Big Brother and the Hodling Company

Variability and customization are essential for capturing nuance and niche, and massive platforms don’t do that. And today, through web3 and other new internet technology and thought leadership, we have an opportunity to transform our structures.

The idea of anti-scale was conceived as a challenge to think about how we can grow and cultivate music communities in ways that work with the core tenets of community, which rely on transparent, non-extractive, intimate relationships – which aren’t part of the broad social and streaming platforms we know today.

Alongside my co–host Neil Berkeley, co-founder of Decential, I was joined by Lani Trock, who helped build out Leaving Records-grown Genre DAO, Black Dave, an artist who has always been at the vanguard of community building in web3, Maarten Walraven, co-captain of Wild Awake and MusicX, and Mike Sugarman, the conceiver of Freq, a platform tuned for music community that leverages something he calls very small online platforms.

It was a really fantastic, insightful, and kind conversation about healthier community building in music.

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Nick Merich is a seasoned entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in launching, building, and growing businesses in the music, media, and tech space. He cut his teeth in music by building and growing Songlink, a smart link tool for artists, and stayed in the industry because of the artist relationships he built along the way. He then helped expand and deepen the community surrounding music NFT platform, Mint Songs, before taking over growth at Arpeggi Labs, which offers a suite of web3-powered creation tools. 

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Hu is an award-winning journalist and the founder of Water & Music, a collaborative research community that focuses on the intersection of music and tech. Cherie is one of those rare humans – extremely intelligent, curious about the world, strong ethical foundation, and very low ego.

We chatted about all kinds of: playing piano, almost taking the conservatory route, thinking laterally, on-chain music, AI. And the catchphrase for the whole thing: I’ve never seen eggrolls go so hard.

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Garrett Hughes is a music and technology lover from Richmond, Virginia. His loves have collided a few times, most notably when he co-founded the music NFT platform Mint Songs, which thrived until it didn’t, ultimately sunsetting, until it rose from the ashes earlier this year, when the tech was purchased by Napster.

Today Hughes is an engineer at Dune Analytics, but he’s still an advisor at Napster and stays close to music. We chatted about his journey, covering everything from love to on-chain music trends to the great outdoors.

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Stephen Laddin is an LA-based, upstate New York-born writer and producer who focuses on creating content that normalizes underrepresented voices. He's written and produced a number of short films, and he – like me – derives great joy in interviewing artists and creators. He writes for spots like High Times and AskMen, and he hosts the "Lights Camera Crypto" podcast, which is also beneath the DeCential umbrella. We chatted about his journey, from baseball card collecting to web3 to finding inspiration in the voices of his interviewees. 

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Xcelencia is a Puerto Rican-born, Florida-based artist has been one of the best at marrying web2 and web3 opportunities – or rather, ignoring the strange tendency many have to keep them separate. His new album 'El Nino Estrella,' for instance, uses dynamic non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) to creatively transform their appearance via external triggers, like when a track gets to 100,000 Spotify streams. 

We chatted about the album, crate-digging, mindmaps, and the supreme importance of imagination. 

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Vaughn McKenzie-Landell is the founder of Butter, a protocol for DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) Governance. In the past, he was an aspiring singer who ultimately chose a career in technology, eventually merging the two to focus on how the latter can be used to disrupt the walled garden surrounding the former. He built JAAK and is now rallying around a new project called Juice. We chatted about these endeavors, learning Japanese, how to better capture value in music, and a great many other things.

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Matthew Sanders, aka M. Shadows, is the lead singer of the band Avenged Sevenfold. Sanders has become one of on-chain music’s most outspoken champions, and I wrote a piece about the ways in which he and Avenged Sevenfold are using web3 to cultivate their community, based on a previous conversation we had — which you can read on Decential’s website — but for this conversation we dived into other things: the human voice, psychedelics and the limits of speech, the origins of Avenged Sevenfold and writing a record about the positivity of meaningless, and embracing the beauty of our impermanence to find joy in the short time we have on this earth.

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Simon de la Rouviere is a builder, musician and creator of all sorts. He co-designed the ERC20 Ethereum standard, invented bonding curves, and is now working to produce new science fiction using some web3 mechanics through his business, Untitled Frontier. In the past he also spent some time in the music industry, pioneering the first smart contract royalty payments with Imogen Heap at Ujo Music, and he introduced one of the first music non-fungible token (or NFT) collectibles in 2017 with the artist RAC.

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The North London native infuses his love of films, stories, and human experiences into his music, borrowing from UK dance music, hip-hop, and soul. His musical ethos is oriented around the concept of finding beauty in imperfection, and he embraces new technology to help share it, which includes selling 21 non-fungible token (or NFT) collections, and co-founding the collective Wild Awake, a music project focused on building scenes that uses web3 technology.

We talked about the importance of creating scenes, reorienting our mindset around music’s inherent value – that is, it makes sense for it to cost money – and growing a project by speaking with people, one by one, and gathering around a shared love for music.

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