On The Brink with Castle Island - Matthew Chaim (Songcamp) on collective creation with music NFTs (EP.286)

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

In our second episode in the web3 music mini-series, we spoke with Matthew Chaim, musician and founder of Songcamp and other projects at the intersection of music and web3. We cover how Matthew thinks about: Helping artists gain control over their creative output Collective creation and re-imagining the role of fans Optimizing for resonance versus reach with music NFTs Discoverability in music NFTs and ways to democratize curation And much more. We also recommend reading Matthew's writing on these topics at chaim.mirror.xyz. Intro and outro track: OmgKirby Genesis #326  

In this episode, we got to sit down with Matthew Chame, musician and founder of Song Camp, among other projects at the intersection of music and Web 3. The Song Camp community has run two songwriting camps so far and is working on a third. These camps bring together musicians, designers, storytellers, and fans, and gives them the structure, support, and resources that they need to create a body of work that they can collectively monetize via Web3 Rails. In this episode, we get into how SongCamp helps creators regain power and control over their creative process, their distribution, and their monetization,

how Matthew thinks about one-of-one music NFTs versus additions versus copies, especially in the context of what he calls resonance versus reach, how he's applied this framework to his own work, and much more. I learned a lot from this conversation and really resonate with Matthew's ability to create a thoughtful structure around Web3 music, as well as articulate areas that require continued exploration and iteration. So with that, let's get to the episode. Hello, everyone. This is Ria, and today we have the honor of sitting down with Matthew Chame, who's one of my favorite musicians and creators who founded, I don't know if that's the right word, or maybe seated the idea of and has led to date at SongCamp, Electra, Club BPM, and Job Dow, if I'm not mistaken, and so much more.

So before we get into what each of those are and your thoughts on the Web 3 music movement more broadly, could you just start off by telling us a little bit about yourself, your music, and your entry into this industry? Yeah, sure. Thank you, Rhea, and thanks for having me. I love that drop-down list. You do do your research like your handle implies. Yeah, so a bit about me. So I'm kind of first and foremost a musician, as you pointed out, singer and songwriter doing that for many years and sort of taking it super seriously about five or six years ago, living in Montreal

and kind of working in kind of like startup sort of space. and like I had gone to business school and that sort of thing, but music was a hobby that then just slowly started to completely envelop my life and then had the opportunity to actually go on songwriting camps in Nicaragua and other places that really just like threw the ceiling off of what I realized was possible in terms of creating music with others, started doing trips to Toronto, L.A., and then eventually moved to L.A. for a couple of years and sort of, yeah, just did my thing out there.

First, like, cutting my teeth, going through songwriting kind of circuit thing, and then just like focusing more on my own craft and putting out music under my own name. And then when the pandemic hit, I had put out an album. It was the only album I ever signed like a small record deal for it. And that came out in November 2019.

And then March 2020, we all know what happened. I left L.A. came back to where I'm from in Montreal because I just didn't feel like. I wasn't administratively moved into the States and then suddenly a pandemic was there. So came back to Canada and in that move connected with an old friend who essentially pushed me down the rabbit hole who was working in kind of layer two tech and had been in Ethereum for many years and started educating me on what was happening. And I started to see how this could touch music and the empowerment for artists in general and more specifically maybe this early on. artists who like to wear that business had and I always wanted to use my creative

spotlight and pour it onto that and suddenly I saw the canvas to be able to do that. So through that, just soaking up knowledge and learning, stood up Song Camp in March of last year. And we've just been running experiments, throwing crazy stuff at the wall together through collective creation, songwriting camps, Web 3, NFT hackathons and just coming up with the weirdest ideas and seeing what we can do. That's awesome. I think first of all, you were super early in recognizing this movement, this Web 3 music movement and being vocal about it and really building in public sharing your experiences. You have so many articles on Mirror on the song camp page, on your page, asking questions, answering them, talking about what you're grappling with. And I think. that that's been a massive resource for a lot of musicians and artists and creators in this space. I'd love to double click on song camp. Tell us a little bit about the Genesis and how

camp one, how you ran camp one and two, and then how it's evolved over the different camps you've held and are maybe planning to hold in the future. Yeah. So, I mean, the The place from which it started was very serendipitous and I find over and over again, like it's serendipity that is the fuel for the most interesting projects in this space. I mean, the name song camp had been with me for many years, and it came from, like, as a brand that I kind of wanted to launch and never did, but it came from the fact that, as I was saying, songwriting camps had a huge effect on me. And I went on this, this, what was it called, destination, songwriting camp to Nicaragua

that really just, yeah, created such. different outlook for me on what it means to like what collective creation means and and and changed my outlook on my own creativity and my ability to work with others and so much music was created in those five days and so many friendships were made and those songs were sort of artifacts of those relationships and you know maybe 30-ish songs were created that were incredible and you know fast forward five six years later um two of those songs are actually out there in the world for the public to hear And maybe after two years of recognizing that none of these songs were coming out, I found it super frustrating that they just got stuck in this thing we call the music industry.

So I started ideating on this project called Song Camp where I'm going to buy all these songs and put them out and then run song camps and just put out the music myself. But I never did it because I was just, yeah, it seemed like a big lift and was kind of busy thinking in terms of how I thought then, of just being an artist and building the Matthew chain name and building my individualist thing. And part of the reason I didn't put out those songs was because, oh, they're amazing, but they don't fit the brand that I'm building to make Spotify work from me or what have you. Then I, yeah, this place maybe reinvigorated that intention and seeing a canvas that was blank where I could maybe do something of that nature.

But I just kind of one night, late night in March, like just created a Discord page and called it SongCamp and said, this is a place for music and Web3 to crash into each other and invited like 10 people who I had met on Twitter, you know, in our little corner of crypto Twitter. And then like through kind of like conversations with people at Seed Club and people at friends with benefits, some people fell into the Discord and just musicians who were already Crypto Curious and Web3 and NFT Curious. we just started having conversations every Monday on the phone. And maybe two weeks in, we just said, okay, let's run a project. Let's just do something. Let's not just talk about it. So I devise a plan where we're going to create three teams of three and like three bands, essentially with people who had just met and they're going to create a song from scratch over two weeks.

And then we're going to put that music out as one of one NFTs. And at the time, this is right when the catalog started and like maybe a few songs that sold, you know, it was like very, very early. But we went and did that and some amazing music came out and we had a small visual team that built the cover artwork. We had an ops team with me and two others who put together the actual like strategy of how we're going to do this. And we then successfully got Mirror and Catalog to basically support and interoperate each other because at the time Catalog didn't have auctions and Mirror didn't support music. And we had the quote unquote leverage to get them to do that, which was amazing to me because at the beginning of it,

I didn't think, I thought maybe, oh, a couple of years down the line, we'll be this, like, power user of collective, like, just power user of music, Web3 products that will be able to leverage them to do what we want. And here we were six days in, and these two projects were bending for us. And that went super well. So that was, like, incredibly exciting and reverberated out into not only the artists who had just sold music and, and, receive value for it within like a few weeks time after you know or a few hours time after kind of releasing it but also to like the community that was like watching what was happening so more people fell into our world more people joined our heartbeat calls on Mondays and more ideas

started to percolate in terms of what we could do next you know one was just like okay let's do that again that works that's usually what like startups or companies do they find something product market fit they do it again and again and they skis it up but we weren't we didn't come with that intention we were just artists who wanted to run experiments at the edges and do weird new cool things artists like to kill what they do and then do a new thing so we killed that and we built something new and we built Electra so in camp two we called a camp Electra and we built we did a songwriting camp again but this time we wrapped a like 20-person production pop-up production house around that songwriting camp

to give birth to this world and universe and lore called Electra. And Electra was a fantasy world that we all travel to together, a world that music is energy, and we were sent there to save this world and repower this dying world called Electra. And as you and others were a part of, we created an interactive game-like experience in Discord to allow others to travel with us there and then contextually release the music out.

into this audience that was being created in that songwriting camp. So the experiment there was like, okay, we can like put musicians and visual artists together and then create great music and put it out as NFTs. What if we also created not just the content, but the context in which that comes out too? And so that was kind of like the experiment there. And through these projects, we've just crashed all these artists into each other, some more or less knowledgeable on Web 3 at the beginning. Camp two, we had eight of the 42 people involved who did and have.

have metamask's day one. So people are falling down the rabbit hole in a very experiential way. And then new ideas are happening when you crash artists into each other and they have this camp-like experience with each other, they come up with new ideas and now those are just like incubating in our Discord with our community and like especially on those heartbeat calls, which really do act like this, this drumbeat, this heartbeat of the community. And we're just wanting to pour more kind of like support and resources into those projects. And then also keep running camps, the pillar kind of cohort sprint song camp hackathons that we run. Essentially, what we're starting to do is the cadence of twice a year, those pillar camps.

