How to Capture Lightning in a Bottle
Spit raps, mint tracks, sell for digital cash with the Cipher app.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CIPHER
Ciphers exemplify hip hop culture —they’re impromptu gatherings of fearless street poets spitting bars with wit, style and a sharp tongue in delivery. To cipher is to flow freely, to collaborate in good spirit, to represent, to diss an opponent or fight back, to borrow, and ultimately to claim one’s voice — absolute freedom of expression.
Cipher comes from “decipher,” as in to reveal the meaning of one’s lyrics — a message to unpack often with a host of deep cultural references and observations in the heat of the moment. Traditionally ciphers are in person round robin-esque rap sessions, powered by sheer adrenaline, brain synapses firing overclocked to string together cohesive verses “off the top.”
Hip hop, like jazz is another improvisational art form that draws from a long history of disenfranchised people, artists who weren’t given the time of day by the record labels until they saw dollar signs despite hearing incredible music.
HIP-HOP TELLS A STORY OF OUR TIME
Established and aspiring artists alike have a story to tell through rap that isn’t being heard much less assigned a value. Our app, Cipher, is on a mission to change that providing an easily accessible onramp for anyone to participate in hip hop culture. Our goal is to tap into the creator economy enabling an entirely new outlet for artists to unleash their creativity.
Cipher lets you earn crypto for your flow. It’s an automagic beatmaker you spit over and sell as “collectible hip hop.” Cipher is in the business of capturing lightning in a bottle.
THE PROBLEM
Getting “discovered” is still largely a matter of chance, even for the most prolific who walk amongst us. Ivory tower-dwelling gatekeepers stand between artists and fans, failing to discern signal from noise. It’s 2021 and we’re still relying on happenstance and briefcase toting A&R reps (artist and repertoire) who often amount to Spotify click-counters looking for people who already have considerable traction. Discovering talent used to be an artform in and of itself, which is just another bygone in an industry upset by technology, unwilling or unable to adapt.
THE SOLUTION — A RECORDING STUDIO IN YOUR POCKET
Our intention is simple — Cipher empowers creatives to flow at the touch of a button, disseminate content directly to fans, and ultimately turn a profit from their craft. To some degree, the production of music has been democratized thanks to modern digital audio workstations, but these tools have a steep learning curve and take considerable time and patience to master.
Our automagic beat maker we call FlowBot5000 (Outkast anyone?) churns out millions of unique beats at the touch of a button.
Hit “generate beat” until you like what you hear and start rapping🎤
Cipher taps the wisdom of the crowd to uncover talent helping artists find their audience, level up their game and get paid in crypto now versus pennies for streams. Together, we aim to displace corrupt industry insiders that threaten to undermine the craft and exploit artists.
THE ALL OR NOTHING PARADIGM
With the democratization of music creation over the past two decades, the commonly held notion of “making it” in music is flawed. For many, making decent money from streaming is a false promise and a dynamic we don’t need to accept — it’s time we challenge the status quo. We need a new model for recorded music where smaller artists can still be heard and rewarded for their craft and raw skill — effectively creating a rapper middle class that lights a path to bigger and better things.
DIGITAL SCARCITY YET ABUNDANCE IN LISTENING
Anyone can listen to Ciphers in their entirety, however, few own them. They’re saved or “minted” to the Ethereum blockchain in limited editions creating actual digital scarcity meaning fans can not only support artists but bet on their success given that early adopters may stand a chance to profit by flipping tracks from artists coming up. Fans become the label, backing artists’ early works no matter how gritty and raw, they can see diamonds in the rough and those sales of Cipher tracks can help artists get studio time, level up in the app and upload more professionally recorded, mixed and mastered tracks.
What’s truly incredible is artists earn royalties when the token re-sells again on the secondary market versus the nickel and dime mentality of monetizing solely by streaming. This residual income made possible by smart contracts is a major “unlock” and marks a disruptive technology that could enable a generation of artists to thrive.
“WHO YOU CALLING FUNGIBLE?”
If the mention of “non-fungible tokens” or NFTs sets off jargon alarms, you’re not alone. Simply put, cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum is thought of as money — as digital cash. NFTs are digital goods, representing a whole new way to package and sell media and can represent a voucher of sorts for various products. “Non-fungible” just means not interchangeable like 2 different baseball cards. An example of something’s that’s fungible might be a dollar bill, which is interchangeable with any other dollar bill. Ya dig? No? Then check out NFT Bible by Devin Finzer at OpenSea.
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TOKENIZED
To crib on Dead Prez, It’s bigger than hip hop, this shift in media format, is a revolution — full stop —going from CDs to MP3s to NFTs. It has the potential to rebalance the power structures that underpin the industry, putting more control back into the hands of creators.
THE CRYPTO ART EXAMPLE
Here’s a prime example of NFTs in the wild — rarified digital art tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain. Garett Laugavitz, aka Kinchasa, Cipher’s founder is something of an NFT OG having personally bought pieces for $20 that he resold for thousands and recently sold one for over $20k (pardon the not-so-humble brag). According to nonfungible.com, NFTs as a whole did $338,000,000 in sales last year alone.
THE FUTURE OF MUSIC IS IN OUR HANDS
In an industry more concerned with making money than making great music, we need to go back to the basics and remember music’s transformative power to affect change and evoke human emotion — to move people.
With the advent of NFTs, we as a community can reshape the conversation and the model by which we monetize our art. It’s time to take back our rights as artists AND as listeners and leverage this concept of digital scarcity in ownership, but abundance in listening.
CIPHER EXPLAINED IN RAP
THANKS FOR READING Y’ALL!!
Join us in the Metaverse for live performances, freestyle rap sessions in Discord and more.
Join us. http://cipher.media/
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