Original Title: Creators, Communities, and the Gray Space in the Middle
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Translator: La
Proofreading: StampSoda
Translation agency: DAOSquare
Interviewer: “This is just a tool, isn’t it?”
David Bowie: “No, no, this is an alien-like lifestyle.”
Bowie presciently described what the Internet will mean to the music industry in 1999. In particular, how the Internet will change the relationship between artists and audiences. At the time, he realized that humanity was on the cusp of something both exciting and terrifying: it broke the barriers between creators and their communities. Art or information is no longer one-way to the audience, but more communication. The audience comes in and adds their own interpretation, and the creator’s work is considered complete. There, the work evolved, a kind of sampling and remixing that the creator could not imagine. Bowie calls the “grey space in the middle” where creators and their communities merge: this is a powerful new field of participation, where the most interesting things will happen, Bowie predicts that everything that will happen in the 21st century will happen in this space .
In the first few years of exploring the possibility of “World Wide Web”, Bowie launched its own Internet service provider “BowieNet” in 1998. In addition to core services, it was also a platform for early fan communities. Fan platform services include a personal email address (yourname@davidbowie.com), access to Rolling Stone’s exclusive music, exclusive content, and online chat with Bowie and his friends.
In 1997, Bowie broadcasted his Earthlings concert online for the first time in Boston, and fans all over the world can get a general live experience. Although most people do not have a fast enough internet speed at this time, this is a signal…
April 2020: More than 12 million people watched the virtual concert of rapper Travis Scott in “Fortnite” (Fortnite) online.
Let’s look at some examples of what is manifesting out of the gray space in the middle in 2020.
I watched Bowie’s interview, and I couldn’t help but think about the recent NFTs and community tokens. New users interact with the web3 application for the first time, not because they want to make money continuously, but because they are seduced by beautiful art, music, NBA clips, money-making games, community ownership, and a sense of belonging. It feels like we are entering the next evolutionary stage of the online community. In a system with a self-marketing reward mechanism to reward the value you contribute, you and others are not just members in the same chat room talking about common interests, It is also a stakeholder in the community itself. The community can evolve a product with the creator. As Bowie has observed, at least the audience has become as important as the artist. Today, the users of the decentralized protocol are at least as important as the people who wrote the code, and the holders of community tokens are at least as important as the people who issued the tokens.
Let’s take a look at some examples and see how the gray space in the middle behaves in 2020.
Audience-led price discovery
Zora is a platform that allows creators to place limited edition artworks and merchandise as crypto tokens. One token can be redeemed for one unit of real-world product. What does it mean?
Placing an item on Zora will generate a cryptocurrency representing the item. If you want to give up 100 pairs of sneakers, 100 tokens will be created, and these tokens can be bought and sold on the Internet. This allows physical products to be priced based on changes in supply and demand in the open market.
The token starts from the basic price, and then the token price fluctuates as people buy and sell. This means that before you exchange the tokens back to the actual product, you have the opportunity to sell the tokens back to the market at a profit or loss, and the transaction costs belong to the original author.
When someone exchanges tokens for items in the real world, the creator earns income at the current market price. The tokens used for exchange will be destroyed and permanently removed from the market. Those who exchange tokens will receive the products sent to them.
In their introduction blog, Zora believes that this solves what they call “The Yeezy Problem (The Yeezy Problem)”. Yeezys is a sneaker jointly sold by Kanye and Adidas for $220. However, due to the short supply of these shoes, these sneakers are sold in secondary markets like StockX at 10 times the price, and the original creators did not get any profit from them. With a platform like Zora, creators can create their own market, thereby discovering its true price, and be able to get some benefits from subsequent marketing activities.
Andre Anjos, also known as RAC, is a Grammy award-winning artist, and he is also one of the most outspoken supporters of web3 when it comes to innovative sources of income for artists and their communities. He collaborated with Zora to produce his third studio album “Boy” and released a limited edition cassette in the form of TAPE, priced with a dynamic price curve. TAPE’s starting price was 20 dollars, and it quickly rose to several hundred dollars, as people flocked to participate in experiments to discover the price of music. The following is an overview of all operations.
Use blockchain to create a public limited edition commodity market.
This is just one example of creators using encryption technology to create their own markets. Please note that these restrictions are currently limited to limited-edition products with a fixed supply. In many cases, fixed pricing will make more sense. In most cases nowadays, the price of a commodity and the reduction of the artist’s income are determined by many middlemen, and the audience can only let it go. Platforms like Zora and Foundation subvert this model and answer our question: If you only manufacture a limited amount of stuff and open it to the market, how much is it worth?
This is the market price of $TAPE on Zora on October 8, 2020
$TAPE product page on Zora
This is a screenshot of a limited edition EP of PLS&TY on Foundation, another market, with redeemable tokenized goods and price curves similar to the Zora method.
$PECIAL product page on Foundation
Price curve of $PECIAL
At the same time, creators have a community of Patreon subscribers, Bandcamp supporters, Subreddit hosts, and fans around the world spreading everything they do. Of course, these stakeholders are at least as important as the company that released these records. However, they are the only ones who have no chance to get the value of their contributions to art projects. How can we do better?
Community ownership of an art project
Have you ever supported a band or artist when you first debuted? Whether it’s a YouTuber with hundreds of fans that I stumbled upon and liked it all the time, or a friend who founded a high school band and sent an EP to everyone at home in class. The gradual growth of art projects (YouTube channels, visual arts, music) by fan groups or communities will give people a sense of like-mindedness and pride. I still remember the first Smosh video I saw and embedded on the Piczo website. For a new individual creator, a platform like Patreon allows people to support a project. Some people not only contribute money, but also spend time promoting it. Except for member information and face-to-face communication with creators, they actually have no incentive to spend time unless they value the project and want to see it continue. What would happen if there was a system that allowed the community of supporters to enjoy part of the successful results of the project while rewarding the most valuable members at the same time?
The idea behind community tokens is that creators can open the ownership of the project to various people and then inspire them to improve the project together. With the support of artists and curators, we are no longer an intricate intermediary relationship. We now have the technology to experiment with more transparent, more tolerant and open mechanisms for monetary transactions and monetary profit.
Now, creators can not only directly interact with fans: the community can also express their opinions, and their opinions have more opportunities to be heard. Benefits can be designed to reward those members who contribute the most. The community can also use token ownership and access Realistic rewards exchanged to benefit. Creators go from being indifferent entities behind the veil of corporate interests to active participants in their own communities.
This is a disenchantment between the artist and the audience. Most prominent social tokens today are ERC-20 on Ethereum, which can be traded at will on the blockchain. Of course, these tokens also have a market, and some have participated in the market without participating in the community itself. But those who earn tokens through active participation invest not their money, but their time and commitment. For them, holding community/social tokens means choosing to join a community that will bring benefits to token holders and users. Token is a tool, not a financial investment. For example, a tiered membership model will require you to have X number of tokens in your wallet to obtain exclusive content for a private Discord channel, to qualify for gifts or early airdrops. Because ownership is on a verifiable chain, checking whether you are eligible is simple.
The following is from the community token RAC announced last week:
“Historically, artists have been deprived of the opportunity to obtain their own value because they have been monopolized by a large number of intermediaries, such as companies and platforms, of the ownership of their creations. For many years, I have been fascinated by encryption technology and its addition to currency I believe that it can directly create a new model of creative ownership between artists and their communities. This new paradigm is what I want to pursue with $RAC, and I want to deliver it to my existing fans And the community.”
“RAC is a token based on Ethereum. I want to give it to fans who support the RAC project and those who want to develop it with me. By rewarding my most loyal fans, we can create a community where Tokens can unlock access to various benefits and exclusive content. Encryption enables the community to capture the value they create instead of being monetized by the existing platform, and RAC is an active experiment that unlocks these basic things Secret.”
Reissue tokens allocated to RAC supporters
Now, when an artist gets a record contract, the service provided by this company actually uses the artist’s success as a bet. After making this bet, they own the project, and then take back the cost and make double the money. When a musician’s community is a record company, what would their world look like?
In other words, what happens when the fan club allows artists to complete their work ahead of time and get the financial benefits of the project? Of course, the creator must be responsible for delivering the work. But once you have established trust with the creator, if you like their work, why not own part of the work yourself? If people can buy stock in a company, why can’t they buy stock in an art project?
Until a few years ago, many such concepts remained at the theoretical stage as separate primitive concepts. Now, the web3 infrastructure is far from perfect, but we are at a stage where we can start to implement these originals as code, put them together like building blocks, and conduct a lot of experiments to see the verifiable scarcity Whether the open market volatility and data distribution can eliminate the social and economic inefficiencies left in the system.
