Unchained - RAC and David Greenstein on Why Music NFTs Are Better Than Spotify - Ep.347

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

André Allen Anjos, who is better known as the crypto-friendly artist RAC, and David Greenstein, co-founder of Sound.xyz, a web3 music platform, analyze the current state of the web3 music scene and discuss how artists can leverage web3 tools to get paid at fair market value for their art.  Show highlights: RAC’s experience in the traditional music industry why David believes music is the most undervalued sector in the world – and how Sound and crypto can help value it correctly the different types of NFTs with which musicians like RAC are experimenting what Sound.xyz is and how it is helping artists unlock their fanbase and community why David is so passionate about creating a social experience when it comes to music NFTs Sound.xyz’s decision to allow artists to deploy their own smart contracts what RAC has made in NFT drops compared to Spotify streams why Sound.xyz was built with “editions” as the most common format for NFTs sold on the platform what makes blockchain technology well-suited for the music industry RAC’s crypto adventures: $TAPE, $RAC, and more … how the famous “Amen Break” sample would work as an NFT what artists will be measured by in the NFT world   Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021      Coinchange: https://coinchange.io    OnJuno: https://onjuno.com/    Episode Links   David Greenstein LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidgreenstein/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/dgreenstein1?lang=en RAC Twitter: https://twitter.com/RAC Website: https://rac.fm/ Crypto Adventures RAC Token https://etherscan.io/address/0xc22b30e4cce6b78aaaadae91e44e73593929a3e9 https://v2.info.uniswap.org/pair/0xf744417d0a5fd18b5b18726ce1b48f931dfa32ea https://blog.ourzora.com/home/introducing-rac https://www.billboard.com/pro/rac-nfts-social-token-platform-racos-web3/ Music NFTs (w/ Sound.xyz embeds) https://rac.fm/nfts Discord https://discord.com/invite/rac Tokenized cassette tape https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/64760/ethereum-tokenized-cassette-dj-rac-zora-grammy Sound.xyz Website https://www.sound.xyz/ FAQs https://soundxyz.notion.site/soundxyz/Frequently-Asked-Questions-1-0e39e44edccb42f8b3c3ca5d93c703a9 Recent raise https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/15/sound-xyz-raises-5m-from-a16z-to-explore-how-web3-can-upend-the-economics-of-the-music-business/ Recent drops that are fun Bored Ape Yacht Club Band Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're a no-hype resource for all things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Schitt, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as the senior editor at Forbes was the first Main Tree Media Reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the May 3rd, 2022 episode of Unchained. Welcome to a new world of crypto-friendly banking with Cross River Bank. Request your Fiat Ones. off-ramp solution now at crossriver.com slash crypto. Buy, earn, and spend crypto on the crypto.com app. New users can enjoy zero credit card fees on crypto purchases in the first 30 days. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 with the code Laura. Link in the description. This episode of Unchained is brought to you by Beefy Finance, the multi-chain yield optimizer.

Beefy is the easiest way. to earn more from your crypto. Deposit funds into Beefy's secure vaults to auto-compound yield across 12 blockchains. Got crypto? Choose Beefy. Today's topic is Music NFTs. Here to discuss are Andre Allen Anjos, better known as the crypto-friendly artist RAC, and David Greenstein, co-founder of Sound.XYZ, a Web3 music platform. Welcome, David and Andre, I guess.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. And thank you as well. I feel like this has been a long time in the coming from your initial email when we first want to give you a lot of credit for reaching out back in December. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. I feel like my book launch has just kind of offended everything in my life.

And I'm kind of grateful is not the word because obviously I've enjoyed the book tour, but it's nice to be able to get back to work. All right, so the problems with the business model and the music industry have been kind of, I guess you could say iffy, slow motion disaster might be another way to describe it, and it's been playing out over the last few decades since the internet has become dominant. But before we get into kind of like everything regarding music and empties, let's just make sure listeners understand the traditional business model of the music industry. Can you describe that and also what you think is wrong with it?

And why don't we start with Andre, so people can learn to differentiate your voices? Like my experience with the music industry has been in the form of an artist. So, you know, I, you know, a lot of people sort of have different perspectives on it. But like, you know, my experience is working with various labels. And I've worked with pretty much every label out there, big and small. I've done music for film and TV. I've done, I've done a little bit of everything. And so I've had sort of, I've gotten to experience almost every.

problem area of the music industry. So I do have a lot to say here, but it's also important to mention that, you know, as much as we're trying to fix things, like a lot of what we're trying to do is sort of start over. So we can get into that during this talk, but, you know, let's start with sort of the recording side of music, you know, the, you know, the Spotify's and the, you know, the Apple music's and Amazon musics and all that. So, you know, typically as an artist, you know, you work in the studio, you record a piece of music. And, you know, from that point, you know, and it's relatively inexpensive. I mean, it's really not, you know, the cost of producing music has gone down pretty

dramatically in the past, you know, 20, 30 years to the point where a kid with a laptop can essentially make a professional quality, you know, chart topping song. So, you know, I guess my point is that that's, it's really inexpensive and actually quite accessible to a lot of people. You know, we start there and, you know, okay, you finish the song. Now, okay, now we're thinking about distribution. Like, where do we go? From here, there's sort of a variety of different methods of releasing music.

And what people generally know is, you know, you sign to a label and they handle that side of it and they release it for you. They handle promotion. They handle, you know, all those sort of various aspects of releasing music. And in that process is sort of where I see one of the major issues in the music industry, which is essentially the financial side of it. So labels typically serve two purposes. One is the financing of music and the sort of creative support. I'm talking about like album art. Maybe they're helping find the right artist to do the album cover or they're finding the right record store to put it in, like things like that.

But the financial side of it, I really see it as sort of one of the core issues, which is that it's almost like a loan shark model where they'll offer you, let's say for the sake of this example, you know, $100,000 and they call it in advance. So this advance is essentially a loan that's paid back at a rate. And that rate traditionally, especially on a major label, is about 12%. So, okay, you're an artist, you get to 100 grand, you know, you're like sweet. Okay, like half of that goes to legal right off the bat. So then from there, you have a little bit of money left for promotion. You know, maybe by the end of it, you have maybe a couple thousand dollars to yourself, you know, for living expenses and whatnot.

