Cherie Hu — founder of Water and Music – research pub / DAO on music + tech trends (interviewed by Ria Bhutoria)
Evolving into a DAO with governance token
Trained as classical pianist
Into math and stats
Internships in music industry with data angle
Writer for Forbes
Count one hand those who focus on music + tech
Learned about blockchain in 2015 – music credits database
Launched Patreon in 2019 – wanted long-term predictable revenue, direct connection with readers
Nice integration with Discord
Eventually moved off due to lack of flexibility / control
Streaming doesn’t work for vast majority of artists
2020 went full time on Water & Music
Discord server w/ 1600 paying members
Daily water cooler for music + tech folks
Accepted into Seedclub Accelerator
-what makes DAOs succeed is human coordination + intrinsic rewards > extrinsic
Now collaborative research model – community generated reports where all contributors are rewarded
Examples of music communities that did airdrops
-RAC
-Poolsweep / Poolside
How to measure contributions in a Discord
Messages sent, characters count, reactions received, eventually maybe sentiment analysis
Difficult problem to reconcile / aggregate members and readers across the multiple platforms
Blau best selling NFT artist – was already known in music industry
Pandemic woke up artists to unsustainable streaming model
But labels are doing just fine
can be high selling in NFTs if you have solid community strategy
1000 true fans – but even 100 very devoted fans can work
web3 gives artists more choice and flexibility
more collaborative culture
Ria: “curate to earn” as potential model
experience and activation layer in web3 is terrible right now
Maroon 5 NFT sale – charity DAO to allocate those funds – but Maroon 5 is very web2 and didn’t know how to do it right
Ria: many in web3 are independent artists
70% of NFT sales have gone to artists not signed to trad labels
major label artists haven’t really gotten involved because rights issues are complicated
mostly just artists who own all the rights to their work
the duo Disclosure is doing web3 right – direct to fans, went independent, produced track live and did NFT mint (stream to mint)