I love that. There's so much there that really resonated. I think one thing you said is you created in the past before Song Camp before Web 3, you worked on music and so much music and then didn't end up releasing a lot of it because it didn't fit the brand that you were trying to curate on Spotify. And I think that's one thing that's so powerful about Web3 is it's not about reaching the most people. It's about reaching the right people that really resonate with your work. And one thing I want to talk about later on is you've written about is resonance versus reach.

and or maybe we can just talk about that now. I think you have this amazing article called, I think, canons, collectibles and copies where you really explore this idea of what it means to hold a music NFT, whether it's a one of one or an addition. Maybe could you expand on that and how. your thought process in arriving at this framework to think about music NFTs? Yeah, so I wrote that article back in May, I think, or May or June, when I was, because I had an EP that I was working on kind of during the pandemic while I was getting more and more curious about

NFTs, and then I ended up putting it on hold in terms of its release because like that first camp, Camp Genesis ended up kind of taking over. my days and so then when that was over I wanted to put it out but I wanted to again just like run an experiment with it and start to think about how NFTs could I mean how they do carve out this this sort of value that's already there you know people talk about artificial scarcity as if like these things are not scarce but I guess and I think it was something I argued in that article was like the creativity that creates this and like that is the sort of like um explosion of creativity that creates this art and sort of bottles it and artifacts it in

in whatever medium it might be that is scarce it is it is the fact that we throw it up on the internet and like anyone can just copy it stream it play it do whatever they want with it which is powerful it can travel like and it's boundless um that's what makes it um lose scarcity so so the argument there is that like we're actually um able to carve out that resonant value that actual scale scarce creative value through NFTs. And that's sort of what the one of one can do is like that resonance that reaches, like you're saying, finding the right people that touches that other listener or fan or whatever you want to call it.

I don't even necessarily like using the term fan because it feels kind of just like far away and dried out to me. But it feels more like a friend. It's a lot closer. You create this like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, much stronger bond and it's energetic, you know, as esoteric as that might might get. And then so the idea there was like kind of like, and I've spoken about this a few more times and it's just always kind of like playing in the back of my mind is how

the different sort of layers of that resonance can that resonance to reach spectrum can relate to one another because because both matter, right? Like you want your music to reach as many of the right people as possible. So in some ways, like Spotify allows that, but they don't account for the resonance at all. Yeah. And then a one of one like catalog accounts for the resonance, but not so much the reach. And so there's so much design space kind of also in that middle that's exciting to explore. Yeah, for sure. I think, like music should 100% be ubiquitous. It should be enjoyed by everyone. But I think what you said, I'll read you exactly what you wrote. I instead believe that by creating a scarce vessel through the use of NFTs,

we are in essence building a space for the weight of arts resonance to be housed. So well articulated. And then so you had this article and then you talked about, well, actually, one thing I also want to mention that you wrote about in this article is this idea that, like, the existing platforms, likes, the supply, first of all, streams and the demand or likes or ability to express your appreciation of that thing are both unlimited. And through the use of NFTs, you imbue the scarcity because there's a limited quantity and a limited, on both ends of the spectrum. The other thing I wanted to, an extension of this is you, a applied this framework to releasing textures of a long-forgotten assumption.

I think that was your third album. Can you talk a little bit about how you actually applied that in practice and maybe some of the platforms that you used to release the work as NFTs? Yeah. So I wanted to explore, like, I guess, like in three spots along that spectrum. So all the way on the resident side, the kind of like intersection or intersection. in between middle ground and then all the way to reach. So on the resident side, we had the one of one of these songs that were minted on

catalog and trying to remember, oh no, I think that was right around the time. Catalogue was launching auctions. I remember I was messaging with Jeremy trying to decide if I was going to still do it on mirror or kind of like running with the catalog auctions. I still ended up doing the auctions on mirror for most of them. And then I also released the songs kind of all the way on the reach side. I released them on Spotify slowly. So there was also this infinite supply in that sense of them, the infinite reach.

And also release them in a way that people can buy the album with Fiat. So that was kind of like near that reach side. And then the middle ground, I released finite number of additions on Rarable. It was five editions of sort of just the chorus playing with a vinyl spinning and some audiovisual element to it to kind of, yeah, kind of play in that middle ground. I love that. One thing that stands out is that in this space, you have so much flexibility to create your own playbook and experiment with different platforms.