So, you know, that's, you're a little bit limited there. But the issue that I think a lot of people don't realize is when you take an advance like that, you're actually paying it back at a 12% rate. So that 100,000, you know, they call it recoupment. So it's like when you pay that back, you're paying it back at a 12% rate, which effectively makes it sort of more like a million dollar alone because essentially the album or the song or whatever needs to make a million dollars to recoup that 100,000. So my point is just there's a lot of sort of shady kind of misconstrued, you know, tactics that

people use to take advantage to young artists that think that they're supposed to do it this way. And that's created, I think, like a really difficult environment for an artist to actually make a living really supports primarily the people that run these labels and everybody else in the music industry. Essentially, the artist is the last one to get paid across the board. Go on and on about all the different problems in the music industry. But I think that that's, like, sort of a key one that I think is actually directly related to crypto is sort of the financial side of it. It's like how, like, because it's always

going to cost money to promote stuff. It's always going to cost money to make music and release it. So how are we financing that? Are we going to finance it through like really, really toxic loans or are we going to find a new model? So maybe I'll just kind of keep it at that one example because like that to me is such a strong, like easy to fix, you know, also relevant to this conversation about music NFTs is like, of, sort of the fundraising side of music, which is incredibly anti-artists, I guess. Yeah, I have to say I relate because although it does sound worse than publishing a book, there are aspects of it that are very similar. So a lot of it, a lot of what you said resonated

with some recent experience I've had. So, David, what do you want to add on that? Yeah, so a common theme that I'm sure is going to come up in this interview is just too few options. it's not about one versus the other is better. It's about giving artists more options to explore and experiment with their music. And so on what Andre just talked about, which is obviously very valid and all too common, is that if an artist wants to raise money for an upcoming project or an album or a music video, there are very few sources today in music for where to get that creative capital. And it oftentimes comes obviously from the label.

If there's very few sources, then the other party has, the leverage because there's ultimately not that many places that you can turn to. And part of what's going on here is the more sources for creative capital, the more places that artists can honestly choose from. The same is also true on the monetization side. No matter whether you're self-uploaded or you pick a label to distribute your music, the next step is where do you put out that music? And today, the majority of recorded music revenues come from streaming, which wasn't even a thing 10 plus years ago, but is now obviously the dominant default. And has done a lot. of good to kind of, like, the music industry is at an all-time high right now, and labels are making

more than ever because of obviously the growth of streaming. However, the streaming didn't solve every problem. And what streaming has done is it's basically become a very top-heavy model. It's essentially radio with a very pretty UI on top. And there are a couple reasons for that. Let's just say, hypothetically, that I'm a huge RAC fan. And Laura, you know, you don't really like are you see unfortunately. There's no place on Andre's Spotify page that lets me give him money for his music. If we took every one of his listeners and there's millions and we asked them how much do you want to pay for Andre's music, it seems very unlikely to me that they all decided that they want to pay roughly 0.003 cents per stream. Some fans may want to pay a lot more. Some fans may want to pay a lot

less. But the answer is we should find out what that answer is because as a listener, no listener has given input into the price of an artist's music. And then the irony of the story is no artist has given input into the price of their music. So Andre has never determined that the price of his music on any music DSP today should be 0.003 cents per stream. This leads to the conclusion that it seems unlikely that the entire music world has decided to value every song by every artist the exact same way, which is kind of the underlying thesis behind this whole movement of maybe music is undervalue. I think one of my favorite quotes actually, or tweets, and there's a lot of them from Andre that I always use in almost anything I say is he put out a tweet a couple, right,

a couple maybe weeks ago, a month ago around Walmart. And Walmart is a 300, billion dollar company. And the music industry, if you add up the entire music industry on recorded music is around 30 billion. So the question is, is the impact of the music in the world one-tenth of Walmart? If the answer is true, then, then, you know, I think we're all going to be very wrong about obviously what's going on here. But if the answer is that that's ridiculous, well, then music is potentially one of the most undervalued media assets in the world because it's been suppressed the value of music for no real reason. That 0.003 cents per stream is not some sophisticated calculation.

It's really just a number. And the question is, can we experiment and kind of explore with what that number obviously looks like? And the ultimate goal to wrap it up is to give artists more options and more ability to make a full-time living off their music. Because ultimately, music is what drives in artist's economy, whether it's touring or merge, all of these things are unlocked because somebody has an emotional connection with the music. And so it feels a bit crazy that music isn't as valued as it should be.

Yeah, Jesse Walden has said that music is criminally undervalued compared to the impact it's had on society or something like that. I remember the term criminally undervalued, which makes sense to me. Just, you know, to my mind, music, well, I mean, I actually once had a philosophical debate about this with somebody. And now I'm going to argue against myself. But I do think that music is one of the art forms that kind of like just gets at our emotions in a more direct way, even than some other art forms. So, you know, obviously that has a high value on it. So obviously both of you are like very active with your own projects. But I, before we get into the details on it, and I do want to dive into the details on those things, I actually just,

just want to give people an overview around music NFTs generally. Because at the moment, I think a lot of people actually typically associate the word NFT with visual art NFTs or profile fix. But, you know, the term music NFT actually can refer to any number of things. There's like a huge variety and there's a lot of creativity right now and how people are experimenting. So what are some of the ways that you're seeing that people are associating NFTs with forms of music. Well, I can jump in here. I mean, I feel like there's, there's been a variety of different methods that have been tried. And that's actually kind of one of my favorite things about it right now is the, is completely, it's completely undefined. So it allows actually creators and artists to

sort of treat it almost as its own creative medium, you know, and explore that. And, and, you know, a lot of it is sort of economic in nature. And, and that's fine. But it's like, I, I like that we haven't sort of landed on that perfect formula yet and that we're still sort of iterating like it's exciting you know it's not sort of the same old thing like even just like maybe two years ago you know before i mean perhaps before nfts and before a lot of this stuff really started to take off i mean the the the only method of releasing music was essentially kind of like what david was saying is like you upload it to spotify and hope for the best you know and and hope you get on some featured playlists and you know maybe you'll get some plays and you know maybe four or five years

down the line you'll actually get some money from it so it's also like a lot more of a direct connection which i i really appreciate you know it's it's it's it's me interacting with my fans and in a very real way like artists a fan and and you sort of get that feedback but anyway going back to the different styles of nfts you know i i experimented very early on with visual art because that's sort of where I was, you know, super rare was kind of the main platform, Nifty Gateway was starting to pop off. And I just started working with a visual artist that was a friend of mine that he had done my album art. And as, and now he's like one of the biggest, highest grossing crypto artists out there. So, you know, it's kind of cool to see that transformation of, of like, you know,

we were just trying to do something creative, create digital art. You know, we weren't necessarily thinking about it as this category of music NFTs, but. And who was that? Oh, sorry, this is Andres Risinger. Oh, okay. He's incredible. So we did a couple like visual collaborations, but in the back of my mind, I always hoped that we could go to like sort of a what I would think of like a pure music NFT.

