Inside Web3 | Web3 in Music
Inside Web3 | Web3 in Music
Logbook of a Web3 builder: News, resources, fundraising, and learnings
Hi friends,
I hope you are doing well today :)
Today you will notice some changes in the format! Thanks to those who helped me to improve it with their comments! We are now 2500 :)
The plan of this edition:
1 / Top 5 Resources of the Week
2/ The intervention of the week: Camille, Web3 designer
3 / Focus of the week: Music on the Web3
1 / Top 5 Resources of the Week
🇺🇦 Ukraine Has Received Close to $100M in Crypto Donations. I talked about this in a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago. The war has already spurred demand for crypto-currencies as sanctions resistance for Russia and as a fundraiser (through DeFi) for Ukraine. The Ukrainian crypto fund has surpassed raising $100 million to fund ongoing war operations.
🤝 Musings on Governance. Reverie advises DAOs, helping them with governance and legal issues in various communities. In this article, Larry Sukernik, one of the founders, lists some key lessons about DAO governance from their work. Contributions can have outside agendas, a treasury is not a hedge fund, and openness does not always equal quality.
💎 Stripe launches payment services for crypto businesses. Late last week, Stripe's online payments company launched services for crypto businesses, including exchanges, wallets, and non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces.
📟 The Lore Zone. How to read the internet. The internet is fundamentally different from all the media that came before it and therefore requires new ways of thinking about how it affects us and how we interact with it. This article from the Other Internet team asks the question: how do we read the Internet? Information on the internet is by nature decentralized and fragmented across communities and contexts.
📈 Binance seeks to open a store in Dubai, strengthening its foothold in the Middle East. Binance, the world's largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, is in talks with Dubai authorities to obtain a license to operate in the Gulf city-state. If granted, the license would help the company bolster its operations in the Middle East, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
2/ The intervention of the week
This week, I could chat with Camille, UI/UX designer, designing DApps and tokenized projects since 2016.
“How UX will shape our Metaverse Transition
An important question emerges as we slowly move towards Web 3.0 and place more of our daily lives into technology and the Metaverse. How will that transition occur, and what tools will be needed to make it as natural as possible?
To that, I would answer UX (user experience). It’s a skill often overlooked but can be found in any luxury service, retail store, website, or app; it surrounds us. Henry Dreyfuss believed that the design failed if there was a point of friction between a user and a product (Dreyfuss 1955). On the other hand, designing a product can only be done successfully if the design considers the user's ease, pleasure, and satisfaction. This deep understanding of empathy in design is key to the success of a product. In my opinion, it is the true definition of the goal of UX.
Why does it matter in Web3?
UX is critical in Web 3.0. Trying to translate a digital world into a place of work, entertainment, and collaboration while considering that you will stay for hours is daunting. For that reason, comfort, harmony, and efficiency are key features that must be implemented in both the hardware and the software that will be used to access this new world. UX designers constantly look at what surrounds them, what works, what doesn’t, and what does it look like? Is it appealing? Is it efficient? … All these questions and attention to detail must be looked upon under a microscope to create a new world where we will spend as much if not more, time than we do on our phones.
Immersion is also a founding feature of the Metaverse. Subjects such as hand-eye coordination and peripheral vision must be profoundly looked upon. Therefore, companies that understand and research human behavior early on are the ones to follow as potential leaders. Silicon Valley is already putting much trust into Web 3.0, with billions of dollars poured into developing their own tech. Companies like Facebook want to dominate the market. Right now, researchers on human interaction and UX engineers are hot and ready to put on the next big thing. Simply put, the more time users spend on a platform, the more money they can get from them with user data or by purchasing digital goods. The relevance of security and privacy is at an all-time high, and the world should be careful with their trust in these companies. The most intuitive platform will lead the popular opinion on Web 3.0. Thus, brands will look for this platform and place their trust, services, and products on it. In that sense, we can truly perceive the use case of UX and predict its potential in the coming years.
Open Source, collaboration, DAO, and its importance
As mentioned, UX works best when thinking about empathy and understanding every possible use case. For that reason, Collaboration and open source will be the best way to put minds together on different matters to create a versatile experience that works for everyone by letting people from the community input their ideas and possible innovations through DAO or even simpler feedback methods. The users who care about a platform look at what would improve their experience. It is this selfish approach that doesn’t think about ‘how’ but rather about ‘what would make it best’ that should be implemented in every web3 company.