But at the same time, that's kind of overwhelming for some people that are new and don't necessarily know where to go and, you know, understand, like, which part of their audience they are able to capture with each platform. So, yeah, that's just an observation. Yeah, I think an early, like, learning from me was like, because when I first started dabbling, I was like, okay, cool. I'm going to, like, you know, talk about this stuff on Instagram, and I'm going to bring some people over from my audience there to, you know,

maybe collect some of these pieces. And then I quickly learned like, oh, taking this jump, like, has a lot of friction in it. I always started around that time, I was using the analogy a lot of like, it's like going to another country and like immigrating. If they get like a new passport, you got to get a new bank account. It's like a whole to do. And so it made a lot more sense like when you do move to another country to like make friends in that country.

Yeah. So and that sort of like platform-wise started happening on Twitter. Yeah. Start developing a whole new kind of, yeah, group there. And that continues to be kind of the main place where people who I've become close with and that are also starting to collect my work. And only now, you know, you're starting to see more and more artists jump over that Hooper go through that obstacle because it's becoming less and less frictionful over time.

Another thing that you mentioned as you were talking about that is this idea that you don't necessarily like using the term fan anymore. And I think you've articulated this in the past, but a fan is no longer a fan, but now a co-creator. Could you talk about ways that you've seen that shine through across SongCamp, club BPM, which I also want to double click on, or other ways that you've been active in the space? Yeah.

So, I mean, I think first on that fan part, it kind of goes back to that reach residence thing. I think we're, I think like a big problem with the music industry we're used to, and, you know, especially musicians and artists in general feel that. It's like we are, we are craving that, like, resident side. We are craving those bonds. And the current world doesn't really give them to us. We feel like we're lacking nourishment in that sense. And everything feels very far away.

There's not a sense of intimacy and closeness. not only with the audience, but also with your work in the sense of like you kind of like need to like distribute it through this distributor that that maybe hopefully will pitch it to the like opaque, you know, gods of Spotify and it'll come out in 60 days and you've got to ship at 90 days before if you want a chance at playlist. And then your audience will start to listen to it. You'll get some data that 114,000 people listen to your song. in like such a big number. You know, these big numbers, like we don't even bat an I to because it doesn't mean anything to us. We can't, we can't like know these people.

We're not giving any information, nothing. And then here, those bonds are a lot closer. And, you know, really, when people resonate at the same energy, they don't just want to, like, necessarily, you know, gawk at the person. Like, some people might want to also get involved, you know, like they want to be a part of that. And so I think the biggest point. place we saw that go down was with Elektra where people who were playing the game who actually

joined from the audience side ended up becoming so active in it and also contributed to the final music that was created in the last piece at the end of the you know like kind of like digital immersive play or game and and so doing became like a contributor and now like weeks and months later, with Electra still kind of moving forward, those people are on like the calls every week and they're pushing it forward. They're a part of, they've moved from in front of the, you know, curtain to behind it. And I think like we're only going to see more and more of that take place as it becomes easier to find those sorts of projects and to engage with them and to be sort of validated in that engagement. I remember experiencing that firsthand in the,

the Elektra Discord, there was one, I don't know if you would call it a quest, but like quest that the people in the discord had to solve together. And then that resulted in us discovering like an audio clip. And then I remember someone who was a producer in the audience kind of took that audio clip and created a beat out of it. And then Electra kind of rewarded this person with a special NFT and I thought that was so cool and so special. Yeah. It's funny. When you say that,

it makes me think, because it's like that's, you know, this idea of, it's remixing. It's remix culture, which is not new. But if you look at like today's,

where like ubiquity of remix exists is like something like TikTok. But I think that element of far away still exists there in that you remix these things an incredible, you know, we call it. content, but amazing art is made. But really then the game is to get as many eyeballs on that art as possible. Yeah. And just see that number go up. And then you just gave such good, like, color to it in that in this case, you're actually like in this virtual space with these people

and you're being rewarded. You're given this like digital gem, this gift for, for your remix. And those bonds can just continue to strengthen. And that quality over quantity is just, it's like, transcendence. It's like not even a... That is such a powerful point because if you think about something like TikTok, it's like, yeah, there is this remix culture, but it's not really collaborative, you know, and there's like a one degree of separation,

and that is the TikTok and the desire to reach as many people as possible, whereas I feel like there's genuine collaboration and relationship building in this space And that's not really something that you can capture by getting a certain amount of likes on social media. I would love to know or get your take on some of the challenges that you've faced in building out song camp and how maybe you've addressed them in camp one versus two and how you're thinking about them going forward. Yeah. So that something's like first like right at top of my mind right now as we really get into the kind of nitty gritty pre-camp design of Camp 3 because it's very exciting actually because we start to really feel and taste how we are integrating the kind of insights we got from Camp 2. To be honest, like Camp 1 went swimmingly. It was like very small problems.

