Blockchain Papers

Will Mason

In July 2021, the electronic musician and scholar Holly Herndon launched Holly+, a vocal deep fake modeled on her singing voice. Holly+ is powered by an artificial intelligence engine trained on recordings of Herndon’s voice. Musicians were welcome to use the transformed audio commercially and simply credit Herndon and Holly+. They also could release their work with the official imprimatur of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a Web 3.0 entity tied to the Ethereum blockchain. My paper situates the Holly+ project against the backdrop of intellectual property law in the US, both as it stood in the late 2010s and 2020s and in light of the legacy of legally sanctioned appropriation and extraction of work by Black performers. The DAO framework Holly+ uses is unlikely to gain traction, and Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s provocative invocation of “identity play” suggests an uneasy relationship to the racialized legacy of mimicry and impersonation in the history of American popular music. But the project stands as an important attempt at creating an artist-driven, grassroots effort at monetizing, authenticating, and protecting the intellectual property of musicians in the era of machine learning.

Sanela Nikolić, Biljana Leković

The main objective of this paper is to outline the psychological aspects of trading in the music NFT (non-fungible tokens) ecosystem, with special emphasis on the psychological background of buying NFTs. Since the most important feature of NFTs is the acquisition of ownership enabled by technological solutions, we assume that each purchase of a token does not only imply an economic exchange of ownership, but also the activation of psychological ownership. Having in mind that psychological ownership is a relative category that depends, among other factors, on the nature of the target to which it is attached, our investigation is conceptual rather than empirical. By connecting the already identified cores of psychological ownership to the characteristics of some of the most prominent music NFT drops, we aim to theoretically define general dimensions of psychological ownership through which emotional and social connections to music NFTs as objects of ownership emerge. We conclude that the NFT market reinforces psychological ownership by providing consumers valuable outcomes. In terms of music NFTs, the concept of psychological ownership can be explained by several intertwined dimensions that create emotional and social connections and motivate users to purchase these digital goods. These include a sense of unique possession, identity and self-expression, a sense of belonging to a community, and investment opportunities. The NFT drops discussed illustrate how leveraging different aspects of psychological ownership can transform a music release into a special experience that reshapes the relationship between fans and musicians. Examining fans’ purchases of music NFTs from a psychological perspective can help musicians better understand blockchain users’ behaviour towards music, which is essential for developing NFTs into a sustainable digital format for music revenue.

Martin Clancy

This chapter offers historical, contemporary, and future insights into the workings of the evolving global music industry. Scott Cohen, a seasoned entrepreneur and major-label strategist, shares firsthand perspectives on the challenges that labels encounter, how technology has consistently reshaped the business, and what may be on the horizon. Drawing on historical parallels, Cohen examines how each decade’s “new” disruptive format—from FM radio to MP3—provoked significant resistance within the industry until widespread consumer adoption necessitated transformation. By analysing current developments in AI, generative music, and large-scale data analytics through this perspective, Cohen emphasises that the music industry’s resilience has often stemmed from a willingness to embrace innovation rather than resist it. He highlights important misconceptions surrounding streaming services and emphasises music’s broader social and economic advantages, referencing research by Shain Shapiro of Sound Diplomacy on how music contributes to urban development, employment, and cultural identity beyond its direct revenue. This relates to non-fungible tokens, blockchain, and emerging DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) models. According to Cohen, these technologies can significantly enhance how creators license their work, track royalties in real-time, and transition from centralised gatekeepers to more collaborative, transparent relationships. In closing, Cohen reaffirms that significant labels will continue to evolve and maintain strong positions but must adopt a longer-term, adaptive mindset. The music industry, he argues, has shown time and again that while short-term protective strategies are common, lasting success stems from embracing new tools—be they streaming services, generative AI, or DAO-based platforms—and recalibrating them to uphold both cultural and economic value for all stakeholders.

Benjamin A. Morgan, Dave Carter, Ian Rogers

This paper examines the hesitancy of Australian musicians towards embracing the music non-fungible token (NFT) as a commodity. Drawing on the concepts of cultural autonomy and the digital disruptive sublime, the study argues that the overtly economic nature of NFTs challenges the ideology of creative independence in the hegemonic ‘indie’ music scene. Through interviews with nine Australian musicians who participated in our project, the research finds a cautious curiosity towards the technology, with technical barriers and a perceived cultural disconnect between the NFT ‘community’ and traditional music scenes contributing to hesitation. The paper concludes that attempts to engineer disruption in the music industry through web3/blockchain technology have thus far failed to attract sustained interest from musicians, as the cultural norms and practices associated with NFTs do not align with the values of the existing indie music ecosystem. The findings highlight the difficulties in planning and engineering cultural change within the music industry.

Matthew Lovett

Chapter 3 presents an analysis of music in relation to emergent models of intellectual property rights, revenue management and digital governance. Rights and revenue patterns are evolving as music becomes increasingly entangled with song funds and decentralised computer architectures, such as blockchain-based streaming platforms and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). In this context, the chapter charts how recorded music’s current format as an intangible data asset is catalysing change in music production and consumption habits. By examining how emergent technological and financial services are offering new revenue models for music creators, contextualised within a broader conception of market economics and value systems, the chapter further explores the ecological nature of music by reflecting on how distribution and income generation mechanisms not only support musicians’ creative practice, but also inform, and to an extent shape, the nature of that practice.

