The NFT craze has taken the space by storm. Every day it feels like there is another article about some artist who has sold $1million+ worth of NFTs and everyone is talking about a digital renaissance. For the past 7 years, I've lived almost exclusively from art (music), and when I read these articles, I can't help but feel conflicted. On the one hand, I'm always very happy to ready when artists are getting the financial respect they deserve and even more so when it crosses into the Crypto space.
It's got me thinking the past week, it could be time to create a kind of Decentralized Record Label, that would focus on leveraging decentralized platforms and applications for distributing new music. The music industry as it stands, has created an entire inefficient ecosystem of middlemen who leach revenue from artists and mold them into a product that they know they can profit from the most. In fact, often times artists are forced to make creative decisions that they do not share (uncreative decisions as I like to think of them), simply because they have to earn a lot of revenue just to be able to have enough left over to live from once all of the hands take their cut. For years I've been dreaming of a day when decentralized protocols and smart contracts could cut out many of the unnecessary costs that the full time artist has to cover in order to be able to survive.
My friend @nathanmars loves to remind everyone that on HIVE, we are owners, not users. I think that's the mentality that artists need to have when dealing with their Record Label. We are not working for them, but the label works for us. We own our music, they help us get the most out of it. That's why I believe a decentralized label that is focused on pooling together resources, network and connections would be something extremely worthwhile.
Many people do not realize what a diverse set of skills musicians have to have to survive in the modern music industry. The Label supports with marketing, with administration, with legal, with distribution and accounting. There is an entire business apparatus that must exist in order to be a successful musician and earn enough to live from your own music.
What I am hoping to do over the next few months is pull together a group of interested parties, all interested in decentralization, and try and come up with the foundation for a DAO governed Record Label that could be used to support the release of new music and development of artists online to a worldwide audience. Anyone here on LEO who is a musician his or herself OR would like to have that early conversation or just serve as a sounding board for the creation of our DAO, I'd love to hear from you. Get at me here in the comments and we can figure out a way to communicate more in depth via messenger.