Refraction | Rethinking the Value of Music in Web3

Streaming was really revolutionary and wonderful for a lot of people, but it was really devastating for a lot of other people because everything had to have the same economic logic as pop music.

And a lot of experimental music doesn’t follow that per play valuation logic. A lot of experimental music is about the idea, and you just need access to tha... See more

Cryptomedia and digital assets aren’t exclusive to music; they’ll rearchitect all cultural industries. Many of us were taught that because something is digital, it has no value. We were conditioned by the early internet to assume that everything online is free. But digital creations do have value; the system is just set up so that we don’t see it.

This decision-making around how to price digitally scarce music and art illuminated to me that in a commodified streaming economy, most musicians don’t have the ability to set the price of their own creative output in the first place, and may be leaving money on the table in the process.

“We’ve always had this idea of music being mass-market,” says 3LAU. “It’s always been, ‘we need to get this music to the most amount of people.’ The art world has never been that way. It’s the opposite mindset: Who can afford this really expensive piece of work that I’ve spent hours and hours creating? [Hornby] is an expert at his craft, and indust... See more

Yet there’s a fundamental tension between drop culture and digital music itself. As I've written about in the past, artificial scarcity could not be more antithetical to how the streaming economy works today, because we expect digital music to be as close to free and ubiquitous as possible — i.e. the opposite of scarce.

If you take nothing else away from this article, remember this idea: In a capitalist economy, artificial scarcity creates the conditions for discovering culture’s true market value.