On The Other Side ep 48 - Collaborative Research enabled by Web3 w/ Cherie Hu
Primer: Water & Music is a newsletter and research DAO focused on the music business. Find out what inspired founder Cherie Hu to start the project, how the DAO operates, and her thoughts on community and contributors in this episode of On The Other Side.
Background
In the music industry since 2015
For the first 3-4 years, she was a freelance writer in the industry
Her focus was on how music and technology intersect
She learned about blockchain at the first music conference she attended
In 2019, she started her own music and tech newsletter and community called Water & Music
Have a music NFT database that’s updated every week with new drops from independent artists
Applied for Seed Club’s third cohort. Able to test drive her ideas and nail down the community design and token design
Started with a collaborative article with 10 people from their community on spatial audio
Water & Music’s activity is now driven by collaborative research and educational projects
Structure Of The Collaborative Research
Coordination happens on Web2 platforms but under the DAO structure:
Discord is the main community hub
Thread for each project
A designated project lead for each project
Provides compensation
Their top source of revenue comes from the Water & Music paid newsletter and Patreon she started in 2019
Have NFT sales on the side to generate income
Ensuring A Certain Quality Standard
Filtering process at Water & Music is centralized and tightly managed
Right now, anyone can pitch an article/idea to the core team to be greenlighted
Some trends move quickly, so they get quick approval from the core team instead of the decision being put to community voting
A Discord thread will be started and ideation is open to the entire community
The community has come in to identify blind spots and perspectives that have not been considered before
Once the proposal is approved by the core team, the core team takes a hands-off approach
Starting Music & Water
Started it herself without any co-founders
“People call a lot of DAO work gardening for a reason. I completely understand that. It's very slow, methodical, and incremental.”
- Cherie Hu
World Building And Community Building
Their Academy series dives into various aspects of the industry
Their current series focuses on the artist team
They interviewed creative directors who built VR and AR experiences for artists
One of the questions they asked entails the difference between world building and community building
World building is centralized and involves the narratives you are presenting to the world
“World building doesn't even have to be like super high tech. As an artist, if you write a weekly newsletter, just diving into your own world, your own perspective on the world.”
- Cherie Hu
When world building is done consistently, it results in community building
Brands run the best communities because they do not need to be the centre of attention all of the time
Moderation is a centralized act
Have seen strong communities rotating their moderators. This brought in new and interesting initiatives
Have to decide what your community’s Code of Conduct should be. Otherwise, it’ll keep changing
Their community is still trusting them with the narrative setting, but eventually, it will be handed over to the community
Extent Of Involvement For Fans
Some NFT projects allow fans to shadow the artist and become a tour manager for the day
In practical terms, that is very difficult as tour management is a very stressful job
A lot of people who want to get involved in their community have full-time jobs and have limited time leading projects
Have been communicating ways to get involved and onboarding contributors with more accessible paths to earn their token
A lot of people come in and ask what can they do, which is the opposite of the value proposition of DAOs
Only a minority of people end up contributing
Their focus is not on the number of contributors, but on the quality
Thoughts On Consumers Driving Industry Changes
TikTok is a great example of consumers and fans driving the industry
In Web3, artists are leading the music industry (e.g. Songcamp)
Matthew Chaim, the founder of Songcamp, is more focused on tinkering with economic models around music rather than scaling to millions of fans immediately
For the next wave, she thinks that it’s about scaling the technology to fan bases
Where Can People Go To Learn More?
Follow her and Water & Music on Twitter
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