Like I mean we were 13 people in a very small discord, 26 people applied. and we curated in half from, I think the one challenge, like, or snag we ran into was, I think I stood up a strategy call the first week for some people. And then, like, some people on the call were just like, okay, cool, like, what do we do? Like, tell us what to do. Like, you don't know what we should do. There was just this, like, weird vibe. It was like, literally we were just starting an experiment.

We have no idea what we're doing. But then we just folded that strategy call realizing we didn't really need it. And then we just focused on making music, making some art and putting it out. And they went. I mean, I don't know if it could have gone smoother. Well, I guess it's also because it was like, a pretty small group of people at that point in time. Totally.

Yeah. It was small and it was so, there was a big thing. Like, that's what I like start to get to with camp two. But I really like refer to this all as like expectation design now. Think a lot about expectation design. In camp one, there were zero expectations. Like we had no idea what we're doing. None of us expected anything.

We didn't expect anyone to like buy these NFTs. What are you talking about? When they were collected, we all freaked out. We were all on a Discord call. All the bids were met and we were just like losing our minds. Then you go to Camp 2. First of all, we bring in a lot more people. The scope is a lot bigger.

The timeline's a lot bigger. And there are also front end expectations because a lot of people curated into that camp know about Camp. One, have heard the quote-of-gold success story of this project, you know, that was just like kind of thrown together. So suddenly you actually need to start thinking about expectations in a bigger way. And as soon as you bring more people in, you know, you have just, you're just, yeah, it's exponential in terms of the expectations. And so learned a lot from Camp 2. I mean, we had curated in 42 people. We definitely could have done a better job in terms of role definition on the front end, expectations of scope on the front end, you know, knowing exactly what incentives you're exposed to on the front end.

And so really like kind of thinking about that. That's what we're thinking about a lot now is like having people know exactly what they're kind of agreeing to like when they get on this kind of ride, like what they're agreeing to or what they know at least where this ride's going to go. And even or even just that expectation of like the fact that we've no idea. Like it's going to be imperfect. Right. There are so many unknowns and just making that incredibly clear. So I think it's really about expectation design. like container design. With Electra, did you, did you, were you the one crafting the fictional

story and world building and lore and narrative? Or was that, um, a joint process with everyone that, that you had chosen or that had been curated for camp too? Yeah. So that was it, that was joint. And that was one of those areas that, that sort of evolved or emerged within camp that was like less sort of stood up at the beginning and designed for. But essentially, like, I wrote the kind of outline of the story. So I wrote the outline of the story, the set and setting, if you will, and maybe give name to one or two of the characters. And then I gave kind of like a list of the scope or like the deliverables, the art that

we're going to make to give life to the story. It was in one of the groups called The Swarm. within camp that a story team emerged. Got it. We hadn't really kind of planned for it, but we had like the swarm was doing all of the sound design, the voiceover stuff. And a lot was just kind of figured out on the run.

And then at some point, a few people really took to building the story. And Yada was part of the swarm, started really owning like the script and like showing up with new scripts. We'd have calls and we'd run through it, like do table reads and edit it and all that sort of stuff.

And yeah, so this, like, it was kind of let go into the team and this really strong sense of collective creative ownership over the narrative and story itself sort of emerged through that group, which was a really interesting thing to see happen. That was really cool. And I think an important measure or mark of success in this space is the ability to tell a story. And I just love how, I guess,

a swarm came together to create and give life to these characters and also articulate like the predicament that we're facing through a fictional narrative, which was so cool. Yeah. And that kind of like sort of parallel continues on now in a lot of ways. There's a lot of talk in like Electra calls about sort of this meta-dou kind of narrative where a lot of like what we're experiencing even just like in collectively working together in these sort of unknown territories is then translated into lore within the world of Electra. And it's almost a way of like, yeah, almost like processing real things we're going through through this sort of maybe cathartic practice of art making. Yeah, that's beautiful. One thing that you've done really well is your consistent Monday heartbeat calls

to keep the community engaged and really foster relationship building and fun and jamming on random stuff over the course of this last almost year, I guess. Is that something that you kind of consciously have used to keep people engaged in between camps? And then maybe what are some other tactics that have worked? I don't remember when it like became a thing that we're never going to miss. a Monday call, but I think it was pretty early on. It was definitely like during the first camp, very essential in the sense that like there wasn't much scaffolding to what we were doing, right?

