wavWRLD's Weekly Wavs 🌊🌐🎶 Issue #27
Your Guide to the Best Emerging Artists & Songs in Music x New Internet
What up y’all. It’s legitimately wild out there.
We’re going to assume if you made it so far as to stumble upon this newsletter you are firmly aware of the situation surrounding Silicon Valley Bank and you have a relative grasp on the impact that its collapse has had on crypto markets over the past week. I want to zoom out and consider its potential impact on the music NFT space over the next couple of months.
But before we do that, I want to add another dynamic to the mix: the continued atrophy of capital from the web3 music space. Do not shoot the messenger here because I’m a gemini and flighty, so you will miss—we are in a down market. Nobody has any money and artists are left fighting for scraps.
Which is also why we will not be speaking on the Reveel x Decent collaboration contest, which was wildly successful at driving revenue for the artists that participated, congratulations to the winners. The issues we face as a community are systematic and largely out of our control—we do ourselves a disservice by pointing fingers at each other. Even Coop agrees that the real money isn’t being made right now … We’re beating ourselves up over scraps.
That’s where this SVB crap comes back into play: it’s not just crypto markets that are uncertain right now, it’s the entire US economy that’s teetering. It’s just about as uncertain of a financial time as we’ve had in most of our lifetimes, and for most people uncertain = scary. Scared money don’t make no money, and we’re forecasted for a lot of uncertainty through the rest of 2023.
Consistency is the name of the game, especially when it comes to your cash flow (nfa). We were lulled to NFTs with visions of Shangri-La but found ourselves in the desert with no water in sight. It takes tenacity to make it through these ups and downs, just don’t panic and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
wavNEWS 📰
dit-dit-dit-d dit-dit-dit Our breaking news this week is that Meta has wound down NFT integrations on Facebook and Instagram. Steph Guerrero shared some great thoughts, and in my mind this news points to a larger question: Why can’t these enormous global brands figure out how to make blockchain technology work for them?
On the one hand, we’ve all faced challenges onboarding folks even just because our language is so foreign. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to try to message NFTs to Instagram’s user base—a user base they spent nearly a year disincentivizing away from anything about NFTs.
No, to me it belies how narrowly folks are still thinking about the use cases for this technology. Consider the data applications of Lens via Dune and Bello. On web2 platforms, that data is being monetized through advertising revenue and other means. They’ve got no reason to want it on-chain, they want it firmly in their control so they can package it up for sale. So they turn their attention to the most basic of use cases—house a static image. It boggles the mind what opportunities will arise when the biggest companies in the world start truly embracing web3.
If you’re an artist hoping to give your collectors an easier way to plan around your drops, look no further than Oohlala’s new Drop Calendar. Select the platform you’re dropping on, fill in the details, and voila: you’re now listed among the upcoming projects for collectors to keep an eye on.
This comes across to me as a super helpful tool, especially off the rip. It would be great to get to a point where this list can be filtered by genre, drop platform, community and more—for now, there aren’t a ton of artists that have filled out their drop information, so you have a first mover advantage as well. Just a thought!
Sweetman is on a roll, my goodness. THE music nft engineer (see his bio) has shipped potentially the most useful tool for independent NFT releases: a drop page creator. It’s a little technical off the rip, but looks great once finished.
Anything you can do I can do better. Audius follows Spotify’s lead in implementing token-gated playlists. Web2 and 3 keep doing this cute little dance around each other but are still playing hard to get. Hmmph.
wavLIST 🎶
Fresh wavs & what we’re listening to this week from the WRLD:
KarmaVioletta’s snippet & alternate album cover of their organic house hit “Eastern Lands” on Beats x Lens
Open edition for 2 wMATIC
Forrest Mortifee’s beautiful demo “I’m an Angel” on Zora
Open edition for FREE
wavALPHA 👀
Upcoming drops & projects that you need to know about:
Tomorrow, March 17th at 10am EST, our very own wavLETTER writer Fred Riko is set to release his debut single “Julia” off of his upcoming debut album!! Join the drop party!
Open edition for .001 wMATIC
Tomorrow, March 17th at 11am EST, SAGEALINA drops her Sound genesis of song “ENEMIES,” which represents the ongoing abuse and suffering that women endure all over the world. The lyrics from the song were inspired from a dream she had, and chose to process by making music.
50 editions at 0.05 Ξ
On Wednesday, March 22nd at 4pm EST, ALYSS releases her Sound genesis of song “The Talking Palm Tree,” which is the first ever track she fully self-produced, essentially the official doula for the birth of ALYSS, and the first offering from her upcoming Answers EP.
Open edition for 0.02 Ξ
wavTIPs 💡
On the one end, Spotify exploring integrations with on-chain wallets to TikTok’s new integration with Audius. On the other hand, the news mentioned surrounding Meta and Instagram. Something about web3 still really has yet to land.
Web2 is still trying to figure out how to leverage this new technology. Companies are hiring “web3 experts” to build their decentralized arms, and yet none of them seem to be tapped into the cultural movements actually driving the crypto and NFT spaces forward.
It becomes our superpower as participants in this culture: companies can hire whoever they want, but the real magic is what’s happening in Twitter spaces and at conferences like ETHDenver and SXSW as we speak. Even as the going gets more and more tough, creators are driving this whole cultural machine—and that’s what these companies want to tap into.
No matter how much money comes into the space, make sure to hang on to the 🌊🌊🌊. That’s the real differentiator and what makes this whole race worth running.
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Thanks to our contributing writer Fred•Riko & our editor-in-chief & curator Violetta!
It’s all about the wavs we make with friends along the way.
-wavWRLD 🌊🌐🌱
Disclosure: Writer Fred Riko & Curator/ Editor Violetta Hyland may occasionally own the NFTs of certain artists mentioned & certain platforms/ protocols highlighted. Their wallet holdings & activity can be viewed openly on the blockchain. We prioritize featuring wavWRLD members & contributors.