You know, maybe it has an album art attached to it just like an album would or an LP or whatever. But like having the focus be the music was something that was very appealing to me even back before it was really a thing. So I was kind of like hoping that it would kind of happen naturally. And I think that's, that's in great part due to David and the sound team of sort of, I think they sort of crafted that category in their own way and sort of differentiated from other platforms that were doing maybe a different style of music NFTs. So just to list a few, typically there's been sort of the one of one music NFTs. So, you know, a single, a single additional, a single addition essentially. And, you know, the other one is obviously the sound XYZ model, which is,

you know, anywhere from like 25 to 100 editions, sometimes a bit more if you're a bigger artist. But the idea is to some level of accessibility while still maintaining a level of scarcity, because I think that's important. You know, you want us to be desirable. Those are kind of the two prominent ones. There are other experiments with what we call stems. So like little, you know, for every song has sort of different layers

of musical elements. You know, guitar, bass, drums, whatever. And you sort of, you can separate those two into maybe, let's call them sub-NFTs that are associated to the original at the top, but can be kind of played around with and you can do different things. The other example that I'll all

throw out is I did this project with this platform called ASync where I essentially created a song that didn't really have like a final form. So, you know, when you listen to something on Spotify, there's a final song and that's it. You know, it doesn't change.

But this was like you're selling elements of the NFT or stems of the song. And every NFT has sort of a couple options. So what that does is essentially the owner of that sub-NFT can change the drum arrangement or change the piano here or whatever. And it creates this sort of ever-changing piece of music that, again, it's just an example of using this technology to do something creative that is really not necessarily possible before. So, I mean, I don't know if I'm missing any, David, but those are kind of the main categories that I'm thinking of.

Yeah, I think the only one to tack on is probably like I've seen a few generative drops and first artist on sound. Oshy just recently did one with a company called Beat Foundry where it took four different. songs and all the stems that Andre was talking about and they made 800 and eight, eight unique copies of that song. So again, the beauty of this and this goes back to my original theme is it's not one format versus the other. It's about giving artists the tools and the options to experiment with what makes sense. I do think that there are principles that remain true throughout every single one.

Something that was really important to us at sound we were getting started was one, obviously making sure that this was, you know, accessible to a, obviously, like, want to be careful there with saying we did a price point around 0.1 to start, which in crypto worlds is not too bad, but obviously in the music world is still $300. But again, within striking distance, it's not super cheap, but it's not so far away from being like in kind of a mass market accessibility. And then, too, like, we felt it was really important for more than one person to be able to collect because from an artist's perspective, they want their music to be heard by as many people as possible. Most artists don't want their music heard by only one person or two people or three people.

And so while we're super early there, it was really about getting multiple people around the song because you unlock different dynamics when you have like a community around that music. And I always use the concert as like the holy grail of music experiences. I think no matter what happens in Web3 music. I think that in-person concert experience will remain the holy grail of music. Why is a concert so incredible? It's because you're amongst a community of people. You went to a concert and it was just Andre playing for Laura. Maybe that would be a good time for you to, but I don't think it would be the most like a memorable experience. And so part of it is just about building that in an online format. And I always use some examples like, let's use the Grateful Dead, which is not your typical

Web 3 example. If you go on Spotify and you look at the Grateful Dead streams, you would think that nobody cares about them. But they're playing 80,000 stadiums or whatever the, literally any arena in the world, they can play and sell out in two minutes, but that's not captured anywhere in their online presence. And part of that is because the community of the Grateful Dead is not able to congregate in that way in some type of online manner and support that artist through their music. And a lot of what's going on here is how do you give artists the tools to build their communities, their cults, they're like super following around it. And today, one of the, that's captured to the concert, but the music experience is very isolated. When I listen to Andre's music, it's really me by myself.

And I think that's what's kind of being unlocked here. So with sound, we obviously have a lower price point. Obviously, still scarce, but more accessible and sets the pitch, sets like the stage for kind of what's to come with building these kind of community. needs through their music. Yeah, that's one thing I loved about when I was learning about sound. I thought it was super cool that you had the social element. But one actually other type of N of T that I just wanted to mention was, and maybe you just view it as being in a different category,

but like Royal allows people to participate in the royalties, which, you know, I think is another kind of interesting model and obviously quite different from some of these others. But actually, let's now dive more into Sound.xyZ, because, you know, obviously, as we discussed, you know, you launched it to address some of these issues that we are seeing in the music industry. So why don't you describe, you know, how Sound tries to address those and how it works for musicians and also for fans? Yeah, so Sound is a suite of Web3 tools that help artists experiment and monetize with their music in new ways. So the first tool that we built was basically the ability to upload your song since it seemed like that was.

was what a lot of artists wanted to do. And so you upload your song. It feels very much like SoundCloud back in the day where you upload the Wave File, you upload, you know, a name. We created a section for artists to write a description about the song because we thought the story behind the music was really, really important to kind of building that emotional connection between a listener and a song and ultimately an artist. And we ultimately allowed for artists to like add any attachments or rewards.

And the final thing that we did was we created this fun game called the Golden where one of the NFTs associated with a sound drop is valuable for no other reason than the artwork is different. And the golden egg isn't something that money can buy. It gets randomly determined only once the song sells out. And artists have been attaching value to this golden egg if they want to with, you know, whatever perks or rewards, whether it's, you know, access to unreleased music, concert tickets. It could be anything. We've seen some pretty creative use cases, which I can get to an end. a second, but it was just a fun, fun way. So an artist uploads their song, takes about, you know, 10 minutes. And one of the things that we did that was different is we created the

first music NFT platform that allowed artists to deploy their own smart contract. So something that was really important to us, whereas artists owning the relationship with their listeners. People don't want an autograph essentially from sound.xy Z. People want an autograph from Andre, because Andre is the artist. Andre is the brand. The artist is the platform. Sound is just a reflection of all the artists on sound. Sound itself is nothing without obviously the artists on the site. So that was another thing that was really important in the way you can see that very clearly is every artist has their own open-sea storefront because each artist has their own

collection. So you upload a song. It creates a listening countdown associated with that song. So now the listener can see everything about that song, the description, the rewards, how many NFTs. They can't play the song yet. and they can see the countdown ticking down till the countdown, you know, gets to zero.

Once it hits zero, it plays back across all devices at the same time. So we're all listening to the song together, which is kind of a spin of the concert, right? When you're at a concert, you all listen to the song together. And as I said, I've been very inspired by concerts. And once the song ends, you can press our famous ape button,

which is our buy button. And if you press the ape button, you can go and collect that. song. So the couple of things to highlight are anybody can listen for free. We're not charging people to listen to music. That's obviously against kind of the ethos of what we stand for in terms of making the art accessible to as many people as possible. Everybody should get to enjoy Andre's music. Those who want to collect is totally optional. If you choose to collect and you're able to get one of the NFTs because they often, as people found out, sell out within seconds, then one of the

first ways that you can show off that you own this NFT because today most NFTs sit in your wallet and that's not a very social experience is that you can leave a comment on the song and kind of etch your name in the history of that song's journey which was inspired by obviously like SoundCloud because they had a feature where you could leave a comment and I've always been obsessed personally with who discovered Andrich who discovered Lili Isleish who discovered some of these major internet stars and even if they're not superstars, more just like artists that have gone on to have tremendous careers.