We were just kind of figuring it out. And Monday calls were sort of like the shelling point, like a meeting spot for us to just keep figuring it out and like make sure momentum sticks. And then after that ended, yeah, we just kept doing it. And for me, it was a very almost important anchor as. someone who's kind of like fully committed to this project, but the project itself by nature is sort of volatile in its in its scope or its direction in the sense of like it's kind of like standing up this like, you know, pop up kind of company or project and then just like completely

it then goes away or it changes. And that can be very kind of like disorienting. And so having this heartbeat call that is so there's a sense of security. And, trust and that it's going to be there every Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific into eternity and has now become sort of almost a meme in the network or like sort of, you know, an institution of what we're doing. And so, yeah, I think it's like really an important practice. And there's definitely, you know, it's not always easy that it's on Mondays. I'm on Eastern time, so it's a bit later in my afternoon, but you know, Mondays are the first day of the week. And it's just like sometimes it's just like, damn, we got the call, you know, but I feel a strong

like sense of responsibility and fun. Like I do enjoy kind of hosting those and doing my sort of intro that like is kind of some of those lines could be put on a T-shirt because I know it right now. And yeah, and they've been like really important. And even some ideas that. have gone on to become projects or work streams or what have you in the in the in the in the project or in the discord came were like like came to life just by jamming on that hour call and and they've taken many different shapes like during the lecture it became sort of a work check-in because we were this big project big scope and like damn okay what are the to do is what are the things and other other times it's been like super casual with no intentions whatsoever and just like kind of hang in yeah

And now that's just like more and more people are coming, it's become a wonderful place for people to introduce themselves to the network. So it sort of has a life of its own. And I do see it as like the bedrock, honestly. So I think this is this responsibility that you've taken on to hold these regular heartbeat calls is something that I think a lot of Dow's and communities can learn from. to keep their, the group of people that are participating in the community kind of engaged and consistently present and arriving, because you need to create these opportunities for synchronous interaction. Totally. I totally agree. I think, yeah, attention is like scarce in general, even more scarce

in this corner of the internet. There's so much happening all the time. You're jumping from thing to thing and like to have a place where you know and I know that like some other people in the in the community who show up to those calls week in week out like I think it's I think they would give it this word of like I think it's a place to arrive to like almost rest right it's funny last week we just like put some people on the spotlight who weren't expecting it because they were part of projects or leading projects that they got shortlisted into the seed club accelerator so sort of like handed them the mic and they're not used to talking, but they're there every week. And they're like, oh, man, I'm used to just like, chill out and enjoying the call.

So, you know, yeah, I think that like providing that that space to just like rest and be with each other. And also grow. Like you said, you know, it's an opportunity for growth. So just talking a little bit more broadly now, something that I've noticed recently is this requirement to couple NFTs with some other utility. I think fans are increasingly seeking it, and I think artists are increasingly feeling this pressure that they need to add incremental utility to NFTs that they release and fans kind of struggle to grasp their inherent value as just art. I would love to know how you think about that and what you think it takes to change

that. Very good question. And yeah, like, so from my point of view, I mean, and if you look at my the NFTs I've been did, I've gone in sort of that opposite direction of like some of the early stuff. It's like if you look at the descriptions, right, it's like, if you get this, you get this and that, and not and this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're going to be part of this thing and that thing and all these sorts of stuff. And then now my NFTs are like kind of maybe like my favorite four words and like lyric from the song. And because, yeah, I see it like kind of, and it was cool to hear you kind of quote back to me that line because I think like that sort of housing of that creativity or creative

energy is what we're creating. Right. And I think like there's a lot of also conversation sometimes even in this space about like how are we going to bring the value to the audience, value to the audience, value to. to the fans. And I think people are forgetting that I think artists actually drive where the value comes from rather than needing to sort of think like think about how to bring that sort of value to the full. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like artists seek new stuff and creative stuff. To me, I think of how artists find these cool new neighborhoods, right?

And they kind of like turn it into this awesome place. And then other people come and becomes just like really popular. And then the artists leave and find the next place. And I think that happens, that's happening digitally too. Like this space is so much fun to play in. And I think, you know, these camps are actually kind of that and that like artists are attracted into this experiment in a collective creation that's really weird ways of doing that and putting out and making cool new art projects and an entire sort of that has like a reverberation and it attracts others to watch what's happening like be a part of it and interact with it and I think so I think artists doing what they want to do and then carving out the the sort of resonance around that is the most

valuable way of approaching it yeah um that being said I do want to flag that like, you know, people are like, okay, cool, great strategy, and then they put their art out, and maybe no one's collecting their work. And I'm speaking from, like, definitely a privileged perspective now because I've been in the space for a while and I've developed friends and also collector friends. And so my work, that I put a four-word lyric and someone collects it. So I think there, A, also recognizing that there's like a privileged point of view there. But I also think there's maybe a point in that, which is like, you know, at first I tried to bring over my, my, my, you know, audience from Spotify and Instagram. And then I just started making friends from scratch.

