The Future of Music

AJ Washington is the founder of Phlote, the web3-oriented experimental record label, music platform, and media company of which I have become a core member over the past 6 months. I met AJ on the podcast in October, and we used this episode to give a bunch of updates on what’s changed at Phlote since then and what we have coming up. We also dive into AJs thoughts on artist business models and how...

Domino is an artist of many forms. He’s a writer, rapper, poet, producer, photographer, visual artist, director, and more, and he’s been a web3 trailblazer for over 2 years. He became a fast friend when I met him at ETH Denver this year, and we had an awesome conversation about his background, music career, upcoming projects, web3 philosophy, and more! I hope you learn something new from today’s e...

Super excited to announce the collaborative pay-to-collect release of Episode 26 with Weinbagz on Lens Protocol! All collectors Lenstube or Riff App, will be entered in a raffle for a FREE mint of his upcoming project Playerz Cardz (priced at 0.03 ETH), AND they will be able to access a podcast-collectors-only page on Weinbagz's Bonfire site for access to listen to and download an exclusive song t...

Ahmed Nihmale is the co-founder of Kyd Labs, a blockchain-integrated ticketing platform. Before starting Kyd, Ahmed spent most of his career in the ticketing and live events industries working for companies like Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and Vivid Seats. With the founding of KYD Labs, which stands for "Keep Your Distribution," Ahmed aims to address the existing challenges and inefficiencies withi...

Dadabots is the AI Music project of CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski. Quoting their own words from their website, Dadabots is a cross between a band, a hackathon team, and an ephemeral research lab. We're musicians seduced by math. We do the science, we engineer the software, we make the music. All in one project. Don't need nobody else. Except we do, because we're standing on the shoulders of giants, an...

Yung Spielburg is a Grammy award-winning music producer, a songwriter, the head of collaborative research at Water and Music, and among other things, a friend. He was a huge reason I got so interested in water and music in the first place and really helped me understand what their membership is all about and where their best resources are. We’ve been trying to find some time for this podcast for l...

Stephanie Guerrero is a music industry professional with over 10 years of experience in shaping industry standards and best practices at major record labels and entertainment companies. She is an expert in content development, digital promotion, and campaign strategy for community building and engagement with emerging technologies. With previous experience at Sony and UMG, Steph is now bridging th...

Karma and Violetta are artists, partners, world builders, and more. They are both independent musicians who make music together and individually. And they’ve been a core part of the broader web3 music scene for a while. Together, they started the wavWRLD community, a music community focused on creating intimate experiences for artists to connect with the most engaged fans. I met Karma and Violetta...

Cherie Hu is the founder of Water and Music, a music and tech research organization. Over the last couple years, along with their numerous other weekly and monthly articles and newsletters, they’ve been putting out massive collaborative research projects on the most exciting developments in music and technology, including web3, the metaverse, and AI. I bought a lifetime membership pass to Water an...

This episode is a conversation with Chad Hillard, the founder of Dreams Never Die, and former team member Cole Ryan. Chad started the popular music blog Hilly Dilly that thrived in the blog era, discovering artists like Billie Eilish, Lorde, Tom Misch, and many others very early on in their careers, and the Dreams Never Die record label was formed in 2019 so they could start taking real bets on th...

Mavi Taylor is an independent artist based in Richmond who describes her music as soul-pop. She's active in web three and has been minting music NFTs since last year. We met at Art Basel in Miami and became fast friends, and it was a pleasure to host her for her first podcast conversation. We talked about her musical background, how she got into web three, what tools she uses for writing and produ...

Malcolm Levy is the founder of Refraction DAO, a global community of music, art, and culture enthusiasts who produce festivals and ongoing events, organize NFTs projects, and create written, visual, and audio content around art, culture, and music today. Previously, Malcolm started his own music and tech festival, called New Forms, in the early 2000s after years of growing up in the east coast and...

Daniel Allan is an independent artist and one of the biggest names in the game. He’s had some historic NFT sales including sell outs of 1000 editions for his Glass House project and 2500 editions for his Criteria EP with Reo Cragun. He is also fresh off his first-of-its-kind $1 million dollar artist seed round capital raise led by Coop Records and Palm Tree Crew Crypto. In this episode we dive int...