The idea of a Metaverse will grow slowly in people’s minds and will not arrive before 5-10 years, but you have to remember that if executed correctly (meaning a good experience), it could possibly shift the entire world’s day-to-day life. Industries such as Education, entertainment, and architecture could drastically change, and only by working with experts in those fields will you create a suitable environment for us to move into. It is a widely ambitious project with flaws, but looking at past innovations. We can see a pattern: Understanding users, working on their experience as collaborative feedback, and improving their experience will create a better product.
If you are currently working on or interested in web3 projects, you need to understand the basic characteristics of UX. From Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. They are all looking at human data and how the interaction with their software creates more revenue or less. This data is currently limited to clicks, cookies, and retention, but eventually, our bodies will enable the interaction. From that moment, the amount of data collected could help create the most intuitive, addicting software that predicts our decisions and enables them. For that reason, UX can’t be overlooked in our day in age. One could say it will be the reason for a successful or failed Metaverse. UX focuses on human behavior and human-related data, which might be the next currency if it isn’t already.”
3/ Focus of the week: Music on the Web3
This week I've been interested in Web3 in the music industry. I looked at many resources and found WaterAndMusic, an independent newsletter, and research DAO. I learned many things I wanted to share with you today.
The music industry in Web3 is more exciting and diverse than ever. New platforms are launching every week to help artists leverage NFTs, social tokens, and DAO infrastructure to create new business models around creativity and fan engagement.
1 - Understanding the challenges of the traditional music industry
As a creative economy, the music industry faces the same dilemmas as video creation platforms, social platforms, and other industries. First, the biggest problem of the traditional music industry is that musicians and ordinary users depend too much on intermediaries, which leads to very low revenues.
However, this concerns the streaming model common to traditional music platforms. Streaming media is the common mode adopted by traditional music platforms. It works so that musicians who publish music on Web 2.0 platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and QQ Music receive a fixed amount of revenue.
The artists themselves quite criticize this model. First, the revenue from a single play of the work is exceedingly low. The creator may earn about $5 after a song has been played 1,000 times; moreover, most of this revenue will go to the music platform and the record company. What creators can and will get is very meager.
In the music industry, much of the revenue generated by musical works is received by third-party companies, such as record labels, streaming platforms, agencies, etc. Music creators end up getting a small amount of revenue from listening to their music in the end. Musicians who don't have a large fan base can hardly live off these revenues. This is detrimental to music creation and innovation.
If you want to know more about the music industry's problems, I share a top article: The Music Industry Has 99 Problems. And They Are...
What Web3 brings to the music industry
From Web1 to Web3, we have seen three phases: observe, create, and own. For the music industry, we can say that Web3 will be an arena where creators will try to own the content of oligarchs. Whether songwriters, writers, or artists, they can earn a place in the arena and receive direct income from their work through tokens and contracts.
In the Web3 revolution, the music industry must abandon the unreasonable revenue distribution system and get rid of the control of the middleman who extracts value from the production of works. True creators should not be exploited by middlemen who negotiate exchanges but should receive the vast majority of the value generated by the work. This idea was born with Audius, a decentralized Web3 streaming media platform.
Compared to traditional music platforms such as Spotify, Audius is a simpler music aggregation platform where all music data is stored on the IPFS network, and the token economy and community play a role in keeping the system stable. Audius said it would allocate 90% of the platform's revenue to creators, 10% as rewards for node operators, and the platform itself will not take a penny.
Musical works will have value in the digital world. In a computer, a musical composition is a sequence of 0s and 1s that can be easily copied. This allows piracy to progress, and the value of musical works cannot be fully realized. The ability to convert them into NFT or tokens can solve this problem. Thus, creators can connect with fans directly through music NFTs, and fans can support musicians by subscribing to their music NFTs. In a way, this model shows a pure relationship between musicians and fans characteristic of SocialFi. Pianist and MintSongs are such Web 3.0 music platforms.
Web3 music platforms associate NFTs of music musicians create with the copyrights of musical works. Users who purchase music NFTs can obtain all or part of the copyright in the works and may receive certain dividends from subsequent earnings on the work. Some platforms even allow NFT holders to modify the content of musical works. This model gives the music distributed by NFTs a more intuitive commercial and collectible value. The copyright providers of traditional music platforms are replaced here by NFTs and smart contracts, and the value of music copyrights can flow more easily. Royal, Opulous, and Melos represent these Web 3.0 music platforms.
The different actors of the music industry in the web3:
