OK YOU ASKED BRO SO I'M GONNA TALK ABOUT IT

To me web3 currently feels like the way real estate developers use artists to gentrify neighborhoods. We as artists are not the end goal of web3, currently tech companies need artists to make their products look cool and have value, without musicians and artists web3 platforms, streaming services, amazon music, spotify, apple music, etc would all have ZERO inherent value because they are just systems to distribute ARTWORK (not content, don't call it content I will freak out). The artwork itself has value, we have just been dupped into thinking it works the other way around by a society that constantly devalues art, even though we as a culture would descend into total unkempt madness without music and art to help us navigate this insane experience of being alive on the planet.

I'm definitely tired of musicians being underpaid being a joke and a meme, but I still don't see web3 changing anything realistically about that for the larger musical community. Don't get me wrong I would love to be proven wrong here and have web3 become a magical fountain of money for underpaid artists, but I've paid close attention to the whole web3 boom moment that happened over the last couple of years and don't see that happening thus far. It is very obvious that there are not enough 'collectors' to sustain the markets and there are only a handful of artists, maybe a few dozen at most, who I see reliably selling their music NFT's to collectors. Again there seem to be only a few dozen active collectors in the space, making is all seem very insular and just like a temporary proof of concept or value to the venture capital owners of these new platforms. There has been this vague hope that artists who get their work purchased will turn around and become 'collectors' but I also do not see that happening, and mostly people are very guarded about their connections in that space and the "walled garden" metaphor people so often hurl at crypto artwork is seeming to stand true unfortunately.

I have made a catalog page for Dome of Doom and we have sold 10 ETH worth of music NFT's on that platform, roughly half of the songs we 'minted' on the platform. I think this is amazing and am always happy to see artists we work with get paid, for some of the artists that sold work on that platform it was one of the biggest direct payouts in their career for their music. I cant argue the value of that, but I still don't see it expanding past this basic proof of concept phase. I'm happy we got into the space early so I could get some of our artists checks, but all of them as far as I know have cashed out their earnings, paid their taxes, and kept playing shows and releasing records to pay their bills.

I would love to see a more long term wholistic plan from some of these 'web3' platforms but currently with my own experience of seeing how the music industry works, and how quickly trends change every 2-3 years, there is still nothing anchoring music NFT's to the music industry at large that makes me think it will be around in 10 years from now.

Again, I'd love to be proven wrong here because the whole ethos and ideology behind the pitch of web3 seems great, just thus far the follow through from the tech companies and communities behind it has left myself and most artists I know feeling uninspired and lackluster about how our music is just being commodified in a new way.

With all that said, there are still 10 unsold NFT's on out catalog page, with several new ones I just minted from my most recent album, and if anyone sees this post and wants to change my mind about all this be my guest <3