And now it's been whatever, a year, year and a half, which in this world, tends to be a long time. And at the meeting this call, you say, you say I was early and I don't feel early at all. I feel like a bunch of early people in front of me, you know. So I think it's just like that slow and steady burn like anything else that's wonderful. Yeah. Well, I think you've done a really good job of building a community and putting yourself out there. And I might have used this already, but building in public, which, you know,

know, actually, this might be a good segue into a couple other questions I have, but things get built so fast in this space. And because we have the features of this underlying technology of interoperability and composability, there's just so much stuff being created. How do you think about like discoverability or curation? to allow people who maybe aren't so deep in the weeds and don't know what they're looking for to discover things in this space. And I think things like Song Camp really help with that. But yeah, that's one question that I've been thinking about. Yeah, it's a very good question. And definitely, I'm thinking about too,

and definitely don't have the answers for it. because I think, you know, for a while there, I was just like, I was saying how to like be the signal in the noise is to just do something because like there's not even that much noise. But now it's getting noisier. And so we're heading into maybe this next evolved state of like more people being here. and that's really exciting. But then it is that signal in the noise question comes out. And I mean, I'm thinking a lot about curation too because we're curating the second camp.

Yeah. Sorry, the third camp. And this time we have like 136 artists like just on the musician side who apply. Wow. And that's insane. That's that's only dropping the application form on our heartbeat calls in the discord and like never publicizing them on Twitter.

Yeah. Because I'm like way too scared to do that. So and, you know, and our plan is to actually like curate in 36 artists. So it ends up being like like a much smaller chunk of that. And I think curation is is very important. I think it's the reason like we're at, we're even doing a camp three because like we curated camp one. We curated camp two. And but that being said, like as this scales and more people are coming in,

I think even a project like Song Camp where we're at and we're just like, you know, we have alumni who want to help and we have a few people who are like really pushing on like kind of the core team side of things. But we're still like we're a very small project. And so even 36 musicians is going to be a lot for us to handle. Right. So I don't know how you like, you know, scale curation. You know, early on I started thinking in terms of like, I don't know that you scale curation by like decentralizing curation and everyone. just gets a vote and like we all just do it in this mass thing together for for these sorts of much more like bigger scope things but like you need to like be able to scale the curators

right um you know like be able to have different i guess projects curating in more people and i think i guess the exciting thing for me is the fact that you know because i think a lot of the times like you have something like Spotify or all these things just become the mass thing. But the fact that they're these closed, siloed things, they're not like connected on a layer deeper. That's what makes them a problem. You know, not the fact that the curators are centralized, but the fact that their curators are centralized and they just like capture the audience fully.

Right. But in this world, like the networks can choose and swim around to the place that they want to go. So I think more, you know, quasi-centralized curation collectives can exist, and therefore more scenes can exist. And there can be just these sort of like micro communities everywhere with like all these network ties. And that just creates maybe a more healthy environment that there's just like more opportunities for curation. I do think though right now we're in a position where actually the people coming in is like moving. way faster, exponentially faster than those sorts of maybe rails and infrastructures and collectives and curation groups are forming at, if that makes sense.

Yeah, for sure. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I totally agree. And then it's this idea of like delegated curation, for example. But the innovation is that anyone can kind of apply or ask to be a part of that group and that group can grow intentionally within a community as the number of things that need to be curated grows maybe. But yeah, I agree. It's an unanswered question, but I definitely think that's one way to tackle it.

Another question that I'm trying to answer in this series is whether there's space for less vocal artists to be as successful as more vocal. artists, like you who really invest this time in community building and entrenching themselves into other communities and bringing people over that way. And I'm especially curious to hear your answer because I think that something like Song Camp that becomes this known brand and this curator in the space really can play a role here. Yeah, I think there is a role because yeah, Definitely I'm, I guess, an extrovert. And like, I enjoy hosting a call with 70 people on it. Right.