Artists have never had the ability to differentiate between their first fans and their one million fans, right? They all get washed in, and this created, if there was a clear, simple way to be able to show who are the 25, 50, 100 people that are supporting that artist, then it would be very easy for the artist

to have that ability to say, hey, I want to interact with the people that have first supported me. And of course, just like everything else was sound, there was a bit of a wrinkle in it, which is if you sell your NFT, you lose your comment on the wall, and the new person can come in and leave a comment.

So it creates a bit of a, like, I guess, buying pressure because some people really want the social status, but then these NFTs have obviously gone up in value as well. And that's kind of the end-to-end process. I just wanted to add something that you said that I think it's sort of a common misconception with, I think maybe NFTs in general, is that, and it's particularly interesting for music.

is that the song is free. Like, you can listen to it for free. Anybody can listen to it. I think a lot of people assume, and I get it, it's sort of a clickbait headline. It's like, artists sell song for $300 or whatever. You know, it sounds, I know what it sounds like. But the truth behind it is actually you're only selling, you know,

the ownership of that edition. You're not selling, you know, you're not gating content. You're not, you know, putting a paywall on it or anything. like that. So it's something I like to make a distinction because I think a lot of people gloss over that. It's like I think it's like a really powerful idea of essentially let's stop like gating content and just say, hey, any, literally anybody can have it. And the theory and I believe in this is that, you know, the wider something travels on the internet, the more valuable that original source for that NFT becomes. And you can still monetize it in however way you want and all of that. But it's that,

that original, you know, like there shouldn't be a hindrance. Like, you know, we're, you know, we're like 30 years into the internet, you know, really. So that feel, I've always argued that that is sort of an old model that that doesn't apply to the internet. Like information wants to be free. And, and we, this was sort of a way to, to, you know, it's a different model. It's just a different way to sort of value digital objects. So I just wanted to add that because I think it's really important for people to understand. It's like we're not trying to charge $300 for a phone. It's free. Right. Right. I bet it. Yeah. Although I don't know if I would agree that information wants to be free. That that little line annoys me for various reasons. But anyway, I did want to ask you

though, because obviously you, you know, you are an artist on sound. So, and I've seen you tweet about this. Can you just walk us through a comparison of the economics for an artist like yourself on Spotify versus on sound. Yeah, absolutely. So it's, it's so, it's such a stark difference that people don't believe it. So, okay, like, for example, on Spotify, you know, we count, we count it in millions because that's the only way to sort of rationally think about it. So like I know back of my head, it's like, I don't count it in 0.00 or whatever three cents. I count it in a million play. So I know that if a song gets a million plays, that's roughly around anywhere from 35, hundred to four grand. So that's like pre-distribution, pre-label, pre-everything. That's just sort of

raw money from Spotify. So, okay, that's a million people that need to listen to a song, you know, or a million place. Somebody can listen to it all day long and, you know, it adds up. But still, a million people that adds about $4,000. And if you think about it in the sound model, I mean, if we're doing, you know, 0.1Eth, I mean, it's really just a handful of people. that can sort of achieve the same amount of money. And it's kind of incredible, honestly. Because, like, I tweeted this out, and people really just don't believe it. They don't, how is that possible?

Like, I'm, you know, it's like, this is, this isn't right. This is, this is a scam or whatever. And it's like, no, it's actually just the unlocking of value of music. You know, it's sort of going back to what we were saying earlier. It's like, I really believe that recorded music, specifically, recorded music is completely undervalued. And this is sort of letting a market decide the value of it. And I find it hard to argue with markets.

You know what I mean? It kind of is what it is. So, you know, the example that I gave with my sound release is that, you know, we, I think we sold 100 editions. And that's about 10th total. So, you know, about $31,000. I think I... Yeah, I have the tweet. Yeah, yeah.

said you made 1.85eath or about slightly under $6,000 in royalties in one week. And you said it was generated by 36 people. And then you said that would have taken 1.4 million plays to generate that on Spotify. And then you said that when you included the primary sale, which was 10th or about $31,000, that was the equivalent of 7.75 million plays. And so basically you concluded 136 people generated more than 9.1,000. million people. Yeah, and that's what I mean. It's like these numbers, I know it seems crazy, right? Like, but, but look at the data.

I mean, it's, it's what's happening. And, and that to me, what that signals is like, is that music is far more valuable than 0.003 cents per play. I mean, it just doesn't, I just don't accept that anymore, you know? Like, I think it's worth a lot more. And there's a lot of sort of behind the scenes stuff about how that rate. came to be and we can get into that if you want but you know i think just there's some kind of simplicity and beauty in the fact that a market decided the value of this and it's like finally we

we have you know uh somebody valuing music in a different way you know and and i think there's some underlying um like principles that are not even covered there and just the pure numbers which are things that uh i don't think will ever go out of fashion are being you know fast transparent and accurate with payouts and I think those things are oftentimes not the case today in the music industry. So I think it's not only just the sheer quantity of the money. It's also that it was paid out instantly and on the spot so that he literally has it, which I think is different because I don't know if, I think with ethos, maybe you put that on, I don't know if you put that on Spotify or you didn't, but if you did, right, not yet, but whatever money does come in, it still takes three to six

months, right, for getting it out. So the premium to be paid. And I think just to do it from an aggregate perspective on sound. On sound, we've been around for four and a half months. We've done around 125 songs on sound, like 100 different artists. We just crossed the 100 artist milestone, which we haven't announced yet. We've done $2.7 million paid out to those artists, which again is around 650 million Spotify streams. But the real impressive part is not necessarily the dollar amount. It's the quantity of people who generated that 2.7 million. million dollars. And we just announced recently that we have over 2,000 unique collectors. So, 2,000 unique collectors generated, and again, it's not apples to oranges in terms of streams

aren't equal to people. But you get the idea that 2,000 people generated the equivalent of 650 million. And that is such a large magnitude of difference that even if it came down and we met somewhere in the middle, it shows something is off. And I think that's kind of the macro point on this one. Yeah. So in a moment, We're going to talk more about how sound works, but first, it quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. The ScoreBet app here with Trusted Stats and Real Time Sports News. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking.

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including Bitcoin, and earn up to 14% on stable coins. With the Crypto.com Visa card, you can spend to $8.5% on crypto. your crypto anywhere. Enjoy up to 8% cash back instantly, plus 100% rebates for your Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime subscriptions, and zero annual fees. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 with the code Laura. Link in the description. Back to my conversation with David and Andre. So I actually wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, the, the, the smart. contract aspect of sound because, you know, you've structured it so that basically each artist gets their own smart contract, which I could imagine would be expensive in a lot of work.

