The Vision for RCRDSHP
Working musicians deserve to earn a living wage
We think what we’re doing at RCRDSHP with NFT-backed music collectibles has a good chance of improving the whole music industry, or at least moving it in the direction of being more favorable to working artists. What we envision is a world in which making music is profitable enough to offer working artists (and not only a handful of superstars) a living wage from just making music, without having to tour extensively or resort to side hustles.
Is music valuable or not?
In case you haven’t heard us say it before, we think that music is valuable. It’s one of our main taglines, plastered all over our website and social media channels. We even tried to trademark it!
There’s just one problem.
At this moment in history, music is not valuable, not music recordings anyway. Rampant piracy did its part to decimate the value of music files starting with Napster twenty years ago, and the destruction is still going strong today. When you look at the music consumption habits of teenagers, you’ll notice that most of them just stream music on YouTube even if they have other higher-quality, more convenient channels available.
Sure, some honorable DJs and dedicated music fans still pay to add high-quality music files to their personal collections. But music downloads are such a dying business that even industry leader Beatport reinvented itself as a digital streaming platform in 2021.
Creating good music should always be valuable
So what do we mean at RCRDSHP when we say “music is valuable”? We mean that creating music is valuable and should be treated as such. If you’re good at it, you should have options beyond treating the creation of music as an expensive hobby or loss-leader for other activities.
NFT technology enables RCRDSHP to facilitate the creation of limited edition digital music collectibles that can be prized by fans. But which fans are we talking about? All of them?
The 1,000 True Fans Theory postulated by Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine states that an artist only needs 1,000 true fans to maintain a “fruitful, if unspectacular” career. Those true fans are sometimes called superfans, people who will buy anything and everything associated with their favored artist, follow them around the internet, and defend them tooth and nail. We think those superfans will even buy expensive, limited-edition, NFT-backed digital collectibles on platforms such as RCRDSHP.
A platform for fan engagement
Most artists would kill for 1,000 superfans, but it’s never been an easy task to achieve. In addition to creating great music, artists need to be personable and relatable and build a passionate online community around their work. And once they have at least a few superfans, it takes hard, ongoing work to keep them engaged and excited.
Creating music is valuable and should be treated as such.
RCRDSHP is designed and built by artists, producers, and long-time DJs, like myself. Our vision from the start has been to craft a platform that offers everything needed for our fellow artists to foster and engage a community of superfans willing to buy music at a premium price compared to legacy download portals. But it’s more than that.
While cash from superfans is cool, what’s cooler is transcending basic consumer behaviors and cultivating a realm where artists can turn all of their fans, not just superfans, into stakeholders and patrons. That includes fans that have disposable income and those that do not, keeping in mind that the latter camp includes billions of music fans around the world.
Getting most of an artist’s fans interested in buying (or holding) at least one of their NFT-backed digital collectibles as proof of their fandom would be a total game changer. To get there, we’re going to have to do better than trusting in a basic number go up mentality that is prevalent in almost all NFT projects.
Let’s consider motivations
When building any technical solution for consumers, it’s critically important to consider their motivations. Considering our competitive landscape at RCRDSHP, we think what almost all music NFT projects are missing has to do with pretty simple basics of human psychology and motivations.
The motivations that people feel for doing the things that they do can be roughly divided into two categories: extrinsic (desire for material gain) and intrinsic (personal gratification). Since we’re only talking about things that are done voluntarily, we’ll set aside other kinds of motivations such as hunger, fear, or obligation.
Let’s consider the motivations for using RCRDSHP that might be felt by artists and their fans, to see if it can help us refine our vision.
Why do artists create music?
There are many reasons, but if we break them down into a matter of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivations, we may find that the extrinsic motivators include making a living, getting rich, and achieving greater influence and social status along with the rewards that come along with that (e.g. fame).
On the other hand, the intrinsic motivations felt by an artist may include getting better at their craft, self-realization, impact for social change, or even the ego boost that comes from having a devoted fan following. There’s always the sheer enjoyment of being creative, too, a factor that doesn’t even require an audience or following at all!
While all the motivational factors mentioned above could come into play for artists on RCRDSHP, our vision is focused on satisfying two fundamental artist motivations: Making a living (extrinsic reward) and enjoying a devoted fan following (intrinsic reward). We know that our emphasis on those particular motivations works, because we have successfully recruited hundreds of artists so far and the list keeps growing every week. They’re practically knocking down the doors at the moment.
But what about music fans’ motivation for participating in the systems that we’re building here? Why would they be interested in NFT-backed music? The value proposition for fans is where things tend to get tricky.
Why do music fans do their thing?
The truth is that music fans enjoy music for purely intrinsic reasons, not because they’re getting some sort of material gain. Fundamentally, it feels good to listen to music you enjoy, especially with friends. Music satifies the soul in ways that few other things in life can, probably because it’s such a deep-rooted phenomenon. As a species, we’ve probably been making music and joyfully dancing around bonfires since the times our ancestors were closer to apes than modern-day humans.
A blunt way of saying it is that you can’t increase the intensity of a music fan’s fandom with bribes — a fact that makes us sincerely puzzled when we observe how most other music NFT projects try to motivate music fans to use their products.
Whether enjoying music as entertainment or specific reasons (e.g. meditating, exercising, setting the mood for a dinner party, etc.) none of the reasons that you would pick one song over another include the desire to make a tidy profit by flipping it in a secondary market. Nor should it, not as far as we’re concerned.
Now we do admit that there are some lucky people in the world who are not just music fans, but also do music-related activities in exchange for money as their job — a category that includes everything from club owners to DJs to people who run record labels and artists themselves.
When considering these lucky folks as factors in our vision, it’s necessary to remember that extrinsic motivations have a tendency of crowding out and depressing intrinsic motivations. Meaning that the more money you make with fun jobs, the less you tend to enjoy them and the more you begin to think of them as work.
Work can sometimes be fun, sure. But it’s still work, not a game.
But what about play-to-earn games?
Video games involve NFTs and feature a combination of work and play are commonly referred to as play-to-earn games. We think that if we were to emulate certain features of those kinds of games, it could prove interesting to one of our larger RCRDSHP demographics: players that love music but also care about making money and don’t mind doing a bit of grinding.
In the world of play-to-earn, video games are seen as jobs — grinding, difficult slogs that yield some form of reward for players. By “participating”, it’s believed that players should be able to earn some sort of compensation — forming a transactional relationship with developers that bears constant fruit. In this way, players would come to ‘own’ part of the game, and have their own personal stake in it. - Leah Williams
The argument against play-to-earn games is that once your motivation for doing something is to make a financial return, the fun is gone. While there’s a measure of truth to that, we’re not so sure the rule is universal. Innumerable individuals outside of the crypto world that engage in play-to-earn games have done so successfully for decades: professional athletes and gamblers. There are even expert gamers that make a living by competing in video game tournaments. It’s their job, but just because there’s money involved does not completely remove the game element or the enjoyment that the players appear to experience.
Does our vision include the possibility of grinding and making good money (whatever that means) in the RCRDSHP game? Perhaps, but as you read this post and the three additional ones that will follow it during the rest of March 2022, please remember that our main goal is to build the future of how music fandom is enjoyed. So whatever game elements we add to RCRDSHP should be designed to optimize artist-fan engagement first, and player profit second.
With that said, it’s also important to point out that our vision for how players could achieve a profit is not so much related to grinding, as in a typical play-to-earn game, and much more inspired by what’s going on in Web3 circles.
Taking inspiration from Web3
Web3 refers to the next version of the internet, focused on decentralization and user ownership. We find web3 concepts such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) interesting from the perspective of letting players go deep into the RCRDSHP game. We also think they’re either super early or present insurmountable challenges when it comes to adoption by mainstream audiences.
So DAOs are not part of our immediate vision. But if we take a step back and consider what has happened throughout the decades of recorded music history, it turns out that there are models to draw from related to enterprising music fans. They tend to pool effort and material resources into promoting music that they love by starting independent record labels! Or they band together to host concerts and parties as event promoters!
One of the ways that RCRDSHP can make music creation valuable for fans and not just artists is to let players participate in games that feel like running record labels and promoting events, with enough depth and ownership that expert players can play those games profitably.
Can RCRDSHP make music creation valuable for players by delivering features that allow them to participate in business-like processes such as running record labels and promoting events within the game? We’re envisioning features that start out light and fun, but with enough depth and ownership that if you get good you can use that expertise to generate an income.
Contemplating what those games might look like is actually a big part of what led me to create RCRDSHP in the first place. Obviously NBA Top Shot was the primary influence for the project as I have said so many times, but it’s not the only NFT project that I studied. I was also fascinated by Axie Infinity. And although we didn’t have the resources to build “RCRDSHP the game” right from the start, everyone on the team and many of the earliest adopters know that elements of a music industry or nightlife role-playing game were always on my mind. It’s why we included game elements such as artifacts from the first drop, even though many of those artifacts didn’t have readily available utility.
Different roles and motivations for different players
Right now there’s only one player role in the RCRDSHP game and it’s not well-defined, other than being considered a collector. As the game evolves, we envision continuously adding features allowing players (including artists themselves) to find a role best suiting their motivations and goals, whether they are intrinsic or extrinsic.
So is RCRDSHP becoming a play-to-earn game?
No, not really. While it’s tempting to barrel down the play-to-earn road given the ridiculously large valuations given to those companies by VCs, we don’t think the model works for music. Enjoyment of music and obsessing over ones’ favorite artists is a perfect example of an intrinsic activity, something that is done purely for the gratification of doing it alone or with friends.
Armed with this knowledge, our goal is to make RCRDSHP a platform where the emphasis is placed on the satisfaction of supporting artists who otherwise make very little money on music recordings, not the enjoyment of making money. The intrinsic motivations that artists and fans feel when interacting and helping each other should be the backbone of the most rewarding activities on RCRDSHP. Game elements that lead to extrinsic rewards for players are explicitly called out to artists and fans alike as our second priority.
Our goal is to make RCRDSHP a platform where the emphasis is placed on the enjoyment of music.
Thanks for reading Part 1 of this series, which will culminate in a major announcement regarding RCRDSHP’s adoption of SOUND token and stakeholder rewards. Part 2 will be published next week.