Not everyone wants to do that. And that's, of course, like, shouldn't, yeah, be a kind of stop for anything. You know, and when we're curating these projects, like, we're listening to quality of music. And that being kind of the thing that we're engaging, it's funny, you know, we're kind of running into this interesting. thing, it's really nice actually to be able to almost run these like concentrate or these parallel experiments that are quite contrasting in the evolution of Electra and in Camp 3. Because Electra is almost becoming more flat, right? Where like the camp was sort of like, here's the scope, here are the containers.

Like let's try to stay in them for two months so we can do this thing. And now it's more open and like self-starting. And you maybe run into those things of like not everyone wants to be a self-stop. starter. But then camp three is actually, we're actually going to double down on those containers. Like you're going to, we're going to build you three walls and we're going to build you a door. And that's your creative outlet. Go nuts. Yep. And extremely introverted or non-self starters can, I think, have an incredible like playground in that environment. And so I think projects like that should and will continue to exist. Um, then not like not just,

we're doing. And I think that's sort of like also a conversation about how like we're culturally just talking about Dow's and the way that work gets done. Because it's very kind of around sort of like or consensus or self-starting or these sorts of things. But it's also okay for like people to just, you know, because that's the thing we're, you know, people like who are in our world are just like artists. They just want to like make music. Yeah. Visual. Like they don't necessarily want to figure out those containers. They don't want to have to figure out the scope or the or the governance design or the decision making. They just want to like make art. And that's great. Like like we should build wonderful rails for that to be done and allow that sort of synergy for

artists to come together. And that's the other big maybe point to point out is like the web two world promotes this sort of individuality of like make Matthew chain the biggest artist and push my Instagram and compete for attention versus here like that's what makes me so excited about like I don't I'm I'm a lot less interested in having the kind of Matthew shame Dow or whatever like kind of have a an infrastructure around my project I'm much more interested in having infrastructure around like these headless artists that when you look in it's just like this collective community and village of artists and that's actually a beautiful thing for artists who are incredibly talented, but don't want to be like super vocal or brand imagery on Instagram and all

these things. And here's a route for them to be able to be their like best artist selves. Mike drop. That was awesome. I love that song cam exists to do that. I think that is a much needed force in this space. And I'm really, really excited to see what comes out of Camp three. Just as a last question, you know, just to add some lightness and fun, who are your favorite musicians in and out of crypto? And how have they inspired your art and music? Well, let's start in Web 3 because I thought of this when we were talking earlier about sort of resonance and that sort of thing is because Iman Europe, who's an artist. to, I first discovered on catalog, but is now also kind of running artist relations at sound.xy-z and an incredible singer and musician. And when she put her first NFT up on catalog,

I fell in love with the song. I fell in love with the lyrics and just the entire energy of it. And so I collected it. And then now on my desk, actually, she sent me this gift of like, with some other stuff also the framed, a framed kind of picture of the lyrics, of her handwriting lyrics. And I love the lyrics so much, I have it on my desk. It's like kind of like something to like see like while I'm working

because it's just like a beautiful intention behind those words. So that kind of points that resonance side of things and that bond. So I'll choose her on the web three side of things. More generally and kind of like also like influencing my own art. I mean, really, Boni Vair was the artist or project that really, like, changed the course of my, I guess, like, art making and, like, influence. When I first moved to L.A., I drove there from Montreal. So I went on this, like, eight-day road trip on my own through kind of the middle of the United States. And I was driving west.

So I was seeing the sunset every night. And every night when the sun started to set, I would put on $20 to a million and listen through that album and then I got to LA and I started writing what became the mathematics and nature of the album I put out late 2019 and it's like yeah super inspired by by Bonnie Baron 22 a million so I'll choose him as my non-web three I love it love both of them they're both favorites of mine too so um it's great to hear you say that so actually last this is actually the last question where can people find you and support you um and how can they get involved in all the cool things you're working on. So I guess the place I'm most active is Twitter. Um, so Matthew Chame at Twitter,

on Twitter. And then I'm also in song camp, discord a lot. So you can pop in there. And we'd love to have you also to a Monday heartbeat call to our 4 p.m. Eastern. And we'd love to hear you say hello also on that call. That's, those are the best places I think on the internet. Perfect. And, I will also shill your mirror page, which has a lot of really great work on, I think it's chain.m.mere.xy Z. But I will include all of this in the show notes. Matthew, thank you so much for your time. I was really excited for this conversation. And I feel like I could talk to you for even longer than the allotted amount of time. And I hope we do. But thank you so much. Thank you, Rios.

This is so much fun and coming to Galaxy Brain.