So why did you choose to structure it that way? Great question. So I think for us, like provenance of other contracts is something that is going to become the default, if not already. So artists, like a lot of the spaces about empowering creators, empowering artists. And for us, it was really important that artists own the relationship. with their fans. Again, coming from obviously the music industry side of things and trying, kind of trying to undo things that obviously haven't been able to be done before, I think there were certain themes that we thought were never going to go out of fashion. So one was fast, transparent, and accurate payouts. I didn't see who would complain about that. And the second thing is,

by the way, I just wanted to add on that, which is that, like, it just goes to show you how far behind the internet era our current financial system is. Because just intuitive, that makes sense that at the time of transactions, sort of like, you know, when you go into a store and you're going to buy something, that the money would just be exchanged at that moment. So it just seems like such a no-brainer. And so it's just kind of funny that, yeah,

actually now the majority of these payments take three to six months or whatever, which is just like bonkers in this day and age. But anyway, keep going. And the other thing was that no artist has ever held the relationship individually with their fans. Like they always tell you, you have fans in New York, you have fans in Portland, but you've never been able to just message those fans directly

or take those fans and leave and go from one platform to the other. So that to us felt like another core critical component. I think we were inspired by a couple other platforms that did this, but I think the first to really own in on it was a company called Manafold. Obviously did their own creator smart contracts as well. And we fully agree with everything that they've been kind of promoting and sharing, which is that artists should have a provenance over their own contracts. And you've seen a multitude of different marketplaces do

this were kind of the first on the, on the music, NFT side, but it was 100% worth the expert engineering effort to basically make this happen because it basically sets us up for artists to obviously own and can build those relationships. And there are, you know, sound is kind of the first example of something built on the sound protocol. But in the future, artists can post and we can even build tools to help artists host, like listening parties on their own website so that it doesn't have to take out, take place on sound at XYZ. I just wanted to add to this, because this is like so important to me. Like this is like such a big deal because so I've been doing this for a long

time. I've been doing this profession since 2007. That's the MySpace era that I moved to SoundCloud and then I moved to Spotify and then, you know, so on and so on. My point is that I've had to build and rebuild audiences every single time and hope that people sort of like, you know, move with me. And I've never really owned that actual relationship. It's always been, you know, let me give you an example of, of Facebook's a great example. So like I built, you know, 100,000 followers on Facebook.

That took a lot of time and effort, you know, a lot of, I gave away a lot of free content to sort of get people to join it and all this stuff. And then at a certain point, they sort of turned to switch and they're like, hey,

actually, so you know that audience that you built? We're going to charge you so that you can reach them. So we're going to monetize you now as well. So it was sort of like, it became like, what are we building this for? Like,

I'm not building this for myself. And granted, like, you know, there's there is a benefit to it of having access to that many people. And there's a lot of good sides to it and communication, all that. Sort of owning that relationship is like so crucial. And we can get into this if you want. But, you know, that's sort of the core thesis of behind my own token and my own platform. And my own website is like is really sort of being the platform, not building the platform for somebody else. It's sort of like using tools like SoundX, and using various other.

Web3 tools to sort of build that platform myself. And granted, that's a little bit bespoke and, you know, a little tech heavy for maybe the average artist. But if I can sort of prove the use case, I think there's like a real pathway for other artists to do this. So that's like something the provenance thing is also super important, you know, making sure that the, that the art is coming from your, you know, ENS address and like all that stuff. Like that is, it's super important.

And I just wanted to stress that. Yeah, so I do have a bunch of questions for you about RAC and RACOS and other things. But before we get into that, why don't we just do two more questions on sound? So, David, you talked about how having additions makes music more inclusive, or at least I saw that on the Sound website. Can you talk about why you're describing it that way? Like, what about it is more inclusive? Yeah. So I think the main point was just around forming a community amongst around the song.

and I think, you know, artists obviously want to get paid and have their music valued appropriately, but they also want to have their music heard by as many people as possible. And so the goal is like if you can bring down the price and obviously have people directly support it, then you can build models where artists can make a full-time living off their music with 25, 50, 100,000. It doesn't matter. And I don't think you've found out what that core number needs to be. But as long as it's around there, you're with every artist can aspire to get that amount of people around their music. What Andre covered earlier was he thinks in millions.

And the problem is that there's only billions of people in the world. How is every artist going to get tens of millions of listeners in streams? There just simply isn't enough people to be able to get those amount of streams. So you ended up in this really top-heavy world. And so we're kind of, and this is why I think it's important that obviously we've had some big artists on sound, but the core of who we're trying to solve for and who our main, like, ultimate kind of artists is like the independent up-in-coming, unsigned artists, because those are the ones that actually, like,

like really need what we're doing, right? Because there's so much music, something that Andre said earlier that is so true, is like the cost of making music is none, but the cost of getting heard and getting your music heard has never been higher. And so it's really, really important that you build sustainable ways.

It doesn't seem sustainable for every artist to get tens of millions of streams. If you want to be a mainstream artist, that's incredible. And so with sound, we're kind of threading a middle ground here, which is, hey, this works for a bigger artists. We've obviously done Snoop Dog and a few other artists with more established kind of audiences. But if you want to only build with 25, 50, 100, doesn't matter what the number is, this can very real work for you. And as Andre said, he only did 100 people on his first sound drop and his second sound drop.

But 100 people can cause real noise if they are connected to the music and obviously want to support. that's really why we thought it opened up the, just the dynamics from a, from more than one perspective. And the final thing I want to just comment is a lot of the times in other prior Web 2 models, it was always the artist doing work. Like if we think about kind of the fan club model, it's the artist making exclusive content.

It's the artist. And the artist spends a lot of time already doing the work of making the music. And so by forming multiple people around the song and multiple listeners and multiple fans, there's an opportunity for the listeners and the community to engage with each other without even the artist being there, just as fans of Andre's music. And I think that's also a more healthy ecosystem where the artist is free to go work on music and obviously still as an active participant in the community, but doesn't need to be there 24-7 running like a fan club or a newsletter because ultimately why they became an artist in the first place is really

to make music and create. And that's kind of what this is unlocking as well. Yeah, yeah. But I wanted to know, like in wherever it was that I saw this on your website, it said something like that you decided to do it that way because music shouldn't just be for the very few rich. Like I think it was like saying like this is a better idea than one of ones, which I thought was interesting and like, you know, just goes to what you're saying because I agree with you that the concert is the best way to experience music. And that's like, you know, kind of yeah, just like the height of a music experience. So I love that. Yeah, you have this community.

aspect. One thing I did notice, though, is that you don't take a commission from the artists who use your platform. So how well sound make money? Yeah, so that's a very famous question to get asked all the time. I think that was more of a statement than anything else. So, I mean, Sound has plans to obviously monetize in the future. But I think in the beginning, we were really just so laser focused on and still are on just helping artists shape and revalued music. Because while people were talking about music NFTs on Twitter now, when we started, it really wasn't much of a conversation. And so before we monetize anything, we first need to make sure that, that, like, this is like, you know, an asset that people honestly want to collect. And so

monetization wasn't our focus. Our focus was really on directly supporting artists. And I think there's no better way to make a statement than paying artists 100% of obviously what comes in on both the primary and the secondary market. And given, I think people forget that we've only been around four and a half months, we just haven't turned on modernization. So that's the simple kind of excuse for why we currently, and honestly, unlike other kind of Web 2 things in the past, we wanted to figure out our business model in conjunction with the artists.

