The state of music DAOs - Water & Music

For instance, Jonathan Mann’s SongADAO has multiple membership levels in their overarching community, with a clear delineation between passive financial supporters and active DAO contributors.

LACK OF TECHNOLOGY

For all the narrative around the technological advancements made possible by blockchain technology, many music DAOs are not utilizing them yet. The large majority of DAOs we studied, for instance, still use Discord to manage overall member communication and facilitate easy day-to-day interactions. Most also use the Google suite of tools to collabor... See more

The emphasis of decentralized power across music DAOs leans towards higher-level decisions around treasury allocation and artist support but rarely touches creative choices.

The main takeaway: If you decide an artist or team is talented and inspiring, you should empower them to make their art — and don’t take control away. This focus on empowerment differs both from the traditional label model of top-down commercialization in creative processes (e.g. writing songs “fit” for Spotify playlists) and from the trustless gov... See more

DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Any owners of the genesis Song A Day NFTs can access the DAO’s private Discord server and participate in non-binding Snapshot votes but need to verify their identity with Bright ID to gain on-chain voting power concerning directing treasury funds. Another way to become a core contributor to the DAO is to participate as a “builder” and help grow the... See more

The extent to which these tools communicate with each other automatically depends on the integration capabilities of the tools themselves and the stage of a given music DAO development. For instance, some DAOs in our sample do not yet have tokens and, therefore, cannot use Snapshot or Collab.Land. The Good Karma Records team also pointed out that i... See more

When asked about treasury management tools, only a small handful of our respondents mentioned using Gnosis Safe multisig wallets, which allow DAOs to support treasury security by requiring multiple signers for treasury transactions and are common amongst investment DAOs. Only two DAOs in our study have used Snapshot to carry out community votes eff... See more