This podcast is sponsored by the NFT ticketing company Neon Ox. You can find them at https://neonox.io/ and you can DM this podcast on social media if you want us to help set up a demo of the platform. Brian Stollery is the founder of W3BSTOCK, a global entertainment company that puts on events that are doubled in the metaverse and enhanced and powered by web3 technology. Brian has an extensive pr...

This podcast is sponsored by the NFT ticketing company Neon Ox. You can find them at https://neonox.io/ and you can DM this podcast on social media if you want us to help set up a demo of the platform. TK is an independent musician based in LA who’s been incredibly active in web3 over the last couple years. His most recent music NFT project, Eternal Garden, sold out of 700 editions between 7 songs...

This podcast is sponsored by the NFT ticketing company Neon Ox. You can find them at https://neonox.io/ and you can DM this podcast on social media if you want us to help set up a demo of the platform. Pete Rango is an independent artist, producer, and entrepreneur. He’s participated and contributed to the online creator community Campfire, the productivity and accountability project BondwithMochi...

This podcast is sponsored by the NFT ticketing company Neon Ox. You can find them at https://neonox.io/ and you can DM this podcast on social media if you want us to help set up a demo of the platform. Tony Lashley is a music industry professional and entrepreneur currently building the curated music streaming platform he co-founded, Marine Snow. Marine Snow signs exclusive licensing deals with ar...

This podcast is sponsored by the NFT ticketing company Neon Ox. You can find them at https://neonox.io/ and you can DM this podcast on social media if you want us to help set up a demo of the platform. Segnon is a rapper, producer, photographer, videographer, entrepreneur, artist, and more. He’s been making music for over 20 years and is very involved with Zoratopia and the other musicians there....

Jagwar Twin, whose real name is Roy English, began in 2018, after Roy had participated in several bands as well as released music independently throughout the last decade +. He released his first music NFT in March 2022 and his most recent album 33 came out in September. He also launched his interactive metaverse “The Hall of Mirrors” earlier this month in November 2022. Josh Hubberman is his mana...

This podcast is sponsored by the NFT ticketing company Neon Ox. You can find them at https://neonox.io/ and you can DM this podcast on social media if you want us to help set up a demo of the platform. Brenna and Saiko are both independent musicians who are building in web3. Their company YouniDAO is the backbone for UniFest, a traveling music festival that’s centered around empowering local artis...

This podcast is sponsored by the NFT ticketing company Neon Ox. You can find them at https://neonox.io/ and you can DM this podcast on social media if you want us to help set up a demo of the platform. Bazooka Zac is an independent artist who is, as far as he and I have discovered on-chain, the first performance musician on the blockchain. His NFT collection “Permanent Dreamscape” showcases him cr...

AJ Washington is the co-founder of Phlote DAO. Phlote is a music curation platform that’s pioneering the curate-to-earn model as well as onboarding independent artists to web3. We talk about the problems with today’s promotion landscape for independent musicians, how their curate-to-earn model works and how this ties into onboarding artists, how Phlote thinks about their DAO structure, where this...

This podcast is sponsored by the NFT ticketing company Neon Ox. You can find them at https://neonox.io/ and you can DM this podcast on social media if you want us to help set up a demo of the platform. Alex Lopez is the founder and CEO of Soundpickr, a music NFT platform aimed at fixing music royalties with transparent data and immediate payments. In the episode, we talk about this goal, the probl...

This podcast is sponsored by the NFT ticketing company Neon Ox. You can find them at https://neonox.io/ and you can DM this podcast on social media if you want us to help set up a demo of the platform. In this episode, Jake talks with independent artist Alex Purdy. Alex is a DC-area based artist who has been active in web3 since spring '21. In the episode we talk about her experience in Songcamp’s...

In this episode, Jake talks with Chris Honsberger who does Business Development for our sponsor NeonOx! NeonOx is a ticketing provider that’s harnessing the power of blockchain and the GET protocol to change the events industry for the better. Using NFTs on the backend, and a familiar, intuitive checkout funnel on the frontend, ticket buyers can purchase 100% fraud-free tickets without any blockch...