L. L. Wynn, Susanna Trnka, Jesse Hession Grayman

Anthropologists like to tell stories about how they were wrong. These stories are part of our collective identity. Consider Briggs's (1970) classic ethnography, Never in Anger. Briggs tells a story about doing fieldwork in Nunavut (then the Canadian Northwest Territories) in the early 1960s. She showed anger on behalf of the Inuit group she was living with when they were wronged by a white outsider. To her surprise, her Inuit interlocutors reacted by ostracizing her for months. She describes feeling devastated, lonely, and depressed, but in slowly working her way back to personhood with her Inuit participants, she learned in a powerfully embodied fashion a core principle of their culture: that adults never show anger or make demands, and that to lose one's temper is to demonstrate a dangerous lack of control, even insanity. She documents how this emotional control is inculcated in children from a very young age. Thus her awful moment of social failure is transformed into a profound reflection on affect and socialization in Nunavut culture. The resulting ethnography became one of that era's most famous. Even when our failures and mistakes are less obvious than Briggs's and don't threaten to derail our research projects, many ethnographic writings reflect on moments when the author realized they had brought a bad assumption into the field with them and, as a result, learned something from their research participants—something that shifted their methodological or theoretical approach, or changed what they were studying. These stories are particularly prevalent among graduate students returning from their first fieldwork experiences. The stories go something like this: I went to the field planning to study x, and when I was in the field, I listened to my interlocutors and realized that what I really needed to study was y. For example, in her book Food, Sex and Pollution, Meigs (1984) writes about going to the field intending to study divorce, but when she gets there, everyone seems bored and uninterested when she asks about the topic. Instead, they want to talk to her about sex, gender, and the pollution rules that govern what they can and can't eat. It's such a collective concern that she describes their interest in the topic as a “religion.” Responding to this, she changes her research topic and commits to addressing her research participants’ interests, letting them chart the direction of her work. Briggs tells a similar story: she goes to the Inuit planning to study shamanism, but when she arrives, she finds that the small group she is living with have converted to Christianity and don't want to discuss their “pagan” past. That, combined with her attempts to process the social ostracism caused by her angry outburst, leads her to a whole new project on emotions and socialization. Without having systematically reviewed all the different ways that anthropologists have described their “I was wrong” moments, the AE editors suspect that many, if not most, ethnographies include stories like this, even if most are not as dramatic as Meigs's or Briggs's. These stories are not just about ourselves as individual fieldworkers but about anthropology as a discipline. We tell them to remind ourselves and to teach our students about the discipline's orientation toward a radically inductive and collaborative approach to building knowledge. By telling stories about being wrong, we might seem to be sacrificing our own dignity and authority, but in fact we are shoring up our authority as authentic ethnographers. These stories illustrate our willingness to be humbled by what we don't know, demonstrating our commitment to what Lederman (2007, p. 310) calls anthropology's “systematic openness to contingency.” In short, anthropology is a discipline that has staked its methodological approach on the possibility of mistake and failure. In taking an iterative approach to co-constructing knowledge with our research participants and collaborators, we insist that when we realize we are wrong, we must acknowledge it to move forward. As we were reflecting on this as editors, we thought of our own “I was wrong” stories. For Lisa, it was less a moment and more of a dawning realization. She had been doing research in Egypt on emerging reproductive health technologies, including sildenafil (the generic name for the drug more commonly known as Viagra). As she visited acquaintances and friends in Cairo and Alexandria, she asked them, “Who uses Viagra, and why?” The first time someone mentioned using sildenafil and tramadol (a painkiller) in the same sentence, as if they were synonyms, she dismissed it as ignorance. The man she was interviewing was an illiterate fisherman. He probably didn't use either drug, she assumed, and didn't have the knowledge to realize that they were radically different, having completely different mechanisms of action. Sildenafil produces erections; tramadol, as an opioid narcotic, would be intrinsically erection-wilting, she assumed—and, indeed, recent Egyptian research has demonstrated this (Hashim et al., 2020). The second time someone described using sildenafil and tramadol for the same purpose, she again ignored it. It was not until the third time that an interviewee described the drugs as equivalent that she started to catch on that something significant was afoot. She realized that she had neglected a fundamental point of critical drug studies since at least the 1970s, namely, that a drug's effect is produced not by the drug alone but by the intersection of three elements: the drug and its neuropharmacology; the mindset of the person taking the drug and their expectations about what it will do; and the social context in which they use the drug (Zinberg, 1984). This led Lisa to ask a question that would prove important to her research: Why did people see these drugs as part of a semantic continuum, and what did that say about how Egyptians understand masculinity and its relationship to pharmaceuticals (Wynn, 2022)? In retrospect, I realized that scars were slowly being formed. More precisely, they were being encouraged to form through a communitywide cultivation