Inside the Internet's First 77-Artist "Headless Band"

I don't feel a sense of unfulfilled promise with regards to NFTs at all. They are not a solution, but a canvas. I think if they are seen as a salve to musicians' problems, they will fall short every time. If they are used by artists in creative ways, more and more people will see that their true nature is that of a medium to play with. This is wher... See more

Q: How does SongCamp fit into the world of music NFTs? Is there unfulfilled promise there? A: Songcamp is a little different from other music NFT projects, as it strongly values collective creation. In a musical landscape that puts the solo artist genius on a pedestal, a whole community creating an ego-less body of work feels more interesting and n... See more

Q: How integral was the lore? A: One of the cool things we talked about was how storytelling pulls you in in a more focused way than a set of instructions would. I think this world-building aspect helps you reframe things. You almost end up acting like a kid again: You have no restraints, you have this freedom, and you’re operating in this new worl... See more

The last piece was holdback. We kept 10 percent of this pie held back, so that [a committee of 14 members from Camp Chaos, including team stewards, music guides, and core operations members] can make the decision to flow value to emergent and undervalued work that was less visible in camp and therefore did not receive [as much].

Q: How did compensation work? A: The first one was Coordinape, where you're [gifting tokens] to your peers and flowing percentage points to them every two weeks [based on the value you believe they added to the project]. Also every two weeks, we had a self-selection form, and this — opposite of Coordinape — is “This is how much I deserve.” You get ... See more

One thing I would add is, at the start of camp, you have to build trust. There is no inherent trust, because you're all new to the network, so you're gonna have to have rigidity in your structure, because that contains the chaos, for lack of a better word. But as time goes on, you're building more and more trust in the network, and the network [slo... See more

Another tactic is “default to open.” All of our channels are defaulted to open to foster greater transparency and context for all participants. Most of our decision-making comes, not from consensus, but more consent-based decision-making — looking for objections, rather than wider consensus on everything.

There are a few concepts or fundamentals that we have explored in this project. One, as Matthew touched on, is containers: time-bound, spatial, experiential containers [such as “scope,” which outlined the end goal of the entire project for clear mission alignment, and “teams,” which detailed strategies for groups of people with different creative s... See more

Q: How did you balance chaos and cohesion?

A: A running joke has been that Chaos is the most organized project we've done so far, and it’s because of these containers we've designed to make people feel oriented when they show up.