Inside the Internet's First 77-Artist "Headless Band"

Q: How did compensation work? A: The first one was Coordinape, where you're [gifting tokens] to your peers and flowing percentage points to them every two weeks [based on the value you believe they added to the project]. Also every two weeks, we had a self-selection form, and this — opposite of Coordinape — is “This is how much I deserve.” You get ... See more

Incubated by SongCamp, the project saw this decentralized cohort of 77 artists embark on a wild Web3 experiment: What would it look like to collectively create music, artwork, tokenomics, lore, a novel distribution mechanic, a website, and custom smart contracts within an intense eight-week timeframe? What would it be like to lean into chaos?

The last piece was holdback. We kept 10 percent of this pie held back, so that [a committee of 14 members from Camp Chaos, including team stewards, music guides, and core operations members] can make the decision to flow value to emergent and undervalued work that was less visible in camp and therefore did not receive [as much].

Q: How does SongCamp fit into the world of music NFTs? Is there unfulfilled promise there? A: Songcamp is a little different from other music NFT projects, as it strongly values collective creation. In a musical landscape that puts the solo artist genius on a pedestal, a whole community creating an ego-less body of work feels more interesting and n... See more

The lore — which includes an enigmatic character named Eris, the “Goddess of Discord,” and a narrative about Order, Disorder, Entropy, and Rebirth — was designed to emphasize “a new dimension of chaotic co-creation.” It’s also reflected in how they're releasing the project: Rather than release the music as an album or as individual songs, Chaos is ... See more

Q: From “Headless Brands” essay by Other Internet: “A brand lives in the minds of those who are aware of it [...] In this way, a brand operates as a consensus system, facilitating a consistent set of beliefs across people." How did this article influence how you all thought about Chaos?

A: “personalities as single points of failure,” which is appli... See more

Two and a half years and a pandemic later, we have Chaos, a group of musicians, visual artists, engineers, economists, lore masters, and more behind the internet’s first-ever "headless band."

In a 2019 essay, the applied research organization known as Other Internet introduced a conceptual primitive called "Headless Brands." The authors use the idea to describe an emerging model of blockchain-based branding: Rather than adopt the hierarchical brand logic of traditional corporations, headless brands like Bitcoin reproduce coherent brand ... See more

I don't feel a sense of unfulfilled promise with regards to NFTs at all. They are not a solution, but a canvas. I think if they are seen as a salve to musicians' problems, they will fall short every time. If they are used by artists in creative ways, more and more people will see that their true nature is that of a medium to play with. This is wher... See more

Another tactic is “default to open.” All of our channels are defaulted to open to foster greater transparency and context for all participants. Most of our decision-making comes, not from consensus, but more consent-based decision-making — looking for objections, rather than wider consensus on everything.