MUSIC NFTS

MUSIC NFTS - BEST IF VIEWED ON INPUBLIC.FUN

there exist very few great songs documented on the blockchain. no new genres have been invented which is disappointing given that clowncore is achieved by playing math metal dressed as a clown. you could argue that our own version of clowncore has been attempted by universal music group in the form of kingship, a band composed of 4 bayc avatars. their output has been scrubbed from the internet in embarrassment (if you can find it please send it to me).
‘minting' needs to be broken down into ‘media type specific’ behaviors. 'collect' is a weak value proposition in 2024 when I am writing this (it may come back around). 'support' is a little better but still not great. you could build a model where you are funding the next thing ('fund'), like super collector, which is also better than 'collect’. I got a peek at fam from iamnick.eth and I think it's moving in the right direction, which is to create ways beyond 'mint' or 'collect' to engage with music onchain, especially at the collective level. we need more music nft clients like fam, songcamp’s audiato & futuretape that open the door to behaviors that will click with people who aren't wealthy or just trying to support web3 as a concept. denying web3 music as a category is foolish. it is not uncommon for the medium to have a relationship to the content or message, some might even say that the medium is the message. mixtapes, AM radio, car commercials, rare japanese vinyl, 8 track, soundcloud, song used in prestige television closing credits - all of these mediums have a 'sound'. people will group web3 music into a category because of the distribution method. sadly, most of the publicized music in web3 doesn't really have a coherent much less cohesive sonic or visual identity. web3 music is mostly uncurious and unambitious.
i don't have an issue with raw, under produced or technically unproficient work existing here. I wish more web3 music felt raw. the medium creates a huge opportunity to create visual and written context for the music and when people lean into this it is awesome and well received. Latasha & Gremlin are two artists who have a clear visual language that they've married to their sonics and it hits very hard. they are also both taking sonic risks and making types of music that doesn't exist in over abundance elsewhere. I don't want to mint pollen type beats or car commercial type beats or even 'i wish i was burial or two shell' rave type jungle house ass beats. I want web3 music to fucking slap and be new and to have a mechanic that is legible to regular people as a sensible way of engaging. if

that's "give me a couple bucks just because" that's absolutely fine - passing the hat around during the live set is a tried and true way of supporting music. we have enough tools to be able to build in that direction in a meaningful way, and we are failing musicians by not building in a direction that supports risk taking.
I also fundamentally disagree with the notion that great music is common, that creativity should always be encouraged agnostic to quality or that artists should be coddled by their audiences. you have to earn a following, same as everywhere else. there are no shortcuts to making good music and never have been.
good music, proficient music, well produced mixed and mastered music, is everywhere and this excess of supply has driven the price way down. there is really powerful and great pop music coming out of the major label system. writing/producing as a craft is concentrated and supported in small scenes that are outputting a very specific & great sound. once a good artist gets absorbed into the industry, the incentives warp dramatically in a way that almost immediately snuffs out the thing that made them special and stops them from innovating further. the economics of boundary pushing and risk taking get overwhelmed as soon as the first major check gets cut and then you're just trying to monetize a well known brand as content and manage reputational risk and downside. most of the best rap labels have mastered keeping the creative process away from the industry and utilizing majors for their distribution and label services while avoiding the kind of slow death encouraged by the content mill.
there is a lot of possibility for experimental music and the risks associated with making experimental music have never been higher. the macroeconomic conditions that inspire that kind of movement have never been weaker in my lifetime. In the 90s you could write a song about walking on the sun built around a cute organ riff and never have to work again even if your band dressed like the cast of the movie clerks. we are currently in a difficult climate for creating great work and the need for great work has never been higher. the birdman must fly in any weather.
we need experimental music onchain. we need onchain native genres. we need artists interested in exploring the containers for their music and mixing media together in unanticipated new ways. the blockchain has a character, the music

documented here could have a character, this could all mean something besides number go up. we need a point of view and a sense of community to get there. i’ve felt it at different times in different corners of the space; during a partybid for pussy riot’s ‘drink my blood’, minting loot from the contract, figuring out how to get a terraform to say ‘bing bong’ in fwb’s nft general chat at 4am. I’ve heard beautiful music here; tangling in headlights by urboiari, barely A lady ✧ raw jam by forrest mortifee. I think about these songs all the time.
there were conditions under which this music might have been attributed its full value by market forces; in march of 2021 anything felt possible. I made my best music nft which was purchased for 65 $fwb by cooper turley. I made one good nft since then, which i gave to bradey from panther modern because he said he liked it in the fwb discord. why did my nfts get discernibly worse as i spent more time in the space?
i was talking to a friend about nft collections and he asked me what exactly in the code made it so you could only make nfts that were profile views of animal cartoons. his exposure to nfts was so limited that he assumed there was something in the code forcing people to only make nfts that utilized a profile view of an animal drawing as their media. Its the same brain worm that executives at umg were dealing with when they decided to make 4 bayc avatars into a band (seriously if you can find any of kingship’s music please drop it in the comments).
some version of this brain worm has found its way into my brain; on some level the gravity of capital convinced me that nfts had to be a certain way to succeed. that way is undeniably worse than the kind of experiments i was making during my first year on the blockchain.
someone’s version of a music nft is definitely dead and honestly, thank god, because that stuff wasn’t fooling anyone. the capital was sourced before the product could mature, the cart was put before the horse. when we’re done clearing away the carcass of failed experiments like kingship we will have made space for what will come next. long live music nfts.

Incase the links don’t load properly:
clowncore
tangling in headlights by urboiari
[barely A lady ✧ raw jam by forrest mortifee](https://zora.co/collect/eth:0xdffd47af914c4fb80f58db83e9c0c5fb7d6dfa be)
[my best music nft](https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xabefbc9fd2f806065b4f3c237d4b59d9a9 7bcac7/1653)
[one good nft since](https://foundation.app/mint/eth/0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1 C48a5405/37994)