Disrupting the traditional music industry with DAOs 🎶 The TILT #23
Talking collective creation in the 22nd century with Matthew Chaim
Ep 27 of the podcast is here, hallelujah! And SUPERTILT is talking to Matthew Chaim: a multifaceted musician and web3 aficionado. Matthew is currently working on Songcamp: basically a web3 laboratory with the intentions of experimenting at the far out edges of where music meets the new internet. Super rad. Très cool.
Read a snippet of our conversation below ⬇️⬇️⬇️
This week in the Pod we also announce our new creation, Frothy. 🥳 🥳🥳
At Frothy, we’re in the biz of designing communities for web3. Community Design is a framework for creating the continual growth of web3 projects + the humans within their community fabric.
More exciting froth-related news is that we released !!! our first NFT !!! in association with NZ motion designer Pippa Haslam. Our NFT is the first in a series of 5 paying homage to Earth's wild ecosystems and the wild ecosystems within web3. We posed the question to ourselves and to the wider web3 ecosystem: if we're so frothed on ecosystem development, then how are we benefiting and regenerating our planetary ecosystems? Aligning with the alpine vibes of The Summit NFT, a 20% donation from the sale will go to Kea Conservation Trust, to protect the world's endangered and only alpine parrot.
The final news to share with y’all is Frothy’s launch on mirror.xyz: a decentralized publishing platform. Think Substack, but web3. In Frothy’s first article, we share the Frothy OS/Manifesto and dive into what we mean by community design, and why it’s so necessary. Have a peep! 👀
As a songwriter and musician based in Montreal, Canada, Matthew is now fully immersed in web3, creating and building communities that oscillate around music and art. He loves the harp, mindfulness, and aspires to hold an IRL songcamp in Hawaii 😉
Our conversation with Matthew is damn fun and traverses the topics of:
Using web3 tools to distribute art and interact with value
Elektra DAO as a web3 music/venture builder 🛠
Gamifying web3 onboarding and artistry
Why the conventional music industry is problematic
Why web3 is better for songwriters, musicians + artists 🎶
Podcast 🎙 Snack 🍏
ST: Relating to your background as a musician/songwriter, how did the conventional music industry feel to you and why do you think it's broken?
MC: I guess I got to see. that it was this very bloated process. They're very bloated and have a lot of different clients, a lot of artists, and it's difficult to run a business in that world now without volume. And it's difficult to prioritize things in that way.
Kind of like with a lot of things with humans, there's a lot of excitement and froth at the top of it, you signed the thing, it's all exciting. And then that plateaus, understandably. So luckily I didn't have such a long deal that my plateau was lengthy. But even before then I did get a major label offer that was just trying to eat my life. And I saw that and said no to that straight away. But I have a lot of friends in the space that get offers in that way that just don't make any sense. And definitely as you start to dip into the web3 world, they really start to make less sense.
Even now I still receive my publishing reports every quarter or what have you, and it's just 95 pages to tell me that I made 17 cents from 36 years. And I know people do make money in these ways as a songwriter. But as an artist my only real uptake has come from streaming and more specifically Spotify…I don't know what it's like to make money as a songwriter. As an artist you make a few bucks, still, it's slow and low. As a songwriter, I don't know what it's like to make anything really. It's so negligible.
So from that standpoint, not only do you get this subconscious sense of what you're art's value is because this is the market of what it is, and this is what you know… but also you're shoved into a position of making arrangements with your friends and the collaborators that you're working with creatively that are modeled off of agreements that reflect what major labels do with major artists.
And we just look at this one thing called the industry and make deals that are modular, yes, but they’re all kind of stemmed from these arrangements made by big companies with big artists that are very archaic, actually that come from like a very, very long time ago. And it just doesn't make sense for us. And as you enter this new space, which really is just like another new outlet, a new place to experiment with what can work and what the value of art is, and how we can work together just by getting to play in a different sandbox… you look back at the other one, you're like, oh, this isn't the only sandbox.
LISTEN to more of this goodness by tuning in to Episode 27 on Spotify…
Or on 🍏 ↘️
YOU + THE SUPERTILT COMMUNITY
We are super keen to hear from you. Connect with us on any of the platforms below… 🤗
⚡️ Instagram
Catch the SUPERTILT sisters on socials: