The community-owned rave: event organisers as DAOs

This piece explores the intersection of underground rave culture and Web 3 concepts like decentralized autonomous organisations.

Lately I’ve been thinking about an idea I had pre-pandemic. I wanted to set up a local rave night to fill a gap I perceived in Berlin’s nightlife. I mentally prepared myself to do all the heavy lifting involved in setting up a new club night – something I’d witnessed from friends taxiing artists around, losing money on events, having to staff the entrance, handling logistics, and of course doing the promo. The pandemic put all those ideas on hold and helped generate a new perspective on things.

Goal-oriented

I previously explored what artists’ fanbases can look like as blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organisations (DAOs) – I recommend reading it if you’re not familiar with DAOs. One important aspect for DAOs is that they should have a clear reason to exist, so that people have something clear to organise around and identify new initiatives.

For events, that goal is pretty straightforward: for example to run a number of events per year (e.g. 6, 12, 24) with a clear musical and subcultural footprint (e.g. hyperpop meets queer hardtechno).

There are lots of activities to take care of, such as:

  • Artist bookings
  • Travel & accommodation (unless fully local)
  • Artwork & design
  • Promotion
  • Venue decoration
  • Tickets & admissions

Many of these require funds and when starting out there’s always a risk you won’t break even. DAOs can mitigate that risk and distribute the heavy lifting surrounding these tasks to a passionate community.

Community-owned raves

My first association with the above words would actually be ‘free party’ culture and teknivals of the 90s, as pioneered by Spiral Tribe (artwork above). They would travel country & continent with soundsystems and throw public raves that were free to attend (and usually illegal). The idea was that by being at the rave, you were not just audience, you’re a participant – a similar mindset to Burning Man‘s ethos. The teknival scene still exists today, by the way.

But what would a community-owned rave look like if it could somehow be formalized?

  • Persistent community. Most events have an audience that reconvenes and persists through brief gatherings. Part of the audience will be ‘regulars’ and part will be newcomers. It can be hard to know which part is which and to really feel connected. By making sure the community is organised outside of the context of the occasional event, the community can exist in a persistent state and experience connectedness daily. (see also: Why local is the answer to a future of new normals)
  • Shared outcome ownership. The community puts together the events. This may be a representative democratic process, where people get elected to a board or special crews, e.g. for artist selection, brand and artwork, and perhaps various ongoing activities like music releases, mixtapes and podcasts, meetups, listening sessions, etc. This way the output and outcome is a collective responsibility.
  • Tokenized. Participants should be rewarded. Most underground events don’t make a lot of money, and don’t have a goal to make lots of cash, so rewards for contributions could come in the form of tokens which give people the ability to participate in the governance of the DAO or get access to other perks. Event tickets could represent a token, which gives you a way to essentially peg token prices to fiat money and automatically make attendees community members (I’d make sure to only sell 1 per person though – maybe translating actual attendance to tokens, rather than just holding the ticket. I’d also carefully think through the implications of attendance always representing 1 token).
  • Proposals & voting. People can submit proposals for artists, event decoration, and peripheral activities. They can request budgets in the form of tokens which they can hold (for governance or to let them accrue value) or cash out in order to finance their activity.

The exact mechanics would depend a lot on the community and what it wants to incentivise. For example, in some contexts you might want to encourage people to spread the word by sharing photos of the events, but some events might enforce strict no-photos rules so that people can be themselves without the pressures of being seen on social media (or worst case: becoming a meme).

Not public, not private, but community events

One example of how this might work can be gleaned from the Friends With Benefits (FWB) DAO, which is a creative community that requires people to buy $FWB tokens in order to participate. It then rewards tokens, as described in the bullet points above, for certain activities. While I personally would avoid throwing up high economic barriers to participatio, for the sake of inclusivity (which is also why many events in Berlin have flexible entrance prices, e.g. minimum 5, but 10 if you can afford it), FWB has been able to create an economic space where members can reward each other with tokens that can be cashed out in order to finance projects. (I don’t mean to imply FWB in general is not inclusive – it’s just a general concern I have with regards to onboarding people into tokenized communities)

This has translated into a real-life event in Miami recently, with DJs like Yves Tumor and Jubilee, that you could only attend if you held a certain number of tokens. For those from out of town, the community created a city guide which can be unlocked in exchange for tokens. It’s an excellent example of how communities can create value for other members either through direct activities (events) or peripheral (guides) and how that value can then flow around the community. All of this didn’t exist a year ago, so what they’ve been able to achieve and fund is incredible.

Stronger together

Many events already function as decentralized autonomous organisations in informal ways. Connecting it to the Web3 allows the community to persist across the metaverse and leverage NFTs, communal creation, and channel the unique talents of all involved.

It gives a certain predictability too. If you have a big community around your event, it can be tough picking artists for your line-up, since you only have so much time per night, which means not everyone will get to play. If the community becomes self-sustaining and energized, it should be easy for the organisation to make a risk assessment and set up more event nights.

It could even extend its footprint, so that people in other cities can set up local chapters under the same brand. Over time, the DAO becomes representative of a subculture and may see artist exchanges and people traveling to each other’s cities to meet community members there and experience the local chapter’s events. At scale, the DAO and the new subculture might become synonymous, though it’s also possible to think small and keep it to a small, local community of fans & friends.

The choice is yours – and theirs.

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Why I’m joining IDAGIO  —  a classical music startup — and moving to Berlin

Today I’m excited to announce that I’m joining IDAGIO, a streaming service for classical music lovers, as Director of Product. I’m already in the process of relocating to Berlin, where I’ll be joining the team later this month.

In this post, I want to explain why I so strongly believe in this niche focused music service and IDAGIO’s mission. I also want to shed light on the future of MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE as a newsletter, a type of media, and an agency. (tl;dr: the newsletter lives on!)

Two months ago, a friend whom I had worked with in Moscow, at music streaming service Zvooq, forwarded me a vacancy as a Twitter DM. By then, I had developed a kind of mental auto-ignore, because friends kept sending me junior level vacancies in music companies. I was never looking for a ‘job’ — I had a job (but thanks for thinking of me ❤️). However, I trusted that this friend knew me better as a professional, so I opened the link.

I was immediately intrigued. I hadn’t heard of IDAGIO before, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about niche services. At one point, the plan for Zvooq was to not build a typical one-size-fits-all app like all the other music streaming services are doing, but instead it would be to split different types of music-related behaviours into smaller apps. The goal would then become to monopolize those behaviours: like Google has monopolized search behaviour (now called Googling), and Shazam has monopolized Shazaming. Long term, it would allow us to expand that ecosystem of apps beyond streaming content, so we would be able to monetize behaviours with higher margins than behaviours related to music listening.

We ended up building just one, Fonoteka, before we had to switch strategies due to a mix of market reality, licensing terms, and burn rate. That was fine: it was what the business needed, and what Russia as a market needed.

Since then, there have been a number of niche music ideas, like services for indie rock, high quality streaming, etc. And while those are all commendable, I was never quite interested in them, because it just seemed like those services would not have a strong enough strategic competitive advantage in the face of tech giants with bulging coffers. Their offers were often also just marginally better, but getting people to install an app and build a habit around your service, unlearn their old solution, learn to do it your way… that’s a huge thing to ask of people, especially once you need to go beyond the super early adopters.

But niche works on a local level. You can see it with Yandex.Music and Zvooq in Russia, with Anghami in the Middle East, and Gaana in India.

Over the last decade, I’ve lived in Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and The Netherlands (where I’m from). Each country has unique ways of interacting with music. Music has a different place in each culture. I think local music services work, because they combine catalogues and local taste with a deep understanding of how their target audience connects to music. It allows them to build something catering exactly to those behaviours. It’s music and behaviour combined.

When I started talking to the IDAGIO team, I soon understood that they too combine these elements. Classical music, in all its shapes and forms, has many peculiarities, which will remain an object of study for me for the next years. The fact that the same work often has a multitude of recordings by different performers already sets it apart. One can map a lot of behaviours around navigation, exploring, and comparison to just this one fact.

An example of one way in which IDAGIO lets people explore various performances of the same work.

Despite being younger and having more modest funding, IDAGIO has already built a product that caters better to classical music fans than the other streaming services do (and also serves lossless streams). Understanding that, I was fast convinced that this was something I seriously needed to consider.