Programmable art
Projects like Async Art are expanding the boundaries of data art ownership and allowing collectors of data art to influence the work itself. The original artist set a series of parameters, which can be changed by the owners of different “layers” of the Art NFT. So if 5 collectors own 5 different aspects of a tree picture. One collector can choose to get its mature fruits, another collector can rearrange its branches, and one can control the weather… In this sense, the entire work becomes the original creator and those who care enough about the artwork and buy part of it. Collective expression of works by collectors.
Artist Matt Kane, using algorithms and his own human input, creates unique and complex colors and patterns in his works, allowing collectors of his tokenized part to log in to the collector-only area, which contains exclusives The behind-the-scenes content and the draft work produced during the finished product process. After logging in, collectors need to use their browser encrypted wallet to connect to the website, and then the website checks whether the person has an NFT. If the person decides to sell the artwork, the next owner of the artwork will automatically gain access to the collector’s area. Interestingly, as time goes on, more and more creators use tokenized visits to design welfare parameters for “accompaniment”, and use a wholesale third-party platform to cultivate and plan fans. Intimacy of the group.
Some tokenized works displayed on Matt Kane’s website
Shared visual space
I have written about non-homogeneous tokens and NFT projects before, and these projects are now pushing their limits. Let us review the fact that NFTs are temporarily used as virtual land. Now, the ownership model is very simple. The NFT owned by a person represents a piece of land, and the person has the right to build or grant construction rights on this land, or sell this land on the open market.
What happens when members of the community can own their own virtual land?
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are collectives of individuals with a common goal, and they can decide how to allocate a set of public resources. It can make for-profit investments or provide authorization to projects with assigned tasks. It can provide services or curate data art.
Cryptovoxel land is NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Today, it is home to art galleries, impressive commissions, weekly gatherings, and even girls’ sororities. There will also be a “Metalympics” game in the community on November 5th!
What happens when a group of artists and curators gather together, buy a piece of virtual land, build a gallery, and decide what works should be displayed or what concepts can be planned for the next exhibition? Anyone can enter the URL in the browser, and then browse, discover and purchase the digital artwork NFTs on display or the digital representation of a real-world product. The tokens can be exchanged for data products or even real tangible products.
The land experiment to which the first community belongs is the ZOO token, where ZOO represents part of the ownership of the CV land representing the Bronx Zoo. ZOO is also used as a governance token, and holders can vote to decide how to deal with community funds. In a few months, the land will be auctioned, and $ZOO token holders can request a proportion of the income from the sale. This is what the zoo looks like now:
Check out the zoo scene from WIP Meetup a few weeks ago!
This topic deserves me to write a series of related articles, which I will save for later. But if you are interested in this and you also want to see the results of some recent NFTs brainstorming, you can check the ongoing Untitled Hackathon, which ends at the end of this month.
David Bowie observed that in the field of music, there was no “representative” artist in the 90s, like the Beatles in the 60s or Elvis in the 50s. In the 90s, people flocked to different genres, and music became more popular: hip-hop, decadent music, girl power… more and more about the audience and this type of culture. At the carnival, DJs accompany the audience and respond to what the audience does, instead of static one-way communication. The experience of the carnival scene is jointly created by the audience and the DJ. He deeply understands the connection between artists, fans and culture. He regards the Internet as an art place. He is very excited to see what the “new structure” between the artist and the audience will look like in this middle gray space.
We now have more means than ever to explore and expand our own differences. We can be experts on LinkedIn, foodies on Instagram, comedians on Douyin, motivational speakers on Twitter, or anonymous reverse investors on Reddit. Similarly, we can also connect with like-minded strangers and cooperate to achieve common goals. When it comes to self-expression, the Internet allows us to create something meaningful with people we may never have seen in real life: whether it is supporting a YouTube channel with millions of subscriptions, or attracting a lot of attention and A cause supported by funds. With web3, we can now not only process information, but also process value, allowing us to create and develop creative projects together and own part of the successful results of the project.
I will continue to explore the strange and wonderful things that emerge from the intersection of this idea and the wider public. If you like this and previous attempts at art, entertainment and online communities in the future, please subscribe! Who knew it would, it might trigger a conversation, and then light up something in the gray space in the middle.
Now, let’s listen to Bowie.
