How a 50-Person Band Wrote a Web3 Hit With ‘Camp Chaos’ NFTs

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 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

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."

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

If we tokenize Soundcloud, and transfer its governance to a network of token holders, it will represent the first of many seismic shifts towards collective ownership, and an historic victory for the decentralized cryptocurrency space over the prevalent, advertising driven, era of the web.

By combining NFTs and social tokens, and in some cases Web2 and Web3 infrastructure at large, these DAOs early frameworks could serve as templates for other DAOs outside the music industry.

In a SoundCloud landscape teeming with off-the-wall musical experiments, it makes sense that artists are anointing themselves as genre-generators. It’s a way to compete in the attention economy, a tactic to distinguish your sound from what could otherwise be perceived as another set of weird noises in a sea of bizarre bleeps and bloops.