A colleague of mine is at SXSW right now, and sent me a link to $STREAM, a new tokenised research framework for the music industry.

$STREAM is led by Cherie Hu, whose work I know fairly well, we’ve spoken online on occasion, and I have a lot of respect for her as a writer and thinker about the intersection of new technologies and the music industries. There aren’t very many people doing digital music business analysis well, but she’s by far one of the best. If anything was going to make me think that a project like this deserves to be successful, it’s her involvement.

One thing she has read correctly is the overlap between consumers of music tech news and semi-early adopters of cryptocurrencies and Web3 technologies. I’m afraid I’m not among them, and I have not yet seen a use case that improves things for the cultural and creative sector at a macro level. I’ve seen some good projects and some positive results for individual creators, but if pressed, I would say that on balance they are largely harmful to creators and certainly to consumers in the long term – and that’s without considering the catastrophic climate implications of the technology.

What I’m hearing from SXSW is an absolute mainstreaming and (suspiciously) well-financed promotional push of Web3 hype. This is not a grass roots development. Perhaps if I was there, someone could persuade me that all of this is a good idea, but studying blockchains and related technologies closely have not made me a Web3 enthusiast.

I’m yet to be convinced that DAOs provide a compelling alternative to cooperatives – and I’ve come to regard the word ‘tokenisation’ as a red flag, because of its near-total correlation with unregulated financial speculation. This is the same thinking that gave us all those websites in the early 2010s that thought that you could improve the music industry by making it more like the stock exchange, the casino or both at the same time. It’s what happens when you start from a position of Right-Libertarian philosophy, which almost all of these projects do.

There will of course be early winners in this game, but that is how pyramid schemes work. Not all Web3 projects are scams or opportunistic parasitism, of course – and to be absolutely clear, Cherie’s certainly won’t be – but none of the ‘problems’ addressed by $STREAM actually requires any of these technological solutions.

If the last 50 years of the internet has taught us anything it’s that open contributions to research, citizen science and communities of interest don’t really need to be gamified or incentivised with tokens. If, for instance, Linux, Wikipedia or Zooniverse had been established as DAOs with Wikibucks, Zootokens or Linuxcoins used to bribe contributors, I seriously doubt it would have improved those things.

If I thought it would be of benefit to either of us, I would probably give Cherie a shout once her SXSW commitments are behind her. If anyone could persuade me that Web3, DAOs, cryptocurrencies and NFTs are a net positive for society, it would probably be her. But I suspect we both have other things to focus on, and I wish her the best of luck.

I’m going to return now to being someone who does NOT write blog posts about cryptocurrency on the internet.

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