Every single artist that's released on sound, we have a personal relationship with. We actually have a group chat with all the artists on sound. And so it's really, I don't think that there, and this sometimes gets like, I think spread falsely. I don't think there's going to be a problem when we do monetize. And if when we do, we'll do it in a very tasteful kind of manner in terms of figuring out,

like what that looks like because I think like large 50% transaction fees are not the norman kind of web 3. And I think it's really just going to be about figuring out that business model in conjunction with the artists who are basically like co-stewards of the platform as well. I think it's obvious that if we never make money, we probably won't be in existence. So I think it's in everybody's best interest that kind of worked that out together. But I think in the interim, no, it's much more of a powerful statement to pay every 100%. and kind of a bet on the feature that, hey, we're not in this for like the short term, like, because obviously we could be charging on these drops right now.

We think this hasn't even really gotten started and, you know, we'll be prepared for when that, when that true growth really happens. And so that sort of almost sounds like a Dow model. I don't know if that's what you were hinting at. So I'd say the thing that I more likely say is I think something that's been true in kind of the prior world is that no artist or the music community, and there's more than just artists, we always talk about artists because they're kind of the focal points, but there's producers, there's songwriters, there's mixers, there's the music listeners, there's music curators.

That's kind of who I think about in the entire music economy has ever really had a stake in a music related service or platform. So I'll use our favorite Spotify as the example. When Spotify went public, all three major labels had major stakes worth hundreds of millions in Spotify. when they went public. No artist, as far as I know, or if there are, there are probably sub five, had a stake in Spotify. And most artists don't even have a stake in the label

that they're ultimately signed to. Now, why is Spotify worth whatever it was when it IPO? My guess is that it, you know, built up a large subscription base based on something called music. And who ultimately makes that music? It's not labels. It's ultimately the artist,

the songwaters, and the producers. And so I think there's a world, and that's kind of honestly what drew me to the space where what if you can build this music economy where artists, songwriters, listeners, producers, mixers can all kind of have joint say and kind of where a music product is headed. And I think that is the ultimate kind of experience and experiment that hasn't been run in prior iterations of the music industry. Oh my gosh, we're like at 45 minutes in.

I'm just like there's so much we could cover. But RAC, we need to get into your trajectory. of crypto, obviously you told us a little bit about your struggles with all these different platforms. Eventually, you not only found crypto, but you have already lived like nine lives in crypto. You know, you like, yeah, why don't you just talk about how you got there, but then I'd be interested in hearing, you know, your initial work with like the tape token and then later launching the REC token. So yeah, why don't you just give us that whole history? Yeah. So just for some really broad context, I've always had sort of an interest in computer science.

It's been part of my life. I think it goes hand-in-hand with music production because, you know, very computer-heavy. You know, it's just there. As evidence by your background. Yeah, yeah, it's a little. Yeah, so it's a highly technical thing. Computers go hand-in-hand with my lifestyle. So, you know, I grew up around, you know, various different technologies.

I grew up surrounded by open-source software. I've always loved it, you know, I've always had a Windows, Linux, Mac. I've had it all just because I just love computers. And at the time, I became pretty upset. Like, Napster basically was my sort of musical awakening. Like, that's when I discovered the world of music. And I was young. I lived in Portugal, a small place.

And the thing that I like to say is I discovered the Beatles on Napster, which, you know, is kind of crazy. But that's how I found out about them. And, you know, I saw how they got shut down immediately. and in hindsight, I think their model was messed up because there was sort of a central point of failure, even though most people thought that they would sort of work with the music industry. But then we move on to BitTorrent, and BitTorrent was like the first time it really became fully decentralized. And so, you know, my point is like I'm starting to see how technology can sort of challenge the status quo.

You know, BitTorrent, although it is sort of a piracy, primarily a piracy or a protocol used for piracy, you know, the technology was sort of neutral in that way. And that was important to me. So, you know, that's later on when I discovered like Bitcoin and all that. It all kind of made sense to me. And granted, I didn't come from a financial background or anything like that. I really recognize the power of a decentralized technology. So when I discovered Bitcoin, I was like, cool, this is really interesting. I don't know anything about finance, but, you know, let me look into this. And that's when I discovered Ethereum. I was like, okay, we're here. This is cool. This is really cool.

Cool. And that's like when it sort of clicked for me where it's, you know, a general purpose blockchain. So sort of those decentralized properties, but, you know, a programmable blockchain, so you can essentially, you know, create anything within reason, you know. My first thought, when I discovered Ethereum was like, oh, we could sort of rebuild the rails or the piping or the plumbing of the music industry using this technology in a way that's actually completely neutral and essentially replaced the music industry with code. And that's something I like to say because that's kind of what it is. It's not completely destroying the human element, but it's taking the sort of part that needs to be decentralized and making that decentralized. So that became an obsession

of mine, and I really haven't looked back. And so everything that I've done since like 2017 has essentially been sort of a form of experimentation with this where it's like I'm not going to single-handedly reinvent the entire music industry, but I can at least experiment with my own career and I don't have much to lose, you know, like people don't really care, you know, I'm still going to do things the typical way, but, you know, having this, again, this other option of being able to play with technology and do something that's interesting, that became, you know, an obsession of mine. So in 2017, I guess I released the first album on Ethereum. So we use a smart contract to view deposited, you know, roughly $10 of ether in this contract. You got this, you got the

download and you got an ERC 20 token. So, Again, this is sort of predating the ERC 721 standard, but it's, it was a form of collectible, you know, and one that's actually still currently traded, where people have sort of wrapped it into a 721 and now they traded it on an open sea. So it's kind of cool. And I'm sorry, which token was that? So this is, my album was called Ego, and this is called the Ego token. So again, this is like 140 people, like tiny, tiny, tiny little experiment. but, you know, it sort of proved the use case. And granted, we were so early, but it was cool to kind of play around with that.

I'm going to try to get through this quickly. But in 2020, I had another album called Boy, and I figured, okay, what Uniswap was already starting to kind of be a little bit more popular? And I was like, what if we created an ERC20 token that represented this limited edition cassette tape, basically? So it's essentially creating a market for a scarce good. So instead of just making, you know, a thousand tapes, I just say, I'm going to make it a hundred.

