TL;DR
To build this research article, we crowdsourced suggestions for music/Web3 tools that enabled financing from our community over two months.
We captured data including product type (e.g., general NFTs, music NFTs, social tokens), core utility (e.g., music/audio collectibles, fan/community rewards, royalty investments, event ticketing), network (e.g., Ethereum, Flow, Polygon) and publicly available funding information (pulling primarily from Crunchbase). We also held several weekly brainstorming and feedback calls in our Discord server over this period to determine the scope of the database and the higher-level story we were trying to tell through the data.
To get started, we coordinated a follow-up research project on artist/label DAO tech stacks in our Discord server, building from the research we did in Season 1 regarding music/Web3 tools for artists. After consulting the community, we concluded that a weekly interview series would be more valuable in capturing the state of music DAOs than a single long-form report in our two-month timeframe, given how quickly the DAO landscape changes. (This format aligns with an idea we seeded in our Season 1 recap post: Embracing a more iterative publishing cadence for the sake of raising more awareness of our research.)
Initially, we assumed our research on music DAOs would be tech-centered (like the broader DAO landscape), focusing on tasks like mapping the tooling market for music DAOs and tracking these DAOs’ token prices and treasury sizes. However, what ultimately resulted was a much more qualitative than quantitative study of music DAOs. This shift was in line with the primarily cultural rather than technical or financial nature in which our interviewees presented themselves and understood the role of DAOs in the music industry.
It’s noteworthy that our community-driven methodology may have impacted this qualitative output. To prepare for the interviews, we brainstormed an extensive list of initial questions in collaboration with our members, covering various topics including community design, governance strategy and treasury management.
Ultimately, 13 interviewers in our community paired up to interview and profiled eleven artist/label DAOs over eight weeks. Contributors would also run through interview summaries on member-exclusive calls in our Discord server every Wednesday evening, often bringing in the DAO leaders themselves to give additional context on our findings. Over the last two months, these calls became a core learning/synthesis “ritual” in our research community.
Many of the contributors to this research project are active contributors or token holders in multiple DAOs — including a few that we interviewed like Sone, SongADAO, Leaving Records/GENRE and Songcamp, plus other tokenized communities like Friends With Benefits, LNRZ and Daniel Allan & Friends.
Water & Music takes the position that embedded affiliation within a community should not prohibit one from writing about it. In contrast, we believe that being embedded in a community allows for individuals to develop a more nuanced understanding of how that community thinks and behaves, which arguably leads to better writing and critique.
That said, as a matter of W&M policy, we require that all community contributors proactively disclose any affiliations that they may have with organizations we study. We confirmed that none of our community interviewers were directly employed or affiliated with the specific platforms they were assigned to cover. Our proactive disclosure policy aims to ensure that we are as transparent as possible with our audience and that our researchers maintain an appropriate degree of separation from the subjects in our research.
In 1997, musician David Bowie made headlines when he became the first artist to issue "Bowie Bonds," a type of bond backed by the future earnings of his music. The bonds, which were asset-backed securities, allowed investors to purchase a share of Bowie's future royalties for a fixed time (10 years) in exchange for a lump sum payment. This innovative model opened up the discussion for alternative financing for musicians. In web2, we’ve seen Royalty Exchange & SongVest take the next step to enable artists to raise money -from a larger pool- using their future cash flows from streaming. With one of blockchain’s core focus to decentralize financing & create more accessibility to wealth, we wanted to investigate how the music industry is using this new wave of technology to drive financing & development of sustainable artists. In this article, we'll explore alternative artist resourcing, and how technology continues to bring Bowie’s dreams to life.
This research article is a branch of the state of music DAOs; with the objective to learn how the ecosystem is using web3 tools to resource pre-project.
As a musician, it can be difficult to obtain the resources you need to execute your projects. In the past, you may have had to rely on traditional methods such as record labels or grant funding to get your work off the ground. But with the emergence of blockchain & its disruption across financing rails, there are now a plethora of options available for musicians to obtain resources for their projects. From our research, 3 learnings emerged: