Music NFTs & The Next Generation Of Music | Cooper Turley

Transcript

a million streams on Spotify is roughly four thousand dollars it's a little bit less than that but we'll use that just for like rounding's sake and so for these artists out there competing to get you know hundreds of millions of streams and that's the base economics it's very difficult for you to see a significant return off of those plays but I would say that for the vast majority of artists they're not going to get a million streams on Spotify like that's a very challenging thing to do and for the hit records they're making great money off of Spotify but for the Independent Artists that don't have the capacity to have that many listens you know nfts create this new paradigm where if you can find 25 collectors when willing to spend 0.1 each on your records you're actually making just as much if not more

money than you would off a Million Dreams off Spotify just off the back of 20 people that really love your work this episode is brought to you by Circle the issuer of usdc which hopefully as you all know is the preferred stable coin of digital Natives and crypto natives with over 1.5 million holders globally you'll hear more about usdc later in the show you're putting it on I'm trying to put it on but I don't know if it's going to fit is it going to fit I love that yes yeah we have a guest episode here it's uh marshmallow no it's not I'm kidding what's the story behind that Sanji uh MO is a really uh is a great guy shout out to Mo and he was super kind enough to

send me send me this one and by the way the only nft that I have the remotely close to music is is marshmallows so shout out to marshmallow he's fantastic and is crushing it yeah absolute Legend definitely co-signed a shout out to Mo too he's a killer I mean I was gonna do this like nice fancy intro for you Coop but like this the intro does not get better than this anyways guys welcome back to another episode of Empire we got Koopa Trooper uh Koopa Troopa we got Santi joining me co-host today we're talking all things music nfts if you haven't listened uh Coop has already been on Empire we've talked all things Dows now we're talking music nfts uh Cooper just raised 10 million for music nft fun so good welcome uh to Empire my friend thank you guys excited to be back here yeah uh we

are going to talk all about music kind of teas in this episode want to get really really deep with you you red pilled me on Dows a couple of years ago and now uh we are having you here to Red Pill us on music nfts but I think can you just give the lay of the land uh in terms of what you just raised in the fundraise and like uh what what the 10 million is going to we can get that out of the way and then we can jump really deep into um just kind of state of the industry and things like that sure so Coop Records is a 10 million dollar early stage fund investing in the next generation of Music this is everything from web3 companies to artists to nfts I wanted to create a vehicle that's sort of a hybrid between a venture fund and a

record label and that's what we announced last week and what we're going to be spending a lot of time on over the next couple years amazing man so what uh I'm assuming you're not just buying floors of Music nfts you're allocating a couple hundred thousand bucks into companies projects protocols uh and just really trying to lay the land for the music nft space yeah it's correct the vast majority of Investments are pre-seed in Siege stage companies anywhere from 10 to 20 mil post money valuations typical check is 250k I'm really looking to get large ownership stakes in the early protocols and platforms that'll shape the next generation of music so what's up what are you actually investing in like are you buying pieces of music like I can look through my spot if I'm like am I going to be able to buy all the major

songs that I like or um for everyone that doesn't really know what music nfts are could you just explain it to them yeah I mean I think that's the goal is to be able to collect any song that you know and love you know I think right now it's a very passive relationship with music where if you like a song you add it to a playlist Maybe you share it on your Instagram story but for people such as myself that have had a 10-year relationship with music and have an identity around it I want to go deep paper into that song and so what that looks like for me is a limited quantity of Collectibles let's say 25 editions of a song a fixed price at primary sale and then a secondary Market where you can trade those Collectibles with other people are you running a some sort of royalty

touch thought there have been several attempts um at kind of Reinventing the music industry with uh crypto if you will like obviously Jason Blau is doing uh perhaps the most the father so long I've seen but they're like the uh what is it Jesse actually your folks are variant um and Dennis tried to do this way back and then kind of didn't really work but I'm curious if you could give us an understanding and an overview of kind of what has been we talk a lot about Industries where crypto can disrupt um music and the entertainment kind of media industry keeps coming up but so far it hasn't largely been successful but maybe music nfts are like the most exciting thing uh to come out of that but I'm curious if you give us like a

lay of land of what's happened what's been tried why hasn't have been tried and kind of why this time is different yeah I'd say a lot of the early music plays were around uh decentralized content storage so things like uploading metadata to ipfs things like decentralized streaming protocols like audios this is very much like where does the content actually live and then what is sort of the way that you're tracking usage of that across multiple rights holders um I think to your early questions about royalties there's a lot of exciting stuff happening around like allowing someone to own a percentage of a song that they love so if I know a song on Spotify and there's an nft of it you know there are platforms out there that allow you to own you know a small fraction of the master rights of that song I think what's important to

recognize is that's not required for music nfts I think that that's actually a premium that goes above the base layer which is just the collectible song and so at its core if you have an nft which is pointing to a song you're collecting a version of that and that has no master rights to it no publishing no utility guaranteed it's literally just collecting a fixed quantity of a song if you want to go and add in premiums like giving it royalty rights or giving it access or something I think that's great but I think it's really important to highlight that this is a net new Revenue stream if you're selling collectible version of your song that doesn't mean you're giving away ownership it doesn't mean you're trying to compete with existing systems you're really just creating a new market that hasn't previously existed before that's interesting so this actually for

a lot of the artists out there that might be listening like they have existing pretty pretty tight I think contracts with the record labels and venues and all this stuff and so this contractually like they're able to Mint music nfts on their entire history of of hits and it's okay like you know I guess like contractually they're not like infringing on some of these contracts uh not blanket across the board I would say if you are minting music nfts you need to ascribe by the current Rights Management System so if you have a label deal where the label is entitled to 80 of your master um it's good practice to recognize that you probably have to give up 80 of your music nft sales to the labels and because of this most of the time that I spend is with emerging Independent

Artists people who don't have contractual obligations they own 100 of the rights to their music and they don't have any blockers in place to kind of creating these economic systems I think those are the artists that are going to see the most value out of this new format is because they don't have to go through the existing system they can really create their own playbooks and I want to take us back out for for a second like this music kind of teas in my mind are solving a problem the problem is you can have a huge fan base you can have millions of listeners uh and really the ways to monetize are pretty crappy right the best ways to monetize today are probably like you do like a an influencer deal like some like a brand pays you uh you you drop merchandise and then probably the Third

Way is you do like concerts and you you sell out concerts like those I'm sure I'm missing some things but really what I feel like this is solving is millions of listeners on Spotify Spotify doesn't pay you checks yet right so like I'd actually be curious to get your take on like how did we get here like how did we what's the evolution like how did we get here like Napster LimeWire uh uh Apple music ending with now I feel like everyone uses Spotify like how did we get here and then um yeah let's let's start there basically um at some point in time you had to buy an entire album to be able to listen to One signal so you're paying 20 to be able to listen to your favorite song um Napster came along and they basically made it free to listen to any song but

then there was an entire rights argument process where people weren't getting paid out for the music they're releasing and then iTunes Store came along and said you can buy any single for 99 cents and then Spotify came along and said hey for 9.99 a month you can listen to any song in the world the only problem with that is that Spotify is a business having to compensate every song in the world based on a 999 a month subscription is very very difficult and so I don't think that Spotify is malicious I don't think they're trying not to pay artists I think that the economics behind it are just very tricky and to really give that some color um a million streams on Spotify is roughly four thousand dollars it's a little bit less than that we'll use that just for like rounding's sake and so for

these artists out there competing to get you know hundreds of millions of streams and that's the base economics it's very difficult for you to see a significant return off of those plays but I would say that for the vast majority of artists they're not going to get a million streams on Spotify like that's a very challenging thing to do and for the hit records they're making great money off of Spotify but for the Independent Artists that don't have the capacity to have that many listens you know nfts create this new paradigm where if you can find 25 collectors when willing to spend 0.1 youth on your records you're actually making just as much if not more money than you would off a Million Dreams off Spotify just off the back of 20 people that really love your work it's interesting you know Kevin Kelly like the Thousand true fans I feel like

a thousand true fans I mean he nailed that post but I feel like it's permeated into a bunch of other Industries and like now sub stack is obviously built on the back of that it's built like even B2B businesses like you really just need a you know maybe 100 customers to to build a very strong business but it hasn't actually permeated into the music industry right without a million uh listens with getting four thousand bucks is like abysmal numbers there obviously Spotify is not trying to do wrong by these artist that's just the economics of the business yeah I wouldn't compare streaming to nfts one to one because they're very different systems there's like different economics behind it but I would say that um the idea of like supporting an artist through patronage is not new you know we've had patreon we've had these fan

clubs we have Facebook groups and whatnot I think the new paradigm here is secondary market for fandom so after I actually contribute and show my patronage I'm getting an asset back in return that has some underlying value that I can either resell on the secondary Market or it kind of uses like an identity status game I think the net new thing here is that it's not really about um super fans being able to support their biggest artists that's been around for a very long time it's the idea that as a super fan I can now have an investment into the artist that I know and love the most and then hopefully have a positive Financial experience with that song Or that artist that I really love you're solving the um you know that feeling that you get when you find someone early and then you text

them like I find someone and even like an Instagram account like uh someone blows up on Instagram they have like 300 000 followers you're like yeah but I was following them when they had 5 000 followers like I feel like you're almost are we are we talking about here Jason in terms of following uh I would assume like you know like mostly business accounts and whatnot right just business accounts correct strictly strictly business accounts yeah exactly no no I'm going to give you a real world thing here which is like Fred again I've been following Fred again for a long time like like I am it's like Fred again in terms of who I like to listen to and then it's like a massive drop off and then it's like every other artist in my mind and like now I'm seeing Fred again blow up and I'm like holy [ __ ] like I

that dude he's blown up now and I'm texting all my friends like and I get I listen to every single fret again thing I can get my hands on every YouTube Interview with him I listen to the tape notes hearing him like describe how he puts together an album I'm like that anything that dude puts out I will listen to and also if you extend it beyond that if that dude dropped music nfts like like I don't want to just attend his concert like I want to drop eth and like collect his his music nft so that was the first like real music nft moment I had um are you buying audio video audio video images like what are the kind of things that you're buying what is your what are the things that your most like what is

your investment criteria and like framework um to Value these nfts two questions but maybe we can start and separate them yeah so at its Corey you're collecting a song it's an audio file with a cover art the same way you would listen to a song on Spotify except now there's a fixed digit limited quantity of them my investment criteria is more based on like the artist's relationship with the space than it is on like the specific song economics itself and so basically is this artist being consistent are they releasing music nfts with all the tracks that they're putting out are they investing back into the community after their drops are they showing potential to scale the economics behind their music nfts both in quantity and price is there volume on the secondary market and is there sort of a you know understanding that this person is going

to be involved in the space for a wild forward I would say that's the vast majority of my investment criteria is just like artist development and a r which is a pretty common practice you know as Yano suggested you know if I could collect Fred again nfts um two years ago I think that would have been a great investment that doesn't exist and so it's kind of like looking for the artists that are native to this space today and trying to find ways to support them in the earliest part in their career possible and how do you think about the investment Horizon now you have fun congrats uh I think it's perhaps the bet the first fully focused fund on music nfts um so I think that's uh that's a pretty big splash 10 million is not a small amount nonetheless I think uh but if

you're a structure like a venture fund I mean you have to return Capital to investors at some point so how do you think about the relationship between the artist and you at some point happen to sell the nft to recoup and then return some Capital back to investors while the fund is only using five percent of its capital to buy liquid music nfts the vast vast majority of it is purchasing equity and pre-seed and Seed shade companies and then working with artists to set up new capital formation events where you can buy equity in underlying artist projects and so to answer that question directly I don't think that the fund will be selling music nfts this year return I think a more likely scenario is very common to traditional Venture where we're buying equity in a pre-seed project helping them raise a couple rounds and eventually launching a token

and at some point in time taking profits on the tokens that have been issued to investors so this would be maybe give us an idea what those kind of precedes the seed stage Investments would be this is mostly like music and if the infrastructure marketplaces or um even artists themselves I'm curious how you think about yeah I mean this is definitely a little bit of alpha here on the podcast so we'll go into uh the only thing we want to hear yeah so there's um an investment coming out this week that we uh co-led called relics this is um Monstercat which is the largest independent electronic label in Canada they spun out a metaverse music company that's doing distribution into different Virtual Worlds they're also doing label catalog onboarding where they're bringing on music nfts from all of these different Enterprises and um

you know Coop Records is buying equity in the pre-seat stage of the relics company and so you know very early stages the first time they raise Capital they've done a bunch of drops on Nifty Gateway they have all these concepts for how their metaverse music project is going to work and um you know we're working really closely with them to think through their season two structure and then think through ways to better distribute content into Virtual Worlds moving forward it's it's really interesting cool because I feel like there's an this idea that a lot of artists have about like not selling Equity um right like if you're uh if you're a big musician it's like you you've got a whole team around you you've probably got dozens if not hundreds of people around you but like you don't have a company it's kind of like you're like

monetizing your name you know uh and so it's almost like the it's the Tim Ferriss like thing like Tim Ferriss can't get acquired right it's like it's his name that's got value so it's like when when Blau like let's use blow as an example it's like or uh I don't know like Tiesto or something like Tiesto's value just accrues to his name so in this instance would you if you were working with Tiesto from the beginning like would you recommend that he almost creates a company and flows that puts value into his company hires developers hires marketers and then like eventually that company gets acquired like what what do you almost like propose to some of these artists who are used to just building Equity value through their own name and their own

brand that's exactly what we're doing we're working with select artists to set up a corporation which has claims on their touring their streaming their publishing their merchandise their nft we're routing all that through a hold company and then doing subsidiaries that you know limit the liability and all those different um entities and then we're selling off five or ten percent of the equity to accredited investors who are going to be long-term Partners in developing their project using that Capital we're going to be hiring people like you just said developers Community managers Etc and then building additional product around the musics that outside of like the nfts that are being released you also have these new experiences around fan clubs shows merchandise Etc and then optimistically uh best case scenario would be something like Iraq Nation where you know an artist Like Jay-Z

spins up his own record label and then the parent cow has a claim on all these other Enterprises that the artist sets up later in their career hmm taking honestly taking nfts out of this whole thing music entities out of this whole thing like I feel like even just that is a better system right because imagine if you're I don't know like if you're I'll go back to Fred again like if you're a fight against manager who I think is his like brother or his cousin or something like that like and you're with him in the early days and then like you get dropped after five years in in companies like if you were an employee like Olaf Carlson we like if you were early at coinbase you're employee number one you build it and then like you get you you drop well you have equity in the company

but that doesn't exist in the music world so even taking nfts out of it even just that I feel like is uh is really helpful yeah I mean most of the music industry offers on a part-time commission basis most managers have five or six clients as you just alluded to they get dropped and then their income stream is cut off immediately after that you know there's cases like Dua Lipa where her managers have been with her since day one um they get fired and then there's just no long-term exposure to the project and so what I'm starting to think is why are we treating artists differently from the way that we think about early stage tech companies and why not give you know early employees grants that they can earn invest over a multi-year Time Horizon even if it doesn't end up working out you know that person should

have some claim on like the underlying success of the artist and I think that it helps to align incentives a lot more than the current structures that exist today can you just give us a state of the music nft space right now like I know there's like audius and Royal and like I think sound XYZ but I I really don't I'm not too deep into it could you just give us like a lay at the land and say to the industry sure I mean most of my time is spent on sound XYZ right now you have an artist that uploads a song typically anywhere from 25 to 50 copies usually at .05 eth um they have a release date and they have a time they'll do a Twitter space 30 minutes before song will drop and then people will collect those records and then once it sells out you have a

secondary Market forming on open seat you know the numbers aren't crazy but typically you're seeing anywhere from five to ten songs uploaded a week most leads are selling anywhere from 10 to 50 copies then you're seeing a couple weeks of secondary Market volume if you're lucky but I would say the wider premise here is that there's now a growing movement of like web3 native artists so these are artists that are putting out music only as music nfts they're making sure that every time they drop the song on Spotify they have music nfts with it and more of their time is spent on sort of developing their collector Community then they're like larger fanbase and there's kind of this you know separation between a fan who's going to stream my music on Spotify which is a very passive relationship and then a collector who's willing to spend a couple hundred bucks

to buy one of my music nfts and the communication and the relationship that comes with those individuals I mean it's really not too different than like the traditional art world where you have a you know you might have a big artist with a million followers on Instagram uh and they're enjoying the post and they're getting likes from those folks but really there's like a core group of 100 200 people who might actually purchase their art yeah and I mean it's kind of like a a stack you know this is kind of like the thesis for the fund is I believe that defy was so successful because of the idea of composability everyone was sharing their contracts their liquidity Etc um with music things are very fragmented right now but I think for the next generation of music you know something like audios can plug in directly with

something like sound XYZ which you can plug in directly with something like Royal and you can kind of have this full stack you know release strategy when you're putting out music and web3 it's not only about selling 25 copies on sound but you can kind of have this composable ecosystem where those assets can sit within different platforms and as a fan and a collector of those assets there's many different ways that I can use them and then optimistically there's different ways to earn you know yield and a return on those assets whether it be through royalties or secondary sales or whatever it might be to actually give all of these assets underlying value let's see um along this thread like how do you see the music like where's the music industry in the next five ten years how much adoption do you think is going to

happen um where does that place the record labels the artists um things like Spotify I'm curious what your grand thesis is for the music industry I think that all music will become free to listen and people will pay to collect it if they really love it and so I think that like streaming as an industry is probably a race to zero more or less like if you want to listen to something for free you can I think systems will be designed where you're going to be collecting Revenue based off the support of your biggest fans rather than trying to rely on like one giant subscription membership fee across the board and so I think Spotify will still be around I think in five to ten years there's no way that it's going anywhere it's the biggest Music Company in the world and that's not going to change anytime soon

but I think there's going to be a net new Marketplace for Collectibles I think there's going to be a net new Marketplace for investing in creators where you can buy governance tokens the represented creators brand and I think in aggregate we're going to start to see a lot more deeper relationships between fans and artists and what's going to come out of that is let's call it a thousand of these artist projects that are much more focused on the quality of their individual collector much more than the quantity of fans that they have and we're going to kind of see the segmentation where many artists are thriving off the back of having 500 a thousand collectors and they're not shooting to get 10 million listings on Spotify because they found a new way that allows them to you know be a lot more free creatively and just have a

very different relationship with their fans have you noticed um and I'm not like I like music I appreciate it but I am curious if like the quality of the music changes as well certainly for like influencers you know the evolution of an of an influencer is you start off with pure like quality content that gets you the first hundred thousand followers the first million followers if you will at some point that relationship that quality gets corrupted and gets far you know because the economics are so bad for these uh influencers if you will they end up doing paid sponsorships and it all it gets you see the relationship gets really influenced by the terrible

economics um I don't know if that's true in the music industry where like certain record labels are pushing certain agendas and type of like type of music and if that ever changes and what kind of music emerges in a more free flowing kind of egalitarian system yeah I mean that's exactly what's happening today every label in the world is encouraging their artists to make tick tocks that they can have a viral single that will get 100 million plays on Spotify songs are becoming shorter to where they're like a minute or two minutes in length um artists are dreading having to wake up and make 10 tick tocks in a day because it's what their label is telling them to do and I think that it's funny that we don't have a world where you can just go and release the music that you love to put

out and then have the people who love that the most collect it and not have to worry about some gimmicky strategy to try and get a viral hit which is highly unlikely in the first place all this for 400 000 based on your math yeah got it all right everyone time for a quick word from Circle and uscc as a crypto user you know the power of stable coins dollar digital currencies that transcend borders banking hours and Legacy Financial rails while circles usdc has quickly become one of the most trusted and widely used stable coins it's simple people use usdc because of its composability its stability and its reserved transparency and uscc isn't just adopted by a few of us d5dgens and Dows and nft marketplaces crypto

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would recommend you check out the recently published transparency Hub on circle.com it's a great update to circles content on usdc it outlines everything from links to their weekly Reserve reports monthly attestations blog posts that are written by their exact team that highlight how and why usdc was built so it is really recommend it just go to circle.com backslash transparency to access it now let's get back to the show got it cool let me ask you I got a buddy uh from home one of my closest high school and middle school friends uh and he does well on Spotify I think he's got probably 70 80 90 000 like followers he probably has like three or four songs with like three four five million streams

um it's interesting I was talking to him I don't think he's ever released an album because he's like the economics of albums don't make sense anymore it's like just single single single not into crypto though like I don't think he owns any like Heath like I don't think he's like got a metamask head up do you recommend to folks like that like hey you should really dabble with music nfts or like do you think you need all parts of the equation we're like you're a great independent musician you have a strong community and you're very into crypto or like someone like my friend are you like what are you doing buddy like go get your music nfts out there no I mean I think it takes a very special type of person to want to lean in here I'd say the question is less about like dabbling with nfts it's more

about what are the relationship with your biggest supporters you know a lot of people have an audience but not many many have a community and so something as simple as a collector group on telegram or a Discord server these are very new Concepts you know most artists that have discords have no clue what they're doing with them it's just like this very passive channel of relationships where they're just like [ __ ] posting with their fans basically but I think the dynamic that shifts with music nfts these collectors are eager and excited to participate in deeper conversations they're talking to you about the economics of your next drop like what's the supply you should do what's the price you should do should we do a mint pass what site should I release on who are different artists that I think that you could collaborate with and collect with and so for someone

like your friend I would say it's not necessary by any means I think yeah obviously every time you put out a song on Spotify you should be selling 25 music nfts with that that's just a no-brainer and it doesn't take away from anything but I think as far as like what's going to make it successful it's very much a time commitment over like a knowledge commitment you know just just takes time to understand the key players in the space it takes time to understand kind of the culture around it but you know as all of us can see on this podcast investing time and understanding web3 culture has dozens and dozens of different implications for it and if you are an artist that's doing anything in music I think it would be naive not to pay attention to what's happening here over the next two years yeah I'm curious

um from like return potential like is it um like does it ever work against an artist by doing music nfts you know we've seen the price of a lot of nfts collapse recently and if you would have bought a board ape at the top you're you're maybe not as happy by looking at these ugly Apes uh I'm upon I love punks but Apes just aesthetically don't do it for me and I've been just like throwing shots at the at four days I'm not a bitter man I used to own them shout out to the team like look they've done something remarkable I just I'm I like collecting things that I like not just I don't do it for investment reasons you know what I mean and maybe this is the the filter where you just like look I'm

gonna buy music nfts as a collector but it strikes me as pretty interesting that you're doing it from a font now of course it's a smaller piece of your portfolio but I'm curious like more from a fan and managing the community which is so hard in crypto you can get it right but it is also it it introduces a layer here that I am curious to get your thoughts on as can it ever backfire for an artist and should every artist be doing a music nft or or not it can definitely backfire I think there was an entire generation of artists that released music nfts on Nifty Gateway that are feeling this pain very vividly today you know they got guidance from their team to sell 15 second audio

visual clips for a couple hundred thousand dollars with no game plan on how to engage those collectors whatsoever and so the difference of what you're seeing today is that these drops are structured a lot more conservatively you know like I said it's 25 50 100 editions under 0.1 each and so you're grossing anywhere from one to ten eth on the high side and so just from like an expectation standpoint I think it's a lot harder for this to backfire on you um from sort of like should every artist be doing this no not right now at least I think it really does require a time commitment if you don't have that I don't think it's worth it for you to just go out and like willy-nilly go and release something you know I'd say like if you want to set aside three to five hours a week to

understanding what's happening here it's going to be very beneficial but if you don't have that time to invest into it I don't think that you should be using it until you have the time to do it properly yeah we talk a lot about utility um when we encrypt generally but within nfts I think a lot of projects that have done his just traditional like pfp have have tried to like shoulder a sell the narrative that they're gonna layer on utility and it's on the Comm and very few teams I think have executed on that um do we need to have utility for music nfts or is it or do you I'm curious to get your thoughts on on that and if there is utility kind of what are some of the

use cases that you you see out there I'm hoping you said no right now coop yeah it's probably my uh my least favorite word in all of web3 to be honest with you the over optimization on like road maps and like like collection because you like this stuff let the man talk I just didn't like yeah I mean I'm in the same boat I mean Santi you said that you're a crypto upon collector and I if I had to ask you what the utility of your punk is you'd probably laugh at me absolutely nothing it's collecting a piece of history and I don't expect it to do anything other than me looking at it and that's it I'm on the record of saying I'm not

gonna sell these punks yeah that's it but the exact same thing for music nfts you're collecting a song that you love and have a relationship with if it decides to have additional benefits like royalties like access like tickets to a show that's great that's not required I mean I literally have 30 different shirts downstairs in my living room from all the different music entities I've collected of people like try and add utility and I say to everyone I'm like I don't need any of this stuff you know like what I'm investing into is the potential for a relationship with the Creator and so the utility quote unquote is basically how much can you prove that you're a value-added member of this artist project and in the event that you you know are successful in that you'll probably get to meet the artist you'll probably get to meet their team you'll

probably get to be involved as a fan with this artist project much deeper than you would ever would otherwise and I think that that's the only utility you need for these things to have value over the long term this goes back to something Jason I think was saying earlier which is it feels nice to say hey look I discovered this artist when he was you know he or she was you know in a dive bar and I had a music nft and and so many people I think are like well so what and I think it's it's the digital footprint the immutable record that there's a there's a time and a place that registers the fact that you believed early in someone and and I think that is a pretty interesting relationship where of course this goes also back to like your part of

pleaserdale I think we are we really were the first ones to say we love people Pleasers work and we're going to support her and other artists like IX shells and and and so the idea is similarly here it feels pretty cool and you don't necessarily are shooting for it's a different Dynamic than you buying like I don't know some sort of erc20 token governance token it's very much different um but yeah what percentage of people the collectors out there that you talk to would you say are in that camp which is like you I don't care I just want to like support them and and I don't necessarily want anything out of it versus hey I want to return I want

access to Backstage I want a shirt I want to be on the tour whatever like what percentage of collectors how would you kind of segment the collector's Market out there right now I'd say 95 of collectors fall into the camp that I do where we're just collecting songs and supporting artists there's no need for utility um that will change at some point in time which is going to be inevitably sign of the times I think we saw this with pfps where Punk collectors didn't expect utility and then you know all these new pfvs came around and then everyone expected it so it'll flip at some point but part of the reason why I am so excited about the sector right now is there are personalities being developed entirely around collecting music nfts the mentality around it has shifted drastically where it's not about flipping it to make a return it's much

more about like supporting the culture and the movement and I think for the people that are spending the most time on this every day you get that early feeling of like what it felt like to be collecting punks earlier what it felt like to be like a Governor's participant in a D5 protocol and I think that's something that music hasn't had for a very long time and as someone that used to be a journalist and a curator that was finding all these artists 10 years ago on Soundcloud and hype machine I'm fired up about the fact that I cannot collect assets from the next emerging wave of artists and then have a digital footprint that says hey I supported this guy before he ever got back do you ever think SoundCloud kind of does something where it allows it's the people that are uploading stuff to okay

right click you know do music nfts yeah I mean I think that they just got like so deep down the monetization rabbit hole that they just completely bone the culture of it I mean um just to go kind of into what happened there you know I was a curator on Soundcloud I was making DJ mixes it was a beautiful time and then something called the repost chain came along which was basically where you could pay to have your favorite artist repost to attract all their followers and then once that got out of the bag there was a chain where you could pay to have 100 of your different favorite artists repost your song to the point where the repost just lost all of its value you couple that with the fact that you now couldn't upload anything to SoundCloud and there was a lot more you

know infringements and sort of like copyright policing and whatnot and then the culture just left the door since then it hasn't been the same and I think what's really working now for web 3 music is it's very much that same sort of feeling where it's independent artist there's you know reposts that mean a lot people collecting means a lot and I think there's a lot of synergies between what was happening in SoundCloud in 2013 and what's happening today with music nfts yeah I think that's a good point like if you look at the evolution of the Facebook wall it went from being like hey this is pretty cool like I can understand and what people in my network are doing to like I don't even open it I haven't opened it in two years because I'm afraid to even open it it's just gross um I don't know like so I feel like

SoundCloud kind of at some point it feels like it feels like nfts help curators of culture get upside 100 that's the like I don't know like not just music nfts but like santi's punks like Santi like that is a that was a good investment into culture and like folks who are able to I don't know that's why I like the road map stuff that's why I like jumped in santi's question about the road map I'm like there this isn't about the YouTube the the the actual business model of nfts suck you have a one-time drop and you have recurring Revenue like that is a bad business inherently a bad business model I feel like but like you do I don't know it does like so you can't put it like a discounted cash flow around any of these things or anything like that like you're really just uh ins

you're basically just giving appreciation to folks who are good at curating con uh curating culture yeah I mean the closest analog automate here would be CDs and vinyls you know there's still a market for vinyl but the secondary Marketplace for vinyl is extremely inefficient you know people love to buy vinyls when they have a deep relationship with music but there's not really been a stigma around like how to participate in those markets collectively and I think the exciting part about music and also the thing that gets me the most pushback is I like having a financial relationship with the music that I love the most I like putting my money around my mouth is and saying hey this song's gonna blow up this artist is going to blow up um when I'm right you're gonna buy this from me five years from now I think that's cool

and I think a lot more fans would do that if they could buy a music nft for 20 bucks and sell it for 100 a year later and use that money to go and see a show or something but the economics for that haven't existed before and frankly the tech hasn't been at a point where you can support those markets at scale but that will happen over the next couple years and I think a lot more fans are going to be excited about those opportunities yeah if you were to tell me that I could buy like the first ever music nft of levels from a beachy because I think it'd be cheap yeah there's never been a greatest DJ after Avicii I'm sorry all you guys out there You're great and beautiful I love your music but Avicii just struck at a different level and I was seeing him

early on when he was playing like in New York and some of these places if I could buy the first like 101 of levels I just came over like you know there's no price to that I feel like there's the floor is like Infinity uh on that point what's the most you've paid for a music entity um probably like 40th I'd say like some 101's on catalog right around 40th I'd say most of the golden eggs this is a mint or the second oh these are these are uh yeah mint on catalog and then secondary sale on sound so one thing I want to zoom into there first of all I'm going to co-sign the Avicii shout out because that was my favorite artist growing up um it's the first concert I ever went to levels was iconic song in my career so I love it tell us more

about where was this concert uh 2012 at the naval ride in Philadelphia I think I ended up going on to Ceviche six times over the course of the next two years and just like really making a habit of like having a relationship with that so totally agree dude I knew you were a man of culture coop thank you thank you um but yeah I would say that the one thing I want to zoom in on there is that there's very much a one of ones versus editions conversation happening right now so catalog is what I would consider the First music nft Marketplace they said like a lot of the historic works from a lot of the emerging artists that are happening today but I'd say that the additions game is really what broke out like the potential for music nfts you know the likelihood of finding a collector that's

willing to spend even one eth on a one-on-one record is small but the number of people I would be willing to buy in addition for 0.02.03 is much higher and I think in that Avicii example a one of one of levels is a good flex but a collection of a thousand editions of levels that all have you know the exact same feature set to them metadata it's really just like one versus a hundred I think that that collection is going to perform a lot better and this is really what Kobe was getting at with his whole like music nft debate like you know one of ones versus editions and whatnot in the concept of like semi-fungible tokens and sort of like what's driving secondary market and that's what I think is going to drive the vast majority of volume for music nfts too is not necessarily like

the one-of-one Super Fan it's more about creating these collections that can have a potential for secondary Market because they're all semi-fungible and it's much more accessible for people to get involved tell us more about that because I don't think a lot of people appreciate kind of this semi-fungible like new standard and and what that really means in the context of like Edition so if you can spend a minute on that for just someone that doesn't just heard it for the first time here it would be great to give an overview yeah so I think that a lot of time when we think of nfts we all think that they're extremely uniquely distinct like everyone is completely different from the next one but the concept of semi-fungibility is that every token's basically the same you know with like a various underlying traits but it's not an erc20 token which means it's one to

one like it's not a dollar you can swap it one to one but the music nft that has editions Edition number one is different than addition number two because it's one and two and so if you have these collections with 25 theoretically number one should be worth more than number 25 but they're all basically the same if you start a pool that has number seven with number 22 it's basically the same thing and so the ability to trade these assets is a lot easier and more exciting because you don't have to go into like this one is a zombie versus this one has a gold crown versus something else they're all basically the same assets and I think for the vast majority of volume that's going to come out of Music nfts a lot of these collections are going to look like that where you have a

fixed quantity of additions the only difference is the number of the Edition itself but the volume is a lot higher because you can get involved across the board in a lot easier way and you could attach certain metadata data to addition to which addition 2 might be the levels that was played on Tomorrowland in addition three might be the levels that was played on Coachella is that you can append certain metadata to that particular like 1 to 25 like I guess you can attach no there's no limit to the amount of metadata that you could attach to a particular like one two three four five six and so on yeah that's correct and so for sound they have a concept of a golden egg which says that one out of the 25 is the one of one and it's basically a different cover art and has

a golden egg trait to it and so I've been collecting a ton of golden eggs on sound you know I confidently have the most in the world right now which I'm very proud of but I would say broadly the reason why it's actually good to keep these semi-fungible is if you trade the addition of levels that was played at Coachella versus the addition of levels that was played in 2012. it's like kind of hard to wrap your head around like which of those is more valuable versus like removing any complexity on the traits like there's almost a beauty to the Simplicity of like number one is worth more than number two the golden egg is worth more than one that's not a golden egg and trying to like remove like the complication I see a lot of artists doing this thing where like they'll release a collection of like 50 songs

and every song is different everyone has a different cover art Etc and it's like yo like you kind of want to keep it digestible you want people to be able to wrap their head around it in a lot of ways the semi-fungible nature of how simple it is is actually a benefit and not a detriment yeah it's sort of like this Paradox of choice that like if you go out and scan openc there's like millions of traits to some of these pfp collections you're like okay no too much um I'm curious um so I'm gonna plug a company that I invested in um and it's relevant in this context called Hume I don't know if you're an investor but they're trying to do like this AI generated music and when I first talked to these guys I'm like this is crazy like it's like wild but then I was like the idea was so

out there and they're so passionate uh shout out to the team that I was like it's a pretty asymmetric like if this works like uh AI generated music it totally creates an entire new genre of like just like and and recently of course like there's a lot of hype and excitement around Ai and like you know AI generated art is now winning like you know you know uh Awards and all that and it's sort of this idea of like uh you know the touring does like people don't really doesn't really matter that a human created this or a machine created it as long as it's good music it's good music right it's like sort of like Oakland's razor like who cares if it's gonna make me dance at a nightclub then that's all I care about right I am curious um what you think about this sort of

category uh does it have potential is it something that you've looked at I'm curious to get your thoughts yeah I'm uh extremely bullish on projects like Hume I'm also an investor there um shout out to David and Jay I think they're doing fantastic work for people that don't know about the project the Hume Collective is a record label that creates metastars and so their first artist is Angel Baby which is a Fluff World Avatar that now has taken on a life of its own and is an artist by the name of angel baby and so they have different music nfts that they've released um these are all free mincing giveaways that have now been you know have a floor of let's call it like 0.5 to 1 each they have a Genesis pass where you can come and collect it and get early access to Future songs and artists

and I think this idea of virtual artists is fascinating to me because there's going to be a point in time when artists need to perform in multiple places in the world at once you know we almost have these like physical constraints with music when artists can only be at one place in one time but for an artist like Angel Baby they had this incredible show down at South by Southwest it was this Dome performance or was this fully animated 3D set and I think there's a very real world in which an artist is dropping a song on Friday and they have shows going on in La New York London Japan all the exact same time and the artist is performing because they're a virtual act in all those spots but you have a lot more scalability and flexibility because it's not a physical human it's a digital Persona that can be

many places at one time yeah nice I didn't know you were an investor there but I guess you're an investor in everything that's related to music not everything but you know we tried everything a little uh what's her name Lil Michaela Loma Kayla made 12 million bucks she's not real made 12 million bucks just on Instagram posts so you know there's like a I would just say like the idea that I like about these virtual artists is like you know we were talking earlier about like artist companies right and like the idea of like an artist setting up a company that represents their brand you're saying like Okay Tiesto is a person so it's very hard to incorporate him there's actually way more potential for things like Angel Baby or like little Michaela because it's not a real human and so the IP can be collectively

divided up amongst people in the event that um someone on the team dies like God forbid the product's not going to go away you know like people can carry it on there's many people that can represent the project and whatnot and so in a lot of ways I think that these ritual artists actually have like more potential than real humans because that brand can live on in perpetuity as ex as compared to a real human who has a finite lifespan and I think there's something really beautiful about that yeah I mean it's sort of like uh I mean we started the episode with me putting on marshmallow mask and marshmallow's always been like you know he doesn't like show his face and so what's to say that in one concert like it's a different person with the same mask and I mean we talk about you

laugh but we talk in crypto the idea of uh pseudonymity and um is pretty powerful and I think you know maybe I'm I don't want to stretch This Thread too much but it's pretty interesting that uh you know uh if you from the very beginning people just like you for your music and I feel like a lot of artists get a lot of pressure because they're fans like it must be really hard to be an artist like I think like everyone is like they get harassed by fans it's very overwhelming and um you know in many ways I mean it may liberate them from that pressure where you know people just like you for the music and that's it like you don't have to care about anything else it must be pretty refreshing for the artist that's what it should be you know I

think that there's a world in which people are able to just like make a song on Wednesday uh put it up for sale on Thursday make a couple thousand bucks on it and then just rinse and repeat not have to worry about like a six week release schedule and I have to worry about signing a distribution deal or a label deal going on a headline tour which for what it's worth and I'll put this on a podcast most artists lose money on their first toys like when they go on a headline tour and they play 10 cities around the US like they're losing money to do that they're just doing that to go and make fans like the upside on music is really like getting a residency in Vegas or getting like a festival play at Coachella or something like that but for the vast majority of artists like

you're paying to get exposure the vast majority of the way there I think we need better systems where the people who love you the most should be able to say like hey maybe don't go on the headline tour maybe like stay around the people that you know and love and make another project that I can listen to and I think trying to unpack that stigma around like every song needing to be this like really fine polished piece of art that was spent like six months with 10 different producers it's like yeah where do we get back to the culture of SoundCloud where someone would make a banger at midnight and then upload it at 1205 and then it would go viral by the morning and I think that culture is necessary and becoming a lot more prevalent with nfts because people don't need editorial placements to succeed

they just need 50 people who like their music and if they find that they're much more free to release whatever they want yeah I'm curious um where and I ask you this is sort of related to what I asked earlier where you saw the music going but what other what are the things around music nfts like what are some of the other avenues and monetization aspects that you see other than music nfts for artists that could leverage um kind of web3 crypto generally I think membership passes are really important so rather than collecting one specific song If I want access into wider opportunities in that artist ecosystem so let's call this discounted tickets to see the artist perform live just kind of merchandise you know early access to different nft mints and whatnot you know having this sort of

Duality between collecting one individual song and then being part of like a wider membership club you know there's kind of a bigger movement around like tokenized fan clubs that's happening right now I would say also there's a big push around sort of decentralized streaming so if you have a quick you know synopsis on that if I stream your track on Spotify today that artist isn't typically seeing a payout from that for like three to six months and so there's a big you know Focus within the industry now and how do we expedite royalty payments and create like better relationships on a stream by stream basis and then the last one that I would call out would be like events you know ticketing let's call it so basically right now there's all these ticket fees with Ticketmaster there's secondary Market scalping there's you know inefficiency of fan data and

there's a lot of projects out there that are thinking about ways to better bring that data in-house and then make better economic systems for our ticketing and that in aggregate is just like you know a glimpse that's sort of this wider webview music ecosystem that I'm really excited about investing in yeah the ticketing use case is one that is always keeps coming up right it's so inefficient and the venue is like really the scalpers and the venues like profiting a lot it's super inefficient price Discovery and if anything like you can have a way more fluid uh price Discovery if it's represented as an nft and traded freely in secondary market and and and I think you can attach certain like uh guarantees where the artist makes a certain percentage on the secondary resale and that has always always kind of been uh like tari started

off with this and there's a few I got the big like 2017 narrative like uh one of the classic 2017. I I still believe it's going to work and and I think like uh you just I mean Andre kind of did this with Lion sure where the pricing on nft the pricing on Nexus coverage was highly inefficient and then he created a secondary Market by wrapping it and create a wine sure and then all of a sudden you had a better Market where it was telling you that the cover on Nexus was widely underpriced given the risks and defy and so in a similar manner you can create a you know nft for for a lot of these concerts and also talk to us about one of the things that I I I'm not an expert in the music industry but like my understanding is

that artists have very little information about their fan base today and they could have way more information if they have nfts represented as tickets if they mint nfts to their fan base in the concert will you scan a QR code all of a sudden you know if your representative kind of fan base in New York loves board apes or punks or cool cats and everything else that they've done on chain if they're just having one wallet and that's pretty powerful data to to have if you're an artist right if you want to Market to them if you want to you know do collaborations marshmallows doing a collaboration with Coca-Cola you know as an example and so I feel like this type of data has historically been for Gatekeepers like Spotify and concert venues but in

the hands of artists I think would be a lot of good for them right yeah I mean I think that most artists wouldn't know what to do with it but I think that the premise of having on-chain social graph for everyone who's collected or touched your nfts is extremely valuable you know like you just said giving out co-ops that show is a great way to do this being able to see who's collected your last sound drop is fantastic but in the industry today if I have 10 million monthly listeners I have no clue who those people are I know like the top five cities in which people are playing my music I know when people post on Spotify wrapped at the end of every year like who five of those fans are who really love my music but I don't have email addresses I don't have like their

Instagram handle or their Twitter anything like that and I definitely don't have a way to like reach them for free you know if I want to reach all my followers on Instagram I'm literally paying to promote to reach a percentage of my audience versus web 3 where you have on-chain collector data you can just put all those people into a chat group and say hey if you have an nft just come and join this token gated chat group um you know if you've been a collector in my past work you now have presale access the song in an hour in advance you know if you hold this membership pass you can get this kind of tickets to shows you know like I think the potentials are a lot more exciting and what I've been seeing a lot more is companies like cremen doing these giveaways where you connect your wallet

to a Twitter account to a Discord and so rather than only having you know the wallet address if you choose to you can also connect you know web 2 Data like your Twitter and your Discord and so when you're starting to create these chat groups it's a lot easier to see who these people are because it's no longer just Xerox dot dot dot dot it actually has like a Twitter and a Discord too and that picture allows you to actually activate and engage those fans in a much more meaningful way cool one thing uh one thing Santi and I talk a lot about is more on the D5 side of things like you've got your makers and compounds and aves and uniswaps of the world like who will win will it be like the fintechs and like the the JP Morgan's and the the those folks will like integrate with D5

or like D5 will eventually just get like billed so quickly uh that it's impossible to stop and those folks will become the new uh like the new incumbents almost uh in in the Like Music Space how do you think this plays out like do does the ticketing like does Ticketmaster integrate with nfts or like does a nft ticketing platform overtake Ticketmaster does a uh like a catalog or sound or Royal or something like overtake a Spotify or SoundCloud even though I know they do different things or like do they kind of just live symbiotically I'd say for the next two to five years it's probably symbiotic but I think it's obvious to me that over a longer time Horizon all these new companies will win I mean I talk a lot about like innovators dilemma we see this time and

time again with history these systems that exist today are just not designed to support the new economic structures that are emerging for web3 and the reason why I'm starting this fun now is I believe over the next five to ten years in music there will be new players who have the same caliber of a Spotify and the goal of the fund is to basically find those companies and invest in them but to answer your question directly I would say yes there's going to be an entire new generation of music tech companies that are driving the space and the goal of the fund is to be able to identify and invest into those companies in the early stages do you plan on incubating artists yes I mean it's something I've been doing already behind the scenes for the last like three to six months but totally plan on doing more of it this is

basically like setting up a team around an artist project doing everything from the development to the Community Management to the governance um helping them think through like long-term strategy around tokenomics you know eventually giving them an investment from the fund to hire a team around them but yeah I mean just to kind of give context what my life looks like right now I work with dozens of artists on like their drops and kind of helping them think through what to release when to release what platform what size um you know an example of this would be Daniel Allen who's a bigger web through music artist he had his last CP come out called glass house we built a custom site for him did a collection of a thousand you know unique traits associated with it four different songs different quantities and whatnot handled all the different community outreach

helped them drop this tweet storms got them in front of a lot of different collector dials you know did a lot of stuff that feels very untraditional from like a label standpoint but on the web 3 side I think is like extremely important and the role that I want Coop Records to play is I don't really care about how many streams you get on Spotify that's not my responsibility and it's not something that frankly I could help you with if I wanted to but I do know a lot of collectors in web3 I do know a lot about governance and how to think about tokenomics and so I want to kind of bring this new piece to the table which is like the web 3 strategy behind it and eventually start getting into situations where maybe instead of investing in an artist and buying equity in their parent

company you know maybe we're signing a deal where we only have a claim on their nft sales and we're not touching their masters that they can go and sign a label deal over in Spotify but then work with Coupe records on the web3 side to make sure that their nfts are doing well and being collected by people who have you know longer time Horizons than mine that's awesome I guess one last question for me and then we'll do a rapid fire when I like get more like fun questions in here like what you listen to and stuff like that but like one of the things that um you know I I'm curious like if you think that one how big this industry gets in the next five years and what are the kind of main drivers that can derail that base case and or because

I for instance when I was investing early on a D5 uh tvl as as far as the metric goes it's not perfect it's like kind of like eyeballs and internet web too I guess uh but it's still it was like surpassed my wildest expectations of when I was like Ave went from like 1 million in deposits to like 30 billion or so like in a year and I was like okay wow like I totally like didn't size up correctly I'm curious how big do you think like what are the metrics that you're looking for like what are the kpis that you track and for like music entities to be honest I'm still developing them you know I feel like the collectible markets for music is really really new and nascent I don't think that like drawing an adult active vinyl is like perfect I almost see it as like the

combination of like vinyl paired with like half pins paired with like some form of like merchandise kind of exists in aggregate there and then on like the longer time Horizon you know investing in early stage music companies I think you make analogs to platforms like Spotify to labels like Universal Music Group to companies like Rock Nation it's sort of like you know benchmark unicorns but then I think what's new here is this concept of Creator stock markets that I talked about earlier where it's like what is the value of Drake's brand right now what is the value of like post Malone's brand right now like you can't really answer that question because it doesn't exist you know people buy catalog for hundreds of million dollars you know where they'll buy like the streaming rights and the future earnings on different songs but that's very different from like Equity exposure on

an entire artist's career and I think that question doesn't have a lot of analogs yet but it's something that I want to start asking more because I think that unlocks a lot of net new you know Market opportunity that's very difficult difficult to draw direct correlations to today just a clarification point when you say buying like equity in an artist's career this is sort of like a a sensitive topic if you will because this exists in like Stu like certain type of student loans where you buy like you finance or college and then you get like a future Revenue stream on whatever it is that they go work for and there have been yeah I guess didn't you have a token on for like these are like social tokens I guess like a few people have social tokens are these like a form of social

tokens like you buy the Kanye token or the Avicii token or the duolipa token like are we gonna see that uh like a Resurgence of social tokens combined with music nfts or or what do you mean by like having exposure to maybe it's an indirect exposure to like the artist's career by yeah music entities you're exactly right we will have Avicii tokens but they're not going to be social tokens underpinned by nothing these are going to have on-chain treasuries with cash flows and they're going to very much closely mirror a uniswap governance token except investing in a governance token you're investing in an artist token but the principles are still the same you know they raise into an equity vehicle they have a couple Venture rounds and then they tokenize and do an airdrop to all their collectors but then underneath the

hood there's kind of this on-chain system that has secondary sales wire music nfts all your membership passes all your streaming Etc and that's what you're buying is exposure to like the aggregate sum of all their income not necessarily like a fluffy brand token thing that has no underlying economics these need to be a lot closer related and that's kind of the intent with the you know deals we're assigning the artists we're working with is to think through what those markets could look like in five to ten years time yeah last question and I promise is what I wanted to ask is there's been a lot of discussion recently that I've been seeing around managing a community like story dial for instance which is trying to like reinvent kind of in some way kind of how the community interacts

with like content development and I'm curious to get your thoughts on that if like you would ever see the music The Fan artist you talk about the fan and order this relationship kind of evolving and being more intimate closer serving out some Middleman do you ever see the like the community like influence the music and be a part of the design of the record label maybe that's like the easiest probably most like you know visit like thing that you can imagine is fairly easy to pull off but like do you ever see fans like produce music co-produce music with artists and like because I feel like there's a bit of a hype on on that but I'm curious to get your thoughts if you see that to be true and if there are examples of that happening already

selectively yeah I think that virtual artist lent really well to this but the one thing I want to highlight is that when you're giving Equity to your fans that doesn't mean you're giving up creative control you know um when I buy shares in Tesla I'm not telling Elon Musk how to run the company I just have like the ability to vote Yes or No which most people probably won't do in the first place and so that's the closer analog I would take here now if I buy five dollars worth of Avicii token I'm not telling him what chords to put in his song Who to collaborate with I'm basically just saying hey I [ __ ] love this artist I have full trust that they're going to do well by what they're releasing and if they want to you know share a governance pull on where what

city what city they should go do next and I Can Vote with my five dollars worth of coins I think that's a win-win situation for everyone involved group I know I know Santi said last question I do have one more question which is in five years uh uh if some of these platforms web3 native like a web 3 native Spotify does get bigger than Spotify or if they have a substantial amount of users could you ever see like uh basically some aspect of tokenizing the entire song like where you all aspects of the song Get tokenized down to their smallest unit uh as they're listening to like on chain the royalties flow back into like in into the Dow uh and then like you are essentially buying the social token that has the on-chain cash flows flowing into that into those treasuries is that like a world that

you're excited about or does that feel kind of like a 2017 like put the supply chain on the blockchain type of thing no I mean that's happening today there's a platform called arpeggi which is tokenizing all of these different stems that exist in songs and their focus is on chain attribution so if I make a song I can link back to whose samples are in it if I sell that as an nft I can link back to what percentage of the song belong to a different artist there's great projects like Xerox splits out there that people are using where you earmark you know an address to have 10 of your primary and secondary sales on your music nfts and so yes I think all that is very likely and not only is it likely it's going to be the exact thing which wins this space because

transparency is going to be so valuable and important that instead of having closed record labels that are making hundreds of million dollars off not issuing payments because it's hard to track everything's going to be happening automatically on chain and once that happens I think it opens up an entirely new design space for artists investing Santa wanted to do a uh a rapid fire I'm gonna kick off the fire with one question go for it girlfriend I I got one question for you Coop which is uh and then I'll turn it over to Santi which is do you still live entirely on a diet of sushi and acai bowls that is correct yes can you remind everyone how tall you are I'm uh 6'5 ball is life if you want to come hoop with me at LA Fitness on Sundays I'll gladly dunk on you and um

put you right in your place are you single okay acai bowls and Sushi Jesus Christ uh okay well did you not follow this man on Instagram or your acai Bowl uh content will just be out of control no I mean I'm I'm blown away I mean I ate a lot of sushi when I was an investment banker but that was by choice like there was nothing else really but wow that's that's impressive um is that is that the key to like being this like can you get taller by eating acai bowls and Sushi just kind of asking for a friend I have not found that to be the case but I'd like to put that out there that if you only eat um sugar fish and Body Energy Club that you will grow many inches in a very short period of time there we go something funny you

said there too that I want to touch on which is um with Coop Records half of this launch was actually on Instagram too and something I found really fascinating was like in crypto we largely lived just on Twitter and like kind of see the interactions from our web 3 Community but when I post it on Instagram and did like a whole campaign around it you know dozens of different artists were sharing it and whatnot and I think a lot of what's going to win this space is actually less about technologically what's happening under the hood it's more about like the culture and the story that's forming around it and so being able to take these projects and go beyond just the web three kind of like Twitter Echo chamber that we live in and actually make an impact within you know wider Creator culture on platforms like

Instagram Tick Tock Etc you know I believe that tokenized media is the next major trend for web3 whether it's music or photography or blog posts YouTube videos tick tocks whatever it might be I think that the next wave is going to be collecting culture that we already know and love and so something I would just say is like a shout out to other project in the space is like try and find ways to get Beyond just Twitter because I think there's huge opportunities there and if you can go out and start to make waves in these larger social platforms I think it's going to make all the difference in two to three years time if you're sitting in my shoes at block Works um I know we talked about block works now like a year and a half ago or two year whenever that was uh sitting in my

shoes at blockworks what would you do on the media side of things knowing or having this thesis that all uh media will get tokenized I would meant every single form of media that you're making and or selectively just mentioning the ones that I think you believe are your best work but for example I was on mint podcast last week today view Cube records we minted the episode on Zora sold 25 editions at 0.02 is there a market for that right now probably not I think people are doing it for a novelty's sake but I think over like the next two to three years there will be markets around your top performing episodes you know like writing nfts on VR starting to become more of a thing you know people are tokenizing their blog posts they're tokenizing their music videos and so I would say if I was

in Blackboard shoes I would just go back and find whatever your top three most played episodes are and then mint 25 editions of them at .01 East and see what happens you know what's funny we uh I interviewed SPF sand banking freed before he was like really really big and it now has like I went I looked the other day it's got like 300 000 views and I still get people messaging me being like I was one of the first like thousand listeners of that episode like I see it has 300 000 views now like I never thought about a podcast episode being the same as music in that way yeah I mean I don't know if you saw like DS and Andy they put out their first podcast as an nft and it was just an open Edition and they ended up minting 2500 of them and netting like somewhere

between like 50 to 60 for the episode like even the one I did with Adam last week was like we did 25 at 0.02 that's like an eth that you can just kind of like have to distribute to guests and it almost creates this like Honeypot mentality where it's like yo if I come on the show and I like do a killer episode like not only am I getting the exposure to it but there's also like underlying economics that make it worth my time to show up and promote the episode as well Santi while you dropped uh here's what you missed we're skipping the we're skipping the rapid fire and uh we have to go figure out how to Mint our episodes as um as nfts on Zora so there we go uh Coupe um let us know what to do and we'll we'll follow the gospel

foreign one last question is uh favorite favorite artist all time uh probably Taiko Taiko is one that I keep coming back to time and time again it's like ambient electronic music it's always been very formative in like my development and something that I know I can just put on in pretty much any situation and just like lock in and get the job done if we were to do um podcast karaoke right now uh wichong and why um just for you I'd say probably marshmallow happier you know classic Banger uh you know very very very uh underrated song and how uh I think so how powerful it is but yeah it's a [ __ ] Anthem and I think that we would have a great time karaokeing that right here I agreed shout out to marshmallow

and Mo and all the great stuff that they're doing they're crushing it um well Coop thanks for coming on this has been a delight um this is a topic where I as I claim I've not ventured deep into music nft so this is more of an education for me and uh you know congrats uh I think you've you're not afraid you're not someone that is afraid to stake their ground it's early uh and I guess we'll definitely have to have you on in a year two three five to revisit everything that was set here and uh yeah it'll be really interesting to to see how this industry uh it's certainly very exciting so thank you for um Coming on if people want to learn more about what you're doing follow you you're very public so what's the best way for folks to learn what you're doing

best places on Twitter at Koopa Troopa I write a Weekly Newsletter called this week in music nfts it's free to subscribe takes five minutes or less to read so I'd highly recommend that uh to learn more about the fun kuberecords.xyz and then last thing I would say is uh Yano here give a quick shout out to Fred again so if you want to find me here in La I will be at the Fred again show on September 30th at the uh Hollywood fever so I'm excited to uh keep the train rolling and see you at some points let's go he's coming out to uh New York October 13th so if you want to join me two weeks later all right cool thanks again man a lot of this stuff I'm right I appreciate you guys if you need anything else for me let me know I know

there's also some Alpha on like other artists to pay attention to and whatnot so I'll Circle back online but um appreciate you guys taking the time to talk about it it was a blast yeah man take it easy thank you sure [Applause] [Music]