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The R2vgOULNXVhGzUq5YeQ Cherie Hu of Water and Music discusses Web3 at Consensys 2022
Water and Music, the newsletter and research DAO (decentralized autonomous group) building the innovator's guide to the music business, was designed to help facilitate discussions among people working in the field of music technology. The company is now taking it one step further by actively engaging with the industry's hive mind to create research-based projects, and reward everyone that is involved.
"My 'why' for this club is to help people understand the world better, and then also understand their own place within it," begins Cherie Hu as the creator of Water and Music. She hopes to assist people become better prepared so that they can make the most impression on the people in their field. Cherie's main tenets that she has used, particularly in the realm of business reporting, has always written in a way that is actionable. "At the conclusion of each article, you'll be armed with an idea about what you can do in your industry or how to be better at your job. Making sure that you are able to bridge the gap between what the community need, and what we write about, is vital," Cherie explains.
Today, the Water and Music team has expanded to conduct regular research sprints' lasting up to 10 weeks where they pick a subject in order to collect as much knowledge as they can for their clients. For these research sprints, when they've settled on a topic, they go out and speak to the Water and Music community: "We inquire, 'What are your concerns right now?', and then crowdsource those responses. Then the structure of our report comes directly from those needs," she tells me.
True to form, the Water and Music research sprints are extremely collaborative and team-based. "It's an open-ended ideation process and we recruit a number of people in helping us do the editorial research," Cherie says. So far we've had Water and Music community has published two research reports under this group model. Keeping on-trend, they sold NFTs retroactively so that, if anyone were interested in supporting the research, they could do so - and the proceeds were distributed fairly among all those who contributed. "It's obvious to me that the output of this research was superior to if a single person attempted to study all the things. It would be impossible to make the work completed!" she smiles. "It's been a great experience for me to see the power of not just linking people, but also synthesising collectively knowledge."
Returning the power
"It's mostly an academic phrase, but I feel that it is applicable in the context of Water and Music: we're a community of practise," Cherie continues. "The term was coined in 1991 [by cognitive Anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger] and it is a term used to describe a group of individuals that don't just have the same interests in the same subject, but are also gathered to focus on learning how to do something better."
The writer explains how this might be the case for people working from the same field, or in similar roles across industries. People who communicate frequently and share knowledge. Water and Music will contribute by not just producing tools and media, but facilitating peer-to-peer education: "That'll be a really vital aspect of our future: breaking down information silos in the world of music, and encouraging people to be more collaborative," Cherie adds.
There's a sense of taking the power back' in this. Cherie hopes to assure the artists that they hold more influence than they think: "Certainly, in the streaming world, there are more and more consolidations, dominated by Spotify and other big tech firms. Royalty rates are going down but everything is going to go downwards! So we're providing artists the ability to comprehend the many different options. The artists we train and individuals around them to think more entrepreneurially."
Sux3d7DLXXZZHfaqDqtw7 the Water and Music team
Cheire explains that the term "community of practice" originally referred to professional communities but it could also apply to communities of creativity, such as the ones we have here. The focus of Water and Music the exact concentration is on the music industry and it's all down to the personal motivation. "I'm motivated by this work since I was a child playing piano. I spent a lot of being around classical music however, I am a fan of being around all kinds of artists and hearing their perspectives on where tech is going," Cherie continues. "Hopefully that whatever information we put out there will help artists and their teams better understand technology, and they'll be able to use it for creating cool art!"
The rabbit hole that leads to the bottom
The company's latest deep-dive study has focused on the mess that is Web3 which is the concept of the next technology of the internet based on blockchain technology. "We're trying to figure out what's the State of the Union for tech trends in music, especially the ones that have a lot of noise," she explains. "Web3 is an excellent example as there's a lot of confusion and no one knows exactly the exact nature of what's going on. It's the most extreme rabbit hole and it just keeps going down. Then it's like, "What's happening? ?'!"
In the world of music it is not surprising that among the most pressing concerns is fan opinion. "I consider that to be the top one reason why a lot of artists are not doing NFTs in the moment: because of fear of the backlash of the fans," she muses. "We did a report on the issues surrounding Web3. In the world of music, there are many concerns around licensing and intellectual property (IP) that are impacted by NFTs. That was a whole chapter!"
The tlg9Yi9H8w9qUpATyR6 The Water and Music meetup at the NFT.NYC conference
The next collaborative report within the community is already in progress. "We're researching even more nebulous subjects right now, like the metaverse, what ever that is!" Cherie jokes. "We're not even trying to build any thing right now. We're just trying to figure out what people think about it, as well as what the people are confused about." The publication contains interviews with artists, entrepreneurs, and professionals from the industry regarding their definition of the metaverse and what they are trying to achieve in it and also what's proving to be difficult to solve.
Cherie says that the aim is to blend this research and the development of online tools to address these issues. "We did this with some Web3 themes already such as secondary sales of music through NFTs and shares of royalties. Certain smart contracts stipulate that 10 to 20% of all secondary sales must go back to the original artist and a lot of users have been expressing that as a benefit. But I think the reality is that the vast majority of NFT's do not result in an additional sale," Cherie explains. She believes that the value lies due to the immediate relation and the connection that an NFT is a part of, and not so much in the possibility of having something to sell onwards again after.
In addition to the report, Water and Music will be creating a dashboard for tracking where customers can enter their NFT collection to see if there have been any further sales and if so, how the NFT is moving through the market. "We would like to create interactive tools that function as interactive data journalism specifically for musicians as they're probably those who think the most about the release or pricing NFT drops. We're developing crucial frameworks and tools that will aid people to do this task themselves."
Conflicting visions
Cherie notes that some of these newfangled terms are becoming more muddied rather than clearer with time "For the metaverse, for instance, there's a massive disparity between the way the concept of metaverse was historically as well as conceptually been defined, from to the 1960s." She explains that the Water and Music team is developing a model for understanding how the metaverse was defined in the past and the gaps between expectation and reality.
"The initial sci-fi works which mentioned the metaverse contained the vision of an the interconnectedness of virtual as well as IRL worlds. We are so far off from that vision right today. Yet, in the meantime, in the music industry musicians are saying "I've just created my own world!' but they essentially mean a virtual world.
"There are now directly conflicting views of the metaverse,"" she says. "You are dealing with Meta [Facebook's holding firm] and Epic Games on one side: both are centralized where one corporation owns all the assets and everything else. But then you have the concept of a Web3-forward, multi-layered metaverse, with interoperable identities and assets. It's logical to at least experiment with blockchain technology and the role it plays in facilitating that, but that directly opposes Facebook's stance."
Cherie says that the metaverse has "just turned into this vague word that anyone could use for their own benefit" and she would like to cut through the nonsense. This is in perfect alignment with her purpose: Water and Music will critically and analytically look into the issue, and be able to provide practical information to help people decide about how they should react. This has real-world use cases also, for instance, helping artists and their team when they are evaluating working with specific metaverse platform.
The Water and Music meetup at the NFT.NYC event.
Cherie concludes her tour in the usual manner by encouraging collaboration among and within Water and Music community. "In the coming months, we'll be rolling interviews with musicians, platforms, and startup founders. Our research into the metaverse is likely to continue throughout the end of summer and into fall therefore, if you're interested in getting involved with this, please let me know. If anyone has recommendations for interviewing people, we're all ears!"
To get involved, follow Cherie for updates on Twitter: @water andmusic. To become a member of the Water and Music community, and gain access to the community's in-depth research reports and Discord server, go to waterandmusic.com/membership.