A lot has changed since the last update. I launched my EP with a custom minting site, sold some NFTs, and took a critical look at my creative output over the last quarter. I thought a lot about the purpose behind XYZ and about its future, and have ultimately decided to wind things down and return the unused funds. You will be reimbursed for 88% of your contribution to the crowdfund or NFT sale; consider your $WAV to be a token of gratitude. More details below! 👇🏻
I saw a need for music to have a place in web3 that was co-owned by artists and funded by a community. I felt like a lot of the existing platforms in the space didn’t express the vision of what inspired me about music, the internet, or their intersection. I also had aspirations to connect what I was seeing in generative art to music culture by pairing generative artists with musicians for special record releases. As a web designer and a music producer, I felt uniquely positioned to work on a platform and a community that could offer something new to the web3 world.
Last month I released my EP on digital streaming services and launched an NFT minting site hosted at http://xyz.church. This was essentially a prototype of the platform that XYZ could grow into. However, with so much production work on my plate, I got exhausted and didn’t get to do any press outreach or marketing. Without marketing, the reach of the sale was limited, but also pointed to some potential issues in the project at large (more below). So far 3 NFTs have been sold at 0.2 ETH each, with three new collectors joining the DAO and 0.6 ETH generated.
While I’m still super interested in the future of music on the blockchain, there are a number of things standing in the way of XYZ becoming successful.
First: the size of the treasury. It is isn’t enough to run a team, and it isn’t small enough to match what I would comfortably pay myself. I don’t want to raise more money without a solid roadmap or vision, and I don’t feel comfortable using the funds to pay myself. Things haven’t been moving, so it makes sense to me to give it back.
Second: an art or media project needs an audience. In this space, audience is probably even more important than product. While I’ve shipped many products in the past, building and retaining audiences isn’t something I’ve done before. I thought building a tokenized community would help kickstart this process, but it’s only made incentives confusing for me. A more considered approach would have involved a marketing plan.
Third: the state of crypto, art, and NFTs. Things have evolved a lot in the last year. At one point, crypto seemed poised to shake up the independent music industry by treating music as tokenized media. It felt like this would create a lot of space for niche communities and projects that would use new capital flows for thoughtful and meaningful art. By now, there are a handful of well-staffed and well-funded organizations experimenting with these ideas (Catalog, Songcamp, Sound, Nina.market, Mintsongs, Arpeggi labs, beatsDAO to name a few). But it doesn’t feel like a purely music scene to me*; crypto is truly its own medium. Everything that’s happening is emergent and fascinating, but it’s grown into something that doesn’t truly fuel me as an artist.
*with then notable exception of Songcamp, which does feel a music scene and has inspired me to a high degree!