You may have reached this repo by seeing it mentioned on a social media story, or perhaps as part of a conversation. OR....maybe I haven’t updated this file in ages and you’re seeing it from a much more public and well-trafficked link. Regardless: WELCOME!
So this is a big deal for me. I’m trying to free myself from a way of thinking that I’ve lived under throughout my 20+ year career as a professional musician: The idea that I own my own music. I don’t. I mean, according to the courts I do, but if you hum one of my songs in public, you’ve defeated that system entirely. The truth is, you can’t own something intangible. Period.
So that kind of opens up Pandora’s box, doesn’t it? Why are songs still the length that FM radio stations or MTV likes them? Why are albums still under 80 minutes? Why are there albums at all? Why does an album, or even a song have to “stop” and become cemented? It doesn’t. This is just the weird space we find ourselves in after the exit from intellectual property being monetized in a tangible medium.
So here’s the beginning of an album, or project, or whatever. It’s on Github. You’ll be able to see every single change I make in the repo. You will be able to download my session files and see how I made it. Some of you will be able to branch it and make your own album with things that I started.
So inevitably there’s some technical questions. First and foremost, I want to be clear that my #1 answer to any technical question regarding this is “I’m not sure yet”. My outline below may change tomorrow if a better solution exists.
I’m still at the drawing board, but I intend on this project having its own environmentally-friendly proof of stake blockchain that will cover any and all financial or intellectual property transactions related to the project.
I may decide that there’s a 1.0 release and put it where my other albums go (Spotify, etc). Then all of those royalties will go back into the overall blockchain (perhaps with the statements stored elsewhere, see the next question). This way, if you buy the album on (for lack of a better term) “my side of the business”, when it does well on Spotify or gets licensed somewhere, you actually may make money back from your token by the token simply growing in value and being traded (albeit this is NOT the point of this project).
I want to avoid using the term “NFT” as much as possible here, because I’m starting to think that the definition has been altered by the way it’s being used in the mainstream.
Furthermore, I’m not sure if this will be monetized or “gifted’, but I’d like to have creative tokens that allow branches to be used anywhere and everywhere so long as the transactions stay on the blockchain. For example, you decide you want to branch the album as your own and upload your own version to your own Spotify account. It becomes a chart topping hit and you make millions of dollars. Well, everyone who owns any stake in the project earns from that. The idea here is to FULLY merge blockchain investment and music for the first time. Not an NFT of an album, but the album itself exists as a vital, organic, always changing element of the blockchain.
I’m using Github as a start, and a way of tracking every single update until the blockchain is opened to the public. It may continue to live here simply as a series of links, or it may not need Github at all. I do like the idea of this repo though, simply because it is a very loud reminder that this isn’t being treated like an album, but much more like open source code. That being said, everything shouldn’t be stored here. GitHub has a bandwidth limit and high hosting fees to go beyond it, and the goal here is for this to exist on its own, completely decentralized.
A blockchain should not be storing an album either, nor should the nodes be forced to download every single session file of every single branch. This would make it taxing for anyone who simply wanted to browse or listen to it. The closest thing I have to a solution is using IPFS, which could be described as a “sophisticated torrent”. It is a P2P file protocol that allows mirroring of files based on nodes much like a torrent does, but it also does contain cryptographic hashes that can easily be stored on a blockchain. So with a bit of work, we could host all of the session files not only on any web host, but also on the listener's device, then keep the download/upload log data on the blockchain itself, giving total transparency and possibly even compensation in tokens for seeding the IPFS data on your own node (or computer).
No. This exists alongside my career as The Flashbulb for the foreseeable future. From this point forward, unless this idea quickly dies in a dumpster fire, any intellectual property I make will ignore my own copyright protection and abide by this project. If that gives the tokens value, so be it. If not, so be it. It changes nothing from my perspective. I intend on giving tokens away at first to some artists close to me, and then some of my supporters. I want to reiterate that I have NO IDEA how the economy of these tokens will pan out. They may exist merely as faux-licenses, or they may end up on Kraken. Who tf knows.
It’s not. When I die, hopefully someone else will take over, or you can listen to the branches. I may get up to 20.0, and it’ll probably evolve a whole lot from 1.0 by then and sound entirely different.
Let’s stop thinking of released music as tombstones, and instead think of them as organisms that evolve with the creators. Thanks for reading into the beginning of my crazy idea. I love ya. :)