And I'm going to let a market decide its value. So who went from, I think we, the original listing was like $20 or something like that. It went to, it eventually peaked at like $13,000 or something like that, which again is, the irony isn't lost on me of like, you know, using a kind of cutting edge technology to sell a cassette tape, which is also like an obsolete technology, but also challenging the notion, again, challenging the notion that music is valuable. And, you know, granted, that was sort of an extreme example. You had, you know, a lot of defy people kind of running the price up and down and whatever, but it was, it was kind of a fun thing to do and say, hey, no, music is actually way more valuable

than what you guys are pricing it as. So that really kind of got me into it. And, you know, that sort of set the groundwork for the RAC token. And also just to, I need to give it a little bit of context, which is that, you know, COVID was, you know, happening. Suddenly the thing that we love about music, live performance, is not an option. Okay, so what do I do? I start streaming on Twitch. And now suddenly there's like this group of people that I'm like kind of interacting with my super fans for the first time in my career, you know, like 10 years in. So it's like I'm getting to know them.

I'm like talking to them. And then that sort of funneled into a Discord server. You know, okay, now, now, you know, there's not a very, not a large amount of people, you know, but they're all of my Discord server. And the thing, the most beautiful thing about it really for me was it wasn't just about me anymore. It was like maybe I was the catalyst that got them there, but they have a lot more in common. And it's sort of naturally turned into more of community of sorts. But I got sort of, I have PTSD from all these other platforms, you know, pulling the

rug. And so I was like, okay, well, how do I sort of circumvent this? Well, I can, you know. So that was the idea of like, okay, let me create a token. Let me create a token that I'm basically going to air drop to anybody that I have an email, that I have sort of financial transaction trail of any sort. So anybody that bought like an MP3 or a piece of merch or anything dating back to 2009, which is, I think, the earliest data we had, got a token air drop. So they got it for free, you know, just for, they didn't do that with an expectation of a token. So I felt like that was like a, like a real way to start, you know, well, that community existed.

It was just a way to sort of like connect them, you know. And it was sort of a way for me to backtrack and like sort of try to get everybody back into this in a platform that we controlled, you know. So that token, I think it was one of the first, not maybe not the first, but like it was one of the earlier kind of social tokens. You know, at first it was perhaps like a reward. tokens, it was kind of a lot of different things, but that, you know, eventually we, we, we started to develop some software around it and, and that sort of culminated in the most recent release,

which is the, or called the RACOS or the RAC.m, if anybody wants to check it out, but it's basically, it looks like an OS and, you know, you can connect your metamask and it'll check your, it'll, first of it can unlock songs based on your token holding. And, and we sort of just wanted to lay a framework so we can continue to add more features. So that was kind of like, it was a long path, but we finally got to this point where it's like, I am the platform. And, you know, I'm trying to create like, you know, I'm trying to own that platform. And instead of giving it to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or whatever. And, and those, those platforms will always exist and I'm always going to continue to use them. But at least I can now funnel people to like a platform that I control and

we can make it, you know, streamline. We can make it like for the. that community, like niche specific. And, you know, that's, that's sort of where I see all of this going. And that's sort of why I'm excited about it because it's, it's like, you know, finally, you know, it took like this long. But like now finally, I feel like we finally landed on a model that kind of is starting to make sense. And I'm just like excited, you know. Yeah, I love how you said, now I am the platform, which makes so much sense. If, like, people are. fans of you and your work, then it would make sense that the way that they're going to congregate is around you and your work. So I love that. One other thing that I saw in an article written about

you was you were talking about something called the Amen break and how that sparked some of your thoughts on music NFTs. So I want you to tell us about that, but we'll play a clip of it here so people can hear what it is. So go ahead. Tell us about this Amen break. And and how it sparked some of your thoughts around music NFTs? Yeah, so the almond break is amongst, like, music producers, it's maybe anecdotally is probably the most widely used sample of all time. So what it is is, I don't quote me on the exact song, because I kind of forget what it is,

but it's from a song, I think, from the 60s, where it's just a drum break. So like a little interlude, like a six-second interlude in the middle of a song, it's a B-side on a little seven-inch. somebody found that it was like this is a sick drum loop i'm going to use that and it eventually sort of spawned it's such a good drum loop that it essentially spawned entire genres of music like you know there's entire scenes and entire worlds and subcultures that are based around this this sample and you know this is obviously wishful thinking but like you know if we had nfts in the 60s

or whatever and if that sample was some form of an nfts you know even though it's it was sort of widely used for free, you know, because nobody ever paid any royalties on this. You know, I think, I think of it as sort of an important cultural artifact and that it's like,

I think it's priceless, you know. And the most disappointing thing about the current music industry is that, like, the original artists never saw a single dime from, from that usage. So even though they have sort of,

you know, like I was, I played drums on the almond break. I'm on like, you know, 700 songs or 800 songs, or 800 songs or whatever, but that still doesn't, you know, they never got to, you know, they never got their due. So it's, I mean, it's not a perfect comparison, but it's just another

example of like how the music industry has sort of failed us in the current system. I think of it as like, like, okay, maybe this isn't for right now. Maybe, you know, I don't know, we're going to find another amen break today. But, you know, if we're setting up the system correctly, I think, and that's sort of what I was getting at it with that. Yeah, because basically it seems, like maybe that then could become a STEM NFT. I don't know if I'm using the terminology correctly. And when people use it, then they could pay some royalty or even if it was just sold as kind of a cultural artifact,

then the value of it, like, whatever people are treating it for, would sort of reflect how valuable it is, even if people use it for free still. So it's it actually asks a really interesting question. And a lot of people will debate me one way or another. And I love it. But basically, like, what actually gives, what gives this value? Is it the monetization of it?

Or is it sort of cultural significance? Or maybe that's a threshold that you cross after a certain point. I don't know. I could truly don't know. And that's actually sort of a question that's happening a lot with NFTs now. It's like, you know, aside for maybe Royal and a couple other examples, like, there's not really that connection to the monetization of it. So again, like, we're making these NFTs free.

So like, where is it going to monetize? You know, none of those royalty streams are streaming to the NFT holders, at least in its current form. So why does it have value? And that's like, I don't know that I really have an answer for that. I have a couple of theories, but like, you know, that's something that we're kind of grappling with right now. Yeah.

So I do you want to ask some broader questions about, music and of teas but before we do that just one last question for racy for andre which is you have this creative agency called six why did you tell us what that is and how it came about yeah so uh six was it's essentially well okay for in the broader context of like i started doing visual nfts and you know we this was like late 2020 uh we were releasing we had a couple like minor successes and broke a couple records and whatnot and i think the music industry started to take notice and it was really when Justin Blow, actually the CEO of Royal, he did an NFT release that I think grossed around $12 million or something like that. It was a very pronounced moment. And this happened on a Sunday.

So me and my friends had sort of been toying with this idea because we were getting, you know, hit up from every angle. Say, hey, what's this NFT thing? Like, what are you doing? How do you, how are you making money off of this? Like, what is it? You know, because everybody in the music industry is hungry because they don't make any money. So, like, people are, were like really trying to like freaking out trying to try to figure how to do this and and we're me a couple friends uh people that have been doing this for a long time we were like okay well what if we started uh an agency maybe like maybe that's a something that we could help other artists and that was sort of our focus is like let's let's help the independent artists let's help the people that

really stand to benefit the most let's let's help them before the labels come in and try to like mess it all up basically so so we started actually that's that Sunday we kind of got together in a group chat and we're like, hey, I think we need to start this like tomorrow. I think we need to announce this tomorrow. And because like in my mind, like that $12 million mark was every single person in the music industry was going to hear about that. First thing in the morning, like every intern is probably like scrambling, preparing, you know, some like some presentation on what NFTs are. And we're like, okay, let's get ahead of this. Let's just literally put out an email and a Squarespace website.

And within the next, within the next like four months, I feel like I was on calls for, you know, 16 hours a day talking to various different people. So it was this like amazing little pocket of time that we kind of got the timing right. And, you know, we created this agency. We eventually were involved in the Wu-Tang album and some other crazy stuff. And it's sort of been like... And when you say that, just talk a little bit about the... Because obviously now there's multiple muting plan albums.

Unfortunately, there's a little bit of this that I can't speak about some details because of NDAs. But essentially, we were involved in brokering the deal in between the DOJ and Pleaser Dow. So we sort of facilitated that. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we... That was the... Yeah, that was the one originally owned by Martin Schrelly.

Yes, yes. So that was a crazy, crazy couple months, yes. Okay, okay. Oh, that sounds fascinating. I would love to dig into that sometime. We'll do it off air. So here's what I want to ask. This was a super interesting tweet that I saw. Cooper Turley tweeted, Breakout 1-3 musicians will not be ranked by plays or monthly listeners. They will be ranked by floor price, trading volume, unique holders, and treasury balance. And this was controversial, and Andre I saw you tweeted about it. So why don't you guys both just react to this? So, you know, what's your take on what he said? So I think Cooper is obviously a big collector on sound

and kind of been pushing the music NFT space forward for a while. But I think the, I land somewhere in the middle here. I think that's a bit on the extreme end of the spectrum. I don't necessarily think that that's how we're going to be at like describing artists, because, as I said, like, there's only two sides of this. There's the, obviously, the modernization side, but there's also, like, just getting that music heard. On the flip side, I think Cooper has a point in a lot of people in the space

have shared this, which is you can't define a song's impact by just the play count alone. Because for certain people, that song might have changed their life, right? And that's not, that promotes this mass culture kind of, like, society where, like, your song is only successful if it goes mainstream, hundreds of millions of streams, et cetera. So I think that's really like, it's more of like the future of the music industry is around building tight-knit communities around your music. And I think that will be the most important aspect. And then I think, yes, you will still have mainstream what's called hits in the music industry that reach hundreds of millions of people. But the ultimate bar over

what we're obviously doing is to form tight-knit communities, kind of like many, you know, Grateful Dead's and examples and whatnot because the best music communities have always he's been like cults. And I think Andre's actually a great example of this where Andre has people around his music that really care about him and his music. And there's a lot of strength in, in numbers here, which is like Andre can put out whatever, it's an RAC token. It's a, it's a release on sound. And his community will travel and follow with them. And I think that is, that's why I think Andre was such a large moment for us on sound when he first released is and why we've honestly, like, I don't think sound would exist without Andre's kind of pushing the boundaries forward even before Sound even launched.

But that's why, like, Andre is a much more relatable example to many, many more artists than if we take some of the, some of the, like a Drake as an example, where it's so large and so beyond kind of like any type of relation. I do think a lot of artists can be in their own way, their own RAC or create their own platform and have their own kind of relationship. and I think that's kind of the model and the blueprint here. So I think, again, like everything else, it's about harmony and balance. It's not about any one versus the other. And that's honestly reflected in everything in the Web3 space where it's not, we never tell an artist, hey, you can't try out something else or, hey, you can't release on Spotify. It's really about kind of experimenting and exploring with the different options out there.

Yeah, I'll just sort of chime in on that tweet. I mean, it definitely, you know, ruffled some feathers, let's say, in some people. But like, I think that what he's sort of intending to explain isn't really that dystopian, even though sometimes it was kind of perceived that way. I think, like, you know, what it is a little bit sort of myopic. And this happens a lot in crypto where they only see crypto and they don't see the wider sort of ecosystem. And like David I was saying, I kind of play in both worlds.

Like, yes, obviously I focus a lot of time and attention on crypto, but I mean, you know, I still release music widely and tour and do all the things that are non-cryptor related, you know. So there are kind of two different audiences and, but like I think where where maybe this is

going is that, you know, this is kind of like how I'm thinking about it a little bit is like a sort of a gamified form of fundraising on some level, you know, where you're sort of perhaps raising funds to be able to really sit more widely or whatever your objective is or if you just want to sit on it and collect the money. I don't know. But I think there'll be a class of fans and investors or however you want to think about them that do care about the floor price.

You know, it makes sense. You know, they bought something. They probably care about its value. You know, but I think it's maybe a little bit naive to think that the wider community would actually care about that. So I mean, like, I know he means well. It's just, I think I responded to that tweet and sort of shared my thoughts, but yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with you that maybe certain people will view it that way, but I don't think most people will just because I do think even when you have NFTs, which make it easier to earn money from these cultural objects that really the primacy still is with their cultural

value. So I do agree. Yeah. Plays and listeners will matter more. But anyway, okay, you guys, this has been so interesting. We could have just gone forever. But before we go, where can people learn more about each of you and your work? So probably easiest is rac.fm or on social media, RAC, I'm easy to find.

So, yeah, come say hi. Yeah, we're also all over Twitter, and that's kind of where we spend most of our time. But, yeah, we have our website, sound.x, y, Z. We have our Twitter, which is Sound X, Y, Z underscore. And then our Discord is always open for anybody who has questions, which you can find in our Twitter as well. Perfect. Well, it's been such a pleasure having you both on Unchained. Thank you for having us.

It's actually been sort of a long-time dream of mine because I've been listening to your podcast for a long time. So I'm stoked that we got to do this. Thank you. And thank you also for listening for a long time. I really appreciate that. I learned so much, yeah. Both of you as well. It's been, I've said, since December, so I'm very happy, and I couldn't think about a better guest to have it with than.

Perfect. Well, thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about RIC and sound. Check out the show notes for this episode. This week, I will be doing a virtual, not in-person event at the PBS Crosscut Festival in conversation with author Jimmy Soni about my new book, The Cryptopians, as well as his new book, The Founders. The festival takes place May 4th through Saturday, May 7th. For more big events, visit my website, laura shinn.com slash book.

Also, tune in to Unchained on YouTube later today for a live stream of The Chopping Block with early stage crypto investors, Haseeb Qureshi, Tarun Chitra, Robert Leshner, and Tom Schmidt. Andre Cronia, founder of Segwit Holdings, will be the featured guest. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony Youen, Daniel Ness, Mark Murdoch, Shoshank, and CLK transcription. Thanks for listening. You know,