Song A Day Meets The Blockchain
It was 2008, the height of the recession. I was 26 and living in Berkeley with my girlfriend. I had just been laid off from my job as a social media lackey at an SF startup. My interest in GameJew (which I had been making online for 3 years) was waning, and I felt directionless and desperate to find something new to pour myself into.
And then my friend Jessica handed me a flyer…
Fun A Day! It said: “Make one thing for every day in January!”
“Huh,” I thought, “Maybe I’ll make a song a day.”
And here I am: 9 years, 3200+ songs and 1 Guinness World Record later. I make my living making music, which still seems surreal. But it hasn’t been easy, and there are things about Song A Day I’ve long been anxious to improve.
I’m going to tell you the story of how I’ve made a living with Song A Day over the years, and why I’m excited about the potential of cryptocurrency to help me keep this project going.
SONG A DAY NOW vs. THEN
Back in the early days, living in a 3 bedroom apartment with my then-girlfriend and a roommate, I had basically nothing but time on my hands. I was responsible for no one but myself. I could (and often did) spend all day working on songs and videos.
I made my living off the occasional commission, some gigs but mostly from online video contests. I’d enter 12 video contests in 12 days and win one or two of them: That was my income for the month.
It wasn’t much, but then, I didn’t need much. I just wanted to make songs.
Fast forward to 2012 (5 years into Song A Day): I’ve moved to Brooklyn. My girlfriend and I split up (publicly). I get together with my wife and before long…
My son was born in early May of 2014 and leading up to his birth, my priorities shifted dramatically. Now that other human beings were going to be counting on me, I could no longer be all willy-nilly with how I made a living.
I started to do a lot more public speaking and performing at conferences, eventually finding a speaking agent. I started a Patreon. I formalized my commissions process. I’ve learned to find work that results from the strangest whims of my songwriting. I’ve even dipped my toe into ad sales, helping my buddy Drew with lullaby jingles on his podcast, Sleep With Me.
In other words: I hustle. At the end of the year, my income has been generated from literally 100s of different sources.
What this means for Song A Day is:
Do you see the difference between pre- and post-kids videos? I made these handy charts to drive the point home:
It all comes down to my economic situation.
Song A Day proper, meaning the one song I write and post to YouTube daily, only generates a small fraction of my overall income. In 2016, via Patreon and YouTube ad revenue, I made $10,201.84 from Song A Day.
This means that all the rest ($86,418.34 gross) of my income came from all the other sources I listed above.
Combine this with…
- the reality of having two small children and
- the fact that my income is very uneven month to month & year to year
…and you can understand why Song A Day went from being the sole focus of my day to being the thing that I often do at the very end of the day when I have a moment to myself.
Up until recently, I had mostly accepted the idea that Song A Day could never be financially sustainable in and of itself.
And then I attended a conference in rural Ontario called Fireside.
LOOKING TO THE BLOCKCHAIN
I saw Ethan Buchman speak, and something clicked for me. I’ve understood in a general way that THE BLOCKCHAIN (!!) would bring an internet-level-change, but I didn’t really know what that meant. I still don’t, really. But Buchman gave a really great explanation of what the blockchain can do, and more than that, I found his wild enthusiasm infectious.
I started to wonder if there would be a way to combine this new technology with Song A Day:
Boris Mann (no relation!), who I had met at the conference, got in touch and we started hatching a plan. The very first thing he did was show me this project called CryptoPunks by LarvaLabs. I fell in love with it instantly.
CryptoPunks is 10,000 24x24 pixel pieces of art, each one randomly generated. Through the magic of the Ethereum blockchain, you can buy, sell and trade them in their own little marketplace. Punks are exchanging hands for real money right now, as you sit here reading this. You can go buy one for yourself. For reference: The person that owns the most punks (there’s a leaderboard!) owns 989 of them which are collectively worth 315.77 ETH, the equivelant of $89,877.00 USD.
So, I can hear you asking yourself: “What do you get when you buy a punk?”
It’s kind of unclear, and that’s part of what’s so exciting about this. Basically, you get this:
It helps to imagine them as: Pokemon, trading cards, M.U.S.C.L.E men, or any collectible item. The thing that’s exciting, and new, is the blockchain. The blockchain makes it possible for one person to “own” a digital good. What does that mean? No one really knows, which is part of what I find so exciting!
We want to make something similar with Song A Day.
We’re in the beginning stages of figuring out exactly how this marketplace will work, but I’m sure you can already imagine the idea: The seed of the marketplace is the 3200+ songs I’ve already written (check out the spreadsheet). Each song has a list of properties: Location, instrument, length, produced/acoustic, topic. Some songs are “rarer” than others, for instance the one that Steve Jobs used to open a press conference. There are collections of songs, such as all the ones I’ve recorded over the years while sick:
And of course, this marketplace grows by one song every day. The finite nature of the marketplace is also interesting: There will only be new songs for as long as I’m alive.
If I live to be 100 (!!), there would be 26,762 possible songs.
My pie-in-the-sky hope for this project is that:
- It helps Song A Day become sustainable.
- It forces me to get creative in new and interesting ways. As I release each new song into the marketplace, my incentive is to make the song as “valuable” as possible. In this case, I’m imagining that value is measured in how unique the song is within the context of all the other songs. This means: Different locations, different instruments, different song structures and time signatures. It could help me push myself creatively in ways that just haven’t been feasible since the early days of Song A Day.
- We, as creatives and members of the Internet community, learn a bit more about how blockchain and ownership/props/tips fit into making art on the Internet.
We’re at the very beginning stages of Song A Day + blockchain experiment, and if you’re reading this and have thoughts on how you think we should proceed, please get in touch!
If you’re interested in joining our team (as a volunteer, for now), we’d love to chat as well! Email me at: jonathan@jonathanmann.net