So I got on a plane and met the team. Over the course of three days, we ran a condensed design sprint, isolated a problem we wanted to tackle together, interviewed expert team members, explored options, drew up solutions, and prototyped a demo to test with the target audience. It’s an intense exercise, especially when you’re also being sized up as a potential team member, but the team did such a good job at making me feel welcome and at home (❤️). Through our conversations, lunches, and collaboration, I was impressed with the team’s intelligence, creativity, and general thoughtfulness.

Then I spent some extra time in Berlin — after all, I’d be moving there. Aforementioned friend took me to a medical museum with a room full of glass cabinets containing jars with contents which will give me nightmares for years to come. Besides that, I met a bunch of other friends, music tech professionals, and entrepreneurs, who collectively convinced me of the high caliber of talent and creative inspiration in the city.

Returning home, I made a decision I didn’t expect to make this year, nor in the years to come. A decision to make a radical switch in priorities.

Motivation, for me, comes from the capacity to grow and to do things with meaningful impact. MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE has exposed me to a lot of different people, a lot of different problems, and has allowed me to do what I find interesting, what I’m good at, but also what I grow and learn from. With IDAGIO I can do all of the latter, but with depth, and with a team.

Classical music online has been sidelined a bit. It makes a lot of sense when you place it in a historical perspective: a lot has changed in recent years. The web’s demographic skews older now. You can notice this by counting the number of family members on Facebook. The internet used to be something most adults would just use for work, so if you were building entertainment services, you target the young, early adopter demographic. That’s pop music, rock, electronic, hiphop, etc. Classical was there, sure, but Spotify wasn’t designed around it, iTunes wasn’t, YouTube wasn’t.

Now we’re actually reaching a new phase for music online. The streaming foundation has been built. Streaming is going mainstream. The platforms from the 2007–2009 wave are maturing and looking beyond their original early adopter audiences… So we’re going to see a lot of early adopters that are not properly served anymore. They’re going to migrate, look for new homes. A very important segment there, one that has always been underserved, are classical music fans. And now, this niche audience is sizeable enough to actually build a service around.

Why? Well, the internet has changed since the large last wave of music startups. Mobile is becoming the default way people connect to the web. For adults, this has made the web less of a thing for ‘work’, and has made entertainment more accessible. Connected environments make it easy to send your mobile audio to your home hifi set, or car speakers. The amount of people on the internet has more than doubled.

This makes the niche play so much more viable than just a few years ago. It has to be done with love, care, and a very good understanding of whose problem you’re trying to solve (and what that problem is). IDAGIO has exactly the right brilliant minds in place to pull this off and I’m flattered that in 2 weeks time, I’ll get to spend 2,000 hours a year with them.

What happens to the agency?

I’ll be winding down the agency side of MxTxF. This means I’m not taking on any more clients, but I’m happy to refer you to great people I know. Some longer term projects, that just take a couple of hours per week, I’ll keep on to bring to completion.

What happens to the newsletter?

The newsletter goes on! I get a lot of personal fulfilment out of it. The agency was born out of the newsletter, so who knows what more it will spawn. I’m actually figuring out a way to add audio and video content to the mix. I expect Midem and Sónar+D next June will be pilots for that. Berlin is a great place for music tech, so if anything, I hope the newsletter will only get more interesting as time goes on.

Besides the personal fulfilment, it allows me to be in touch with this wonderful community, to meet fascinating people, and occasionally to help organise a panel and bring some of my favourite minds into the same room at the same time.

If you’d like to support the newsletter, you can help me out on Patreon. You can become a patron of the newsletter — with your support, I can add extra resources to the newsletter, which will let me push the content to the next level (high on the list: a decent camera).

Elgar making an early recording of the work in 1920. Those pipes are acoustic recording horns, which were piped to a diaphragm which would vibrate a cutting stylus — directly turning sound waves into a material recording.

I leave you with Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85, which I discovered as a student, listening to the brilliant Szamár Madár by Venetian Snares in which it is sampled.

▶️ Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85

You can listen to the work, in full, on IDAGIO.

I’d love to hear about your favourite works and recordings. Feel free to email me on bg@idagio.com, with a link, and tell me what I should listen for.