transactions are very easy there's a mobile app which looks like a mobile app um the crypto parts uh feel transactional but they don't feel scary um which for for regular people is major all right so we're bringing it back was it wasn't this enough and that's the end of the nerd party bringing it back to the music part we're so excited because today we are actually dropping stowy number two with incredible artist jesse boykins iii um he is a web 3 trailblazer yes we got some people that know him um trailblazer total world soul artist um the track is titled honestly i'm a treat it's about um knowing who you are and sticking by that um we're super honored that jesse chose us to roll out this project so so this is jesse and we're super super thankful that um he chose stowy to roll uh story number two out with um so exciting follow-up to that um you can actually be part of jesse's micro dow so you can have skin in the game if you claim some stowy number two uh tokens by going to uh this qr code um and get the full experience so i see some people taking out their phones we're gonna leave it up here for five seconds and we'll have it up at the end as well um but this is just uh amazing that we're doing this today um and we're very excited to be rolling out story number two today all right um when we launch story number one uh and when we go to events and talk to people we hear like oh this is good this is compelling i like the microdail concept i'm i want to participate i want to make one and we're like oh okay because we kind of envisioned this as a curated process um but there's a real demand for self-service so um we got we put a little info at stewie.org email address when we launched and and there are hundreds of of inquiries where can when and how can i make one um so today you can uh at stewie.org you can drop into the process to create your own micro dao for music for a farmers market for like anything you want it's a grand experiment and we want to see what everybody does and we're also here to help you along the way um it's new tech it's a new concept but we hope that you will all go and make them and experiment and like get on the train so one stowy at a time let's take back control thank you guys so much we are stowy.

org thanks [Applause]