The Lab Report 01 - Welcome

To the first proper edition of this newsletter!

A few months back, I started sharing interesting links around music and web3 with my colleagues at Red Light Management. That's now expanded to include some good friends in music and new acquaintances in web3.

I also decided it would be good to share what I'm learning with more people, so I recently published my first piece on the music x web3 space.

In that article, I outline 14 different ways for musicians to get involved in web3. It's gotten some positive feedback so far. I'd love to hear your thoughts and happy to chat through ideas if you are thinking of launching something with one of your artists.

I'm also going to be sending out this newsletter on a regular bi-weekly basis moving forward, running it with my good friend and collaborator Francis.

Lastly - if you have any friends or co-workers who might find this useful, I'd be grateful if you shared it with them! They can sign up here.

Now onto the important stuff.

Artist/Platform News

• A music NFT remixer app called Spores just launched. The project lets users remix music NFTs and then mint these remixes as “Spores”. Built on Zora.
• Great Billboard article on Camp Chaos - a 50 musician collective (+30 support crew) that released over 45 new tracks as part of a 20K NFT collection.
• Eminem and Snoop Dogg Highlight Their Bored Apes in The Video for Their New Single "From The D 2 The LBC"
• Warner Records UK launching an NFT collection in partnership with Bose
• Arpeggi Launches its First Remix Contest

Deeper Dives

• Are NFT Record Labels the Future of Music?
• The Next Wave of Crypto Music by Dan Fowler
• Great article highlighting some upcoming trends in the crypto music space including non-transferable tokens, the role of curation, music streaming and web3, composability and more.
• The Web3 Dream of an Equitable Nightlife Industry
• Cool feature in Resident Advisor highlighting some projects in electronic music including RefractionDAO, Friends With Benefits, etc.
• Playing By Protocol
• Great deep dive on Nina - the leading music NFT protocol on Solana.
• How Arpeggi is Rebuilding Music Making With Blockchain
• Deep dive on Arpeggi who are building producer tools focused on "open-source music creation and changing the standard so that any sound you hear is a sound you can create with."

Metaverse

This isn't really a metaverse newsletter, but a good portion of music x web3 action will eventually take place in metaverse spaces, so it's important to stay aware of where things are going.

Here are a couple of good in-depth reports from the last couple weeks. If you want to get up to speed, Matthew Ball is one of the leading thinkers in this space and definitely worth checking out. He has a new book out today.

• Water + Music Drops a Big Report on the Metaverse
• This article outlines the many paths for artist involvement
• McKinsey Releases a 77 Page Report Titled "Value Creation in the Metaverse"
• "This report examines the emergence of the metaverse: its history and characteristics, the factors driving investment, how consumers and businesses are using it today and may in the future, its value-creation potential, and how leaders and policy makers can plan their strategies and near-term actions."
• 70% of Media & Entertainment companies today are Metaverse adopters. McKinsey forecasts that Metaverse projects will take up 15% of digital budgets in the next 3-5 years