McFucklings, The Pond, and how things are about to get a little quackers.

GQ Ducks, CP here — We’re back! Although we never really left, we’ve just been busy. Very busy.

While the wider crypto market has been doing its thing, the McFucklings team have been working away, building a future for the project and our holders. The work we have done has led to some changes that we’ll make moving forwards.

Since mint, we held our first official McFucklings writing camp in Lisbon, in November 2022, where we were able to meet a whole host of early adopters, sit down and spend 2 days creating together in the studio. Discussing the project, writing songs, and realising that there were a whole bunch of people in the Web3 space not too dissimilar to ourselves. We all share a common frustration with the existing music industry model and agreed that change needs to come about, whether that was driven by a flock of pixelated ducks, or not.

We can now announce to you, the newly formed record label and collective spearheaded by McFucklings as ‘The Pond.’ Fuck-A-Duck records was a great idea, but we need to think long-term, and The Pond fits with the energy we wish to carry forward.

To kick-start The Pond, we are proud to announce our first signing ‘Eazy Queen.’ A hard-hitting 4-piece band based in London, UK, ready to take the existing Web2 and arising Web3 world by storm. Working closely with The Pond, Eazy Queen have been hibernating in the studio and now have an array of material ready to go, launching with ours and the band’s first-ever single ‘Wasting My Time’ on Friday 27th January 2023. We even had some McFucklings holders come down to the studio for the day to watch the band record.

You can follow the band here: https://www.instagram.com/eazyqueenband/

To celebrate this, we have decided to make McFucklings mints FREE from this point onwards. The current contract’s mint function has been paused and will be made active again soon.

We will shortly be posting a link where you can pre-save our first release on Spotify, heightening the band’s chances of getting playlisted, and exposing our artist to a whole new world of listeners. Once we can see that Wasting My Time has been pre-saved 500 times, those that have done so will be allowed to mint the remaining McFucklings NFTs for free.

So why have we done this? Well to us, the writing camp proved that community is EVERYTHING, what’s the point of shouting and trying to make a change, if there’s nobody else there to rally around your point of view and help develop your ideas? We want to build Web3’s biggest pool of like-minded creators, a Pond if you will. Hopefully, breaking down this cost barrier will make it accessible to as many of you as possible. If you want to be part of The Pond, you need to own a McFuckling.

To our early supporters: we wholeheartedly thank you for your contribution — because of you, we were able to host our first writing camp, sign our first act, and pay for the necessary studio time to support this venture. Initial minters were offered $1500 of audio software as a thank you for supporting our vision early on (10x value of initial mint cost.) If you didn’t claim this, for whatever reason, please DM me (@itscp666) on Twitter and I will personally see to it that you are still able to make use of this offer. We will also be going the extra mile to ensure that our early adopters know that their contribution was not taken for granted, with additional perks and features as McFucklings and The Pond progresses.

So how will we fund things moving forwards? Well, we still need funds, but we are confident that with music coming out through The Pond and potentially through secondary market sales, revenue will be there to continue signing artists, continue hosting writing camps, and through a collective push, lead to a change of how traditional record deals are structured.

As a reminder for those that may have forgotten or are just joining us for the first time, here is how our deals are structured:

• The Pond covers the creation of any signees material (studio time, distribution, etc.) in the form of a grant. Record labels won’t let artists see a penny of income until this is paid back, with a horrific amount of interest on top. We believe artists should be earning the moment their work starts generating an income, this shouldn’t be gatekept. As a label, we are the ones taking a risk on the artist, and therefore we only sign those that we wholeheartedly believe could achieve success. Why should an artist pay for our risk?
• Income splits are 80% to the artist, 20% to The Pond. You’d be lucky to be getting anywhere near 20% as an artist in a traditional setting.
• The Pond holds onto the master recording rights for 5 years and encourages the artist to keep 100% of their publishing rights. Nearly all labels will keep the master rights in perpetuity, meaning that the artist will NEVER hold the original rights to their recording. Once those 5 years are up, The Pond will hand back over the rights or renegotiate if the artist is still happy with the existing deal. We would prefer a shorter term but some territories can take this long to pay out revenue (and you thought ETH txns took a while?!)

As someone that has been working in this industry for pushing 10 years now, I have seen extremely promising artists fail due to no fault of their own, but simply a concoction of signing a bad record deal, being dropped, and then consequently blacklisted in the industry. Artists should be able to create freely and feel as if they have a label that has their backs, not just parading them around as a way to profit.

And what better way to create knowing you have 1337 pixelated ducks ready to collaborate, encourage and support your vision, backed by an honest and fair record label?

Quack soon,

CP 🦆