But a couple years earlier he had met the Winklevoss twins, of The Social Network fame, who had successfully reinvented themselves as crypto evangelists. In 2016 he launched his own record label, Blume Records. Recording and producing electronic dance music under the name 3LAU - pronounced “blau,” like his surname - he produced original tracks and remixes for artists including Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Ariana Grande, among others.
#Rihanna work memes how to#
Royal comes for the royaltiesīefore Justin Blau set out to upend the record industry, he learned how to navigate it as an artist. The internet knows a vulnerable middleman when it sees one - “ your margin is my opportunity” and all that - and few middlemen look more vulnerable, from this perspective, than record labels. Most artists make almost no money from streaming, while the majors are reporting record profits.ĭecoder: Olivia Rodrigo and how the music business makes songwriters fight over credits That was great news for the record labels, but the fundamental tensions with artists remained. But the labels were saved by the rise of streaming services like Spotify, which helped them make their existing back catalogs more profitable than ever before. At first, it seemed that file-sharing services like Napster might kill off the major record labels altogether. But for the most part, the major record labels controlled the industry. Occasionally, an alternative artist would strike out on their own and start an independent label. They controlled the production and distribution of records and CDs they had the money and relationships needed for promotion. Taylor Swift is now re-recording all her old albums after her former label sold the material out from underneath her.īefore the year 2000 or so, labels had all the leverage here. (Also, to maximize their profits.) This is a reliable source of frustration for lots of people, but especially the mega-stars, some of whom become famous in part due to their friction with labels: Prince wrote “slave” on his face to protest his treatment at the hands of Warner Bros. Mega-stars are rare, and so record labels hold on to as much of their earnings as possible to finance all the swings they take and miss. If you know anything about the relationship between record labels and artists, you know artists typically get the worse end of the deal.
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Today let’s talk about another of them: a startup called Royal that hopes to upend the traditional relationship between music labels and artists, with potentially significant implications for the kind of culture that gets created. (They had to convert all their contributions from Ethereum to dollars before the auction began the winning billionaire simply outbid them after it started.) The fact that ConstitutionDAO participants largely lost their intended refunds to network fees is worth noting, too - promising though it might be, Ethereum is so slow and expensive that I have come to think of it as the world’s worst computer.īut like I said: good and useful new things keep revealing themselves. Skepticism is still warranted, as a group of thousands of people found out this week when they attempted to buy the Constitution and found themselves at a structural disadvantage.
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#Rihanna work memes series#
Or a series of free NFTs that are now assembling themselves, based on the wishes of their various owners, into movies and games. Like a video game that pays you to play it. Venture capitalists want to put everything on the blockchain and generate big returns, but why not just use a database instead? To skeptics, everything else in the space looks like noise - a bunch of grifters and try-hards changing their Twitter profile pictures to pixelated punks and apes in an effort to eventually flip those NFTs to a greater fool.īut even as my mentions and direct messages fill up with readers fulminating about crypto - last week, after this piece, a paid subscriber wrote to me telling me he hopes that I die! - good and useful new things keep revealing themselves. One big knock on cryptocurrencies is that they’re a technology in search of a problem.