of silence. Rather than silence being considered an inhibitor of healing, as it is in much of Western medical, psychological, and cultural discourse, this was a case of a community encouraging silence as a means of promoting healing. After several moments when her research participants gently corrected her social blunders, she realized something not just about them and their philosophies of trauma and healing, but about her own deeply held assumption about trauma: that to heal, you need to talk. In contrast, for her research participants, “to break the silence [about past trauma] would be akin to breaking open the wound” (Trnka, 2008, p. 180). Jesse had a key “I was wrong” realization during his PhD research in Aceh, Indonesia (Grayman et al., 2009), where he was studying postconflict humanitarian recovery programs. Jesse was working with an Indonesian medical team that was tasked with providing psychosocial and psychiatric support to civilian survivors of the separatist war (1976–2005). He gave the team a short training on ethnographic methods, with a focus on managing trauma and the ethics of discussing painful conflict memories. Later, during a field exercise, an overeager nurse interviewed a village head about his conflict experience, pressing on despite the man's visible discomfort. As a crowd gathered, the village head recounted horrific torture, evoking tears from an elderly observer. When the conversation ended, the leader quietly remarked, “Sometimes I think there is no need to remember the past like this.” Jesse wondered whether he had misconceived his effort to upskill the medical team with ethnographic methods. Afterward, Jesse reflected on this as a moment of failure, noting that confessional narratives, central to many mental health models, are not always therapeutic. While some participants thanked the team for listening, it was nearly impossible to discern the few who might not benefit from talk therapy. Though Jesse turned the experience into a teachable moment, he regrets that the researcher's moment of learning unfolded in a real community, with real people and real leaders, just barely coming to terms with peacetime after living through decades of political violence. Even today, remembering the event makes Jesse anxious and embarrassed. This draws our attention to another key aspect of the way anthropologists process being wrong. We often experience our mistakes as embodied, visceral moments of regret, embarrassment, frustration, or humiliation. Thus, perhaps recounting our mistakes is not just about asserting our ethnographic achievements and authority, but about helping ourselves process our dark, painful feelings and difficult memories of fieldwork. Wanting to reflect more deeply on these issues, we invited anthropologists to submit to a special forum in which they discuss their moments of being wrong and what these can tell us about our discipline. We asked them to recount events when they realized a flaw in their methodological approach, an interpretive error, an ethical mistake, an event that triggered a theoretical paradigm shift, or a realization that their approach to teaching or doing anthropology needed an overhaul. We asked them to address these questions: When did you realize you were wrong? How did you come to that realization? What did you learn? How did you change the way you do or teach or write anthropology? As we read the submissions to this special forum, we were struck by three recurring themes. The first was embodiment and affect. As described in Jesse's and Susanna's stories of being wrong, and in Briggs's powerful ethnography, it can feel like swimming in dark emotions to realize that you are wrong and to process what it means for how we understand our past and our future in a society. Coming to terms with our mistakes is both an intellectual and an affective process, one that is experienced and felt deep in the body, both as we live the moments of mistake and process them later. A second theme was scale. Being wrong can be a tiny realization leading to a subtle reorientation in focus or approach, a microrecalibration of knowledge or of everyday fieldwork practice, or a grand, dramatic moment that causes a seismic shift in perspective. Of course, it's rarely one or the other. As Kuhn (1962) notes of paradigm shifts, they might seem like revolutions, dramatically overthrowing old modes of thinking, but in reality they take place gradually: anomalies slowly accumulate until the dominant paradigm topples under their weight. The third theme is temporality: “I was wrong” can be a light bulb moment or a slow, unfolding realization, a moment in the field or a decades-later discovery. Some “mistakes” do not reveal themselves until several years or even decades after one's fieldwork, reshaping one's sense of not only their research or the people they spent time with, but of themselves. In My Life as a Spy, Verdery (2018) reflects on how state security services labeled her a CIA agent during her three years conducting ethnography in Romania in the 1970s and 1980s. Their mistaken interpretation of her as a foreign agent began, she suggests, through her own error in judgment—motorbiking alone through the Romanian countryside in search of a field site, she inadvertently strayed into a restricted military zone, missing the sign warning “Entry prohibited to foreigners” (“I had made a stupid mistake. It would not be the last time,” Verdery [2018, p. 3] dryly remarks). the way I carried myself was suspect. At least, so it seemed to my friend Emilia, who told me that when she met me in 1990 she immediately thought I might be a spy: “You were dressed very modestly, you didn't hold yourself above us. Your style was to reduce the difference between yourself and Romanians, under-communicating it.” In short, my manner of dress was a form of hiding. Eventually she came to see it as my way of trying to form good relations with villagers, but her first thought was, “Maybe she's a spy. Instead of seeming like someone from a totally different world, you seemed to be one of us”—that is, she thought I had been specifically trained to fit in. (p. 17) recognize me as a spy because I do some of the things they do—I use code names and write of “informants,” for instance, and both of us collect “socio-political information” of all kinds rather than just focusing on a specific issue. … When I read in the file that I “exploit people for informative purposes,” can I deny that anthropologists often do just that, as Securitate officers do? In 1962 the US Department of Commerce, without authorization or permission from the author, translated from French into English the anthropologist Georges Condominas’ ethnographic account of Montagnard village life in the central highlands of Vietnam. The Green Berets used the document for assassination campaigns targeting village leaders. For years, neither publisher nor author knew this work had been reprinted in English for military ends. How can one accept, without trembling with rage, that this work, in which I wanted to describe in their human plenitude these men who have so much to teach us about life, should be offered to the technicians of death—of their death! … You will understand my indignation when I tell you that I learned about the “pirating” [of my book] only a few years after having the proof that Srae, whose marriage I described in Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt, had been tortured by a sergeant of the Special Forces in the camp of Phii Ko. Condominas's outrage changed how anthropologists think about their writing, their politics, and their ethics of representation. As Price (2007) notes, ethics committees often focus on any immediate risks to research participants, including whether they could be harmed by certain questions (as in Jesse's recounting of interviews about a violent past). Examples like Condominas's, however, show that anthropologists also need to think about the different scales and temporalities of ethnographic work and its possible harms. These themes—embodiment and affect, scale and temporality—come up in fascinating ways in this forum's commentaries. Rejecting the simple binary of right or wrong, Veena Das dismantles the AE editors’ language of “moments” of realization. Instead, she sees anthropological knowledge as a long, dialectical process: the anthropologist slowly finding their way between, on the one hand, the dominant theories and theorists of their time, and on the other, their interlocutors, the “figures of thought” influencing them in the field. She describes a sense of incompleteness or poor fit with existing theories, one that slowly accumulates and eventually compels the anthropologist to see something in a new way, or notice what they haven't been seeing. “By taking a long-term perspective on the vulnerability of knowledge, which reveals itself over time,” Das aims to “draw attention, instead, to the connections between the knowledge of the alien and our own everyday modes of knowing. We miss these connections if we stay with the stark oppositions of truth and falsity, mistakes and correction.” Like Das, Carole McGranahan sees anthropological theory as formed not only in the relationship between fieldworkers and theorists, but also by the theorists in the field. Reflecting on her own training, she writes, “The ethnography often, though not always, came to me pretheorized. People shared stories with me alongside observations, musings, and explanations. Analysis was by no means only the scholar's domain. It belonged to narrator and audience alike.” Gil Hizi thinks through a series of unexpected moments during his PhD research and describes his mistakes as the “naivete of early graduate studies.” In studying practices of among young Hizi learned that after the is no with a but to the that come from interlocutors, in are studying While he at first that they would take no interest in the of an in his Hizi finds the Hizi from these unexpected moments with mistaken come and he through them to his with his realization of his mistakes from to decades He describes feeling early in his during his first with a he he was wrong until interviews when of the difference between the and the [of became account is through with embodied affect. when one to talk with in the of a field at a to being and even more and when he how to his field notes and back to the US without He up with a that … seems of you are wrong, after the when in the field you knew something was but didn't how to with it. writes about finding on an at a in one of which is about the impossible of a The of this with about medical issues, such as the of back into old anthropological about the to and is certain that the only to that the is from the on an from This to the of her and, like Das, her by asserting the of and the of knowledge. writes a account that a different to the of the anthropologist as about being as an and from and working to open up to the makes a that leads her to being Afterward, she her in terms of a intersection of gender, and also with In an dark and that many of us will she that she is not to for being she can't over what she did wrong. She to how it so that she can make in the one be wrong without being at and In her we the of stories about being wrong that don't stories that people don't feel powerful to or that don't to our authority, that are or or the of trauma among who work in of political and violence. In research with in US knew this work might trauma and health was in not other, more and ways to both for individual such as and for the discipline as a which could do more to PhD students and a new of who are ethnography, for as work. forum are a of names and finding their in the field. Their on both recent mistakes and made over not only tell individual but also describe both subtle and dramatic of what ethnographic fieldwork and ethical research the of writing, and and the of old theoretical even as we to think in new reflect of things we have wrong as as the realization of in as Das it. are stories and perhaps the most that all these is their on and to our research and participants’ for to participants’ to who offered after the own The the anthropological in terms of and the willingness to be Thus, an “I was wrong” realization is the of a commitment to It anthropology as a discipline that is and to

Hannah N. Krasikov

Since the popularization of digital music downloading and streaming services beginning in 1999 with Napster, artists have struggled to recover financially from the decline of physical album sales. Streaming services like Spotify have been scrutinized for low royalty payments to artists—an issue that was exacerbated over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Following the successful debut of non-fungible token (NFT) collections by musicians including Grimes, Kings of Leon, and deadmau5 early in 2021, some of the biggest mainstream reporters in music began calling NFTs the future of the music industry. The decentralized funding structure NFTs offered appeared to provide a solution for compensating artists fairly; however, in practice, NFTs have primarily only benefitted musicians of celebrity status. This article provides a brief introduction to non-fungible tokens and examines why they have appealed to musicians. Additionally, it establishes the difference between visual art NFTs and music NFTs by situating the latter within both historical and neoliberal capitalist understandings of musical value. Drawing from evidence demonstrating how NFTs have been used in practice, this essay suggests that by assetizing music, NFTs re-legitimize the undervaluing of musicians by establishing them as productive laborers in technoscientific capitalist societies.

Ian Rogers, Dave Carter, Benjamin A. Morgan, Anna Edgington

Introduction In a 2019 report for the International Journal of Communication, Baym et al. positioned distributed blockchain ledger technology, and what would subsequently be referred to as Web3, as a convening technology. Riffing off Barnett, a convening technology “initiates and serves as the focus of a conversation that can address issues far beyond what it may ultimately be able to address itself” (403). The case studies for the Baym et al. research—early, aspirant projects applying the blockchain concept to music publishing and distribution—are described in the piece as speculations or provocations concerning music’s commercial and social future. What is convened in this era (pre-2017 blockchain music discourse and practice) is the potential for change: a type of widespread, broadly discussed, reimagination of the 21st-century music industries, productive precisely because near-future applications suggest the realisation of what Baym et al. call dreams. In this article, we aim to examine the Web3 music field as it lies some years later. Taking the latter half of 2021 as our subject, we present a survey of where music then resided within Web3, focussing on how the dreams of Baym et al. have morphed and evolved, and materialised and declined, in the intervening years. By investigating the discourse and functionality of 2021’s current crop of music NFTs—just one thread of music Web3’s far-reaching aspiration, but a potent and accessible manifestation nonetheless—we can make a detailed analysis of concept-led application. Volatility remains throughout the broader sector, and all of the projects listed here could be read as conditionally short-term and untested, but what they represent is a series of clearly evolved case studies of the dream, rich precisely because of what is assumed and disregarded. WTF Is an NFT? Non-fungible tokens inscribe indelible, unique ledger entries on a blockchain, detailing ownership of, or rights associated with, assets that exist off-chain. Many NFTs take the form of an ERC-721 smart-contract that functions as an indivisible token on the Ethereum blockchain. Although all ERC-721 tokens are NFTs, the inverse is not true. Similar standards exist on other blockchains, and bridges allow these tokens to be created on alternative networks such as Polygon, Solana, WAX, Cardano and Tezos. The creation (minting) and transfer of ownership on the Ethereum network—by far the dominant chain—comes with a significant and volatile transaction cost, by way of gas fees. Thus, even a “free” transaction on the main NFT network requires a currency and time investment that far outweighs the everyday routines of fiat exchange. On a technical level, the original proposal for the ERC-721 standard refers to NFTs as deeds intended to represent ownership of digital and physical assets like houses, virtual collectibles, and negative value assets such as loans (Entriken et al.). The details of these assets can be encoded as metadata, such as the name and description of the asset including a URI that typically points to either a file somewhere on the Internet or a file hosted via IPFS, a decentralised peer-to-peer hosting network. As noted in the standard, while the data inscribed on-chain are immutable, the asset being referred to is not. Similarly, while each NFT is unique, multiple NFTs could, in theory, point to a single asset. In this respect ERC-721 tokens are different from cryptocurrencies and other tokens like stable-coins in that their value is often contingent on their accurate and ongoing association with assets outside of the blockchain on which they are traded. Further complicating matters, it is often unclear if and how NFTs confer ownership of digital assets with respect to legislative or common law. NFTs rarely include any information relating to licencing or rights transfer, and high-profile NFTs such as Bored Ape Yacht Club appear to be governed by licencing terms held off-chain (Bored Ape Yacht Club). Finally, while it is possible to inscribe any kind of data, including audio, into an NFT, the ERC-721 standard and the underpinning blockchains were not designed to host multimedia content. At the time of writing, storing even a low-bandwidth stereo audio file on the ethereum network appears cost-prohibitive. This presents a challenge for how music NFTs distinguish themselves in a marketplace dominated by visual works. The following sections of this article are divided into what we consider to be the general use cases for NFTs within music in 2021. We’ve designated three overlapping cases: audience investment, music ownership, and audience and business services. Audience Investment Significant discourse around NFTs focusses on digital collectibles and artwork that are conceptually, but not functionally, unique. Huge amounts of money have changed hands for specific—often celebrity brand-led—creations, resulting in media cycles of hype and derision. The high value of these NFTs has been variously ascribed to their high novelty value, scarcity, the adoption of NFTs as speculative assets by investors, and the lack of regulatory oversight allowing for price inflation via practices such as wash-trading (Madeline; Das et al.; Cong et al.; Le Pennec, Fielder, and Ante; Fazil, Owfi, and Taesiri). We see here the initial traditional split of discourse around cultural activity within a new medium: dual narratives of utopianism and dystopianism. Regardless of the discursive frame, activity has grown steadily since stories reporting the failure of Blockchain to deliver on its hype began appearing in 2017 (Ellul). Early coverage around blockchain, music, and NFTs echoes this capacity to leverage artificial scarcity via the creation of unique digital assets (cf Heap; Tomaino). As NFTs have developed, this discourse has become more nuanced, arguing that creators are now able to exploit both ownership and abundance. However, for the most part, music NFTs have essentially adopted the form of digital artworks and collectibles in editions ranging from 1:1 or 1:1000+. Grimes’s February 2021 Mars NFT pointed to a 32-second rotating animation of a sword-wielding cherubim above the planet Mars, accompanied by a musical cue (Grimes). Mars sold 388 NFTs for a reported fixed price of $7.5k each, grossing $2,910,000 at time of minting. By contrast, electronic artists Steve Aoki and Don Diablo have both released 1:1 NFT editions that have been auctioned via Sotheby’s, Superrare, and Nifty Gateway. Interestingly, these works have been bundled with physical goods; Diablo’s Destination Hexagonia, which sold for 600 Eth or approximately US$1.2 million at the time of sale, proffered ownership of a bespoke one-hour film hosted online, along with “a unique hand-crafted box, which includes a hard drive that contains the only copy of the high-quality file of the film” (Diablo). Aoki’s Hairy was much less elaborate but still promised to provide the winner of the $888,888 auction with a copy of the 35-second video of a fur-covered face shaking in time to downbeat electronica as an Infinite Objects video print (Aoki). In the first half of 2021, similar projects from high-profile artists including Deadmau5, The Weekend, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Blondie, and 3Lau have generated an extraordinary amount of money leading to a significant, and understandable, appetite from musicians wanting to engage in this marketplace. Many of these artists and the platforms that have enabled their sales have lauded the potential for NFTs to address an alleged poor remuneration of artists from streaming and/or bypassing “industry middlemen” (cf. Sounds.xyz); the millions of dollars generated by sales of these NFTs presents a compelling case for exploring these new markets irrespective of risk and volatility. However, other artists have expressed reservations and/or received pushback on entry into the NFT marketplace due to concerns over the environmental impact of NFTs; volatility; and a perception of NFT markets as Ponzi schemes (Poleg), insecure (Goodin), exploitative (Purtill), or scammy (Dash). As of late 2021, increased reportage began to highlight unauthorised or fraudulent NFT minting (cf. TFL; Stephen), including in music (Newstead). However, the number of contested NFTs remains marginal in comparison to the volume of exchange that occurs in the space daily. OpenSea alone oversaw over US$2.5 billion worth of transactions per month. For the most part, online NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Solanart oversee the exchange of products on terms not dissimilar to other large online retailers; the space is still resolutely emergent and there is much debate about what products, including recently delisted pro-Nazi and Alt-Right-related NFTs, are socially and commercially acceptable (cf. Pearson; Redman). Further, there are signs this trend may impact on both the willingness and capacity of rightsholders to engage with NFTs, particularly where official offerings are competing with extant fraudulent or illegitimate ones. Despite this, at the time of writing the NFT market as a whole does not appear prone to this type of obstruction. What remains complicated is the contested relationship between NFTs, copyrights, and ownership of the assets they represent. This is further complicated by tension between the claims of blockchain’s independence from existing regulatory structures, and the actual legal recourse available to music rights holders. Music Rights and Ownership Baym et al. note that addressing the problems of rights management and metadata is one of the important discussions around music convened by early blockchain projects. While they posit that “our point is not whether blockchain can or can’t fix the problems the music industries face” (403), for some professionals, the blockchain’s promise of eliminating the need for trust seemed to provide an ideal solution to a widely acknowledged business-to-business problem: one of poor metadata leading

Zachary Catanzaro

No abstract is available for this record.

Nancy K. Baym, Lana Swartz, Andrea Alarcón

This article traces the debates occurring in the music industry where blockchain technology surged as an ideal solution for long-standing disagreements over distribution, publishing, licensing, sales, streaming, and listening. The projections (in conferences, media, opinion pieces, and academic reports) started as techno-utopian, but over time the discourse shifted from “radical” to “incorporative” goals. The technological dreams were scaled back as the scope of social challenges to technological solutions became clearer. Borrowing from Clive Barnett’s theory of convening publics, we argue that the role of the blockchain in this environment was not necessarily as a technological solution, but rather as a “convening” force that brought disparate actors together. Nonetheless, we still have to ask, who is invited to convene, and who is left out?

Geeta Dayal

No abstract is available for this record.

Ward-Steinman

An Invitation to Play:A Response to Patrick Schmidt's "What We Hear is Meaning Too:Deconstruction, Dialogue, and Music" Patrice Madura Ward-Steinman The aims of dialogue-as-deconstruction, as described by Patrick Schmidt, are concepts I have pondered as a result of a five-week sabbatical visit to Melbourne, Australia. My research focus there was improvisation, and early in my visit I attended two concerts at the premier jazz club, Bennett's Lane. There I heard twelve improvisers in a variety of ensembles, all in celebration of the seventieth birthday of their mentor, Tony Gould, who also performed. Gould is cited by John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell as an "outstanding player who has never ceased to develop as an improviser" and who "as a pianist, records prolifically across a wide musical spectrum."1 While the music was jazz, it was freer and fresher than usual. There was striking interaction among the musicians, including facial expressions that reflected genuine ecstasy, and body movement that was naturally "in sync" with the music. I began to ask many questions, including: Is Australia's jazz different from that [End Page 82] in the U.S.? Is Tony Gould's influence as a teacher the reason for the difference? What accounts for the sensation of "freshness" in this music? And why is this musical experience so gripping, both aurally and visually? Serendipitously, I discovered answers through the opportunity to respond to Schmidt's aims of dialogue-of-deconstruction. I shall illustrate how those aims, namely decentralized power and conflict, multiplicity and meaning, and mis-listening may be met in the improvising music ensemble. Decentralized Power and Conflict The lifeblood of "free jazz" and "free improvisation" ensembles is de-centralized musical interaction, which may be considered a metaphor for dialogue-as-deconstruction. Case in point: the Tony Gould Quartet was an improvising unit with each musician contributing to the musical whole. The air was electric with each musician poised in both the anticipation of what the other might play and in the moment of creation. A recent trend in studies of organizational behavior is on "self-directed" or "self-managed" groups, as identified by Keith R. Sawyer.2 David Borgo3 explains that the characteristics of these "self-organizing systems" or "SOSs" are threefold: they operate without centralized control, they "exhibit both complex and adaptive dynamics," and they are comprised of autonomous individuals who demonstrate a high degree of connectivity. Both authors assert that an ideal SOS is the free improvising ensemble, where musical ideas are allowed to emerge and adapt, and even musical "mistakes" may be manipulated into the context, thus creating new directions in dialogue. However, SOSs have some inherent problems. For example, they are "slow to emerge. . . . The more complex they are, the longer it may take them to warm up: hierarchical layers have to settle down . . . and individual(s) have to acquaint themselves with one another."4 Borgo explained that even advanced improvisers often need to pursue a musical idea for a long while for it to achieve coherence. Philip Alperson adds: "As the number of designing intelligences increases, the greater is the difficulty in coordinating all the parts; the twin dangers of cacophony and opacity lurk around the corner."5 It seems that "interactional synchrony"6 can develop among musicians who have "good chemistry" after a warm-up period, but those with conflicting personalities, aesthetic dispositions, or musical styles may have a more difficult time of it. When members of the Tony Gould Quartet were asked how they are able to achieve musical unity, they explained that they have played together for many years, they "hang out and drink together" when not on the bandstand, and they trust each other. Even when one of the members feels "out of sorts," their improvisations are respected as authentic expressions. Others' differences are honored, [End Page 83] rather than felt in opposition to one's self.7 Ingrid Monson8 quotes several musicians who use the metaphor of marriage to describe the musical relationship during a peak performance; on the other hand, jealousy, competition, and even hostility on the bandstand are not uncommon and can destroy an ensemble. So, it appears...

Daniel P. Ahn

No abstract is available for this record.

Paige Sarlin

New Left-Wing Melancholy:Mark Tribe's "The Port Huron Project" and the Politics of Reenactment Paige Sarlin (bio) The journal October sent a questionnaire to artists, critics, and art historians in the summer of 2007. The central question, and the one they reprinted on the cover of the issue that contained all the responses, was: "In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq?" The questionnaire and the published responses served as an answer to the lack of attention to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had marked the journal during the previous three years.1 A journal other than October might never have felt the need to address contemporary political conditions. But this journal had been founded with a strident statement of purpose. In 1978, the editors claimed the cultural arena as a site for political action, one in which philosophical and aesthetic questions were not pre-given but rather crucially important, with potential political consequences. Seen in that light, their gesture to justify and remedy an absence of cultural attention to the Iraq War simultaneously appears particularly significant. In one part of the questionnaire, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the author, asked if the absence of the draft explained the difference between the character of the protests against the war in Vietnam and the protests against the war in Iraq.2 This question invoked a range of criticisms within the responses (including a criticism from me, as a member of the group 16Beaver).3 And so in the introduction to the special issue, Buchloh and coeditor Rachel Churner devoted a small section to defending themselves from the various objections and qualifications that were raised about their use of the comparison with Vietnam. They argued that the analogy that they drew upon was intended to "encourage action" through raising a generational question: What is it that we are doing that is different and how can the awareness of this difference be productive?4 Mark Tribe's "The Port Huron Project" was cited in a [End Page 139] footnote in this section, serving as an example of "how protest informs intellectual history and how significantly we have internalized the intellectual paradigms from that generation."5 Tribe's project both served as proof of the influence of historic protests on cultural producers and simultaneously validated Buchloh and Churner's use of the historical comparison in their questionnaire and analysis of the responses to the war in Iraq (figured as the "absence" of a mass movement). But what, one might ask, is the relation of "The Port Huron Project" to the history that it reenacts? And, more significant, what is at stake in the comparison of the contemporary response to the war and the left-wing political activity of the late 1960s that October and various other cultural institutions have invoked and explored over the last year, which was the fortieth anniversary of 1968? Tribe's project gives a blank form to the differences and the similarities between then and now, assuming a form of resonance and significance that the project then re-produces and amplifies. Without questioning the utility of the comparison, Tribe's project works to elaborate itself not in relation to the specificity of the past or the present, but somewhere in between, in relation to this structure of analogy. In this way, the project shares with October's questionnaire and special issue a lack of clarity about the specific ideological and political character of the social movements of the 1960s (and the American left more broadly). "The Port Huron Project" gestures toward a general sense of the politically radical character of the historical period that accompanied the escalation of the American war in Vietnam and the marked increase in the level of class and social justice struggles in the United States and on a global scale. This use of analogy trades on the association with this "radical" history, but it sidesteps the myriad of difficult questions that generic references to protest, the New Left, or social movements of the 1960s could raise with respect to the contemporary antiwar movement. October's questionnaire comes tantalizingly close to...

Jeffrey Melnick

"Soul" Jeffrey Melnick (bio) Sometime in the mid-1990s, Steve Bernstein was asked by John Zorn to make a record for Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture series. Bernstein is a downtown New York avant-garde jazz trumpeter and bandleader—a member of John Lurie's Lounge Lizard's and leader of his own Sex Mob—a group that specializes in free jazz versions of James Bond theme songs and covers of Abba and Prince. Bernstein explains that he was initially puzzled by Zorn's invitation. He writes in the liner notes to Diaspora Soul, the record he finally made for Zorn: "I was left with an enigmatic question. How does a Jewish musician who has spent his life studying 'other' musical cultures make a 'Jewish' record, when, by nature, all of one's music is already 'Jewish'?" Bernstein, by his own account, struggled for three years with this question, and then finally had what he calls his "Gulf Coast epiphany":"I had been doing a lot of reading and listening for the past few months to the music of New Orleans, and had been developing a theory about the evolution of New Orleans marching band music not into what we call jazz, but into rhythm and blues."1 Those of us familiar with the discourses of Black-Jewish likeness see now where this is going, and forgive us if we are cringing: somehow Bernstein will punctuate this musicological genealogy with some definitive proof that the diasporic souls of Black folk and Jewish folk are linked and that these links take musical forms which, if not identical, exist at least in some kind of natural harmony. This is a line of thought that's been promoted for almost a century now: Alexander Woollcott said it about Irving Berlin, stride pianist Willie the Lion Smith said it about himself, Harvard professor Isaac Goldberg said it about George Gershwin, Mezz Mezzrow said it about himself . . . and the list goes on and on. In academic discourse this position was staked out most influentially by Irving Howe, in his World of Our Fathers, where he described Jews in blackface as sympathetic actors who used the Black mask as a vehicle to articulate their own woe. Amazingly, Michael Alexander, in his recent book Jazz Age Jews,2 pushes this insensitive argument even further: according to Alexander, [End Page 13] Jolson was so sympathetic to African Americans that he was willing to compromise his own upward mobility by donning blackface. Michael Alexander's Jazz Age Jews is only the most egregious and relatively recent expression of an ahistorical and politically dangerous axiom undergirding much of what passes for "Jewish Studies." The axiom is "We all know what 'Jew' signifies and we all know it is kind of a synonym for 'Black' anyway." Even the newer Jewish studies tends to make indefensible claims about the meaning of Jewishness—while these claims vary from place to place there are consistent assumptions being made that there is an audience out there in agreement that "Jew" still marks off some recognizable territory or activity. The purpose of my paper is to argue against unanimity, against consensus. My primary motivation is political: in an era when "Jew" too often signifies an "us" putatively opposed to "them" (Arabs) I want to suggest we take a break from imagining "Jew" as any kind of stable or singular identity. And as a cultural historian I want to take note of a new generation of cultural actors and activists—Jewish one way or another—who are busy inventing heretofore unknown ways of being, sounding, looking, and "acting" Jewish. These new Jews range from the immensely talented Jonathan Safran Foer, whose first novel3 offers a Ukrainian descendant of Nazi collaborators as its hero, thereby purposely denying the easy comforts of an us vs. them orientation, to the Jewish two-thirds of Sleater-Kinney, the all-woman band that redefined punk rock as a woman-centered activity in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the Jewish two-thirds of Northern State, who seem poised to do the same for hip hop. My standards are loose here: this is a Jewish "generation" only insofar as I say so...

Donald Brenneis

n Sound as Social Structure Feld (1984) issued a compelling call for qualitative comparison in ethnomusicology. His article on the Kaluli and Roseman's (1984) on the Temiar demonstrate the complexities and internal diversity of particular musical traditions and the great difficulty of finding a comparative language that neither caricatures nor obscures those traditions. suggesting a framework for comparative sociomusicology, Feld stresses the importance of drawing extensively upon local theories of self, society, aesthetics and the natural world. How those with whom we work conceptualize and enact their lives-both musical and social-necessarily informs how we come to share in their understandings, although this recognition is often lost in the scholarly drive to move from specifics to the universal. The Kaluli and Temiar are fortunate in their chroniclers. The richness and particularity of each musical tradition are striking; we are forced, as we should be, to take them on their own terms. That the musical issues at stake are so complex should not, however, lead us to assume that questions of social characterization are any less problematic. Feld points to one of the major dangers, that of relying upon notions of objectified social structures (405). A subtler but potentially more consequential difficulty lies in the interplay between those two societies, which were represented in a recent symposium,' and the theoretical position argued by at least one of the respondents. Keil (1984) quotes Diamond: In societies the superstructure is not reducible to the economic base; that reductive process begins with the exploitative economic relations of civilization (1984:446). The Temiar and Kaluli cases are cited as proof of this argument, and they indeed demonstrate elegantly complex patterns of economic, social and esthetic integration. The danger lies in the possible assumption, suggested by the quote from Diamond, that the Temiar and Kaluli as primitive societies represent a pre-civilized egalitarianism and that subsequent types of social formation-necessarily inegalitarian-cannot encompass an analogous interpenetration of economic, social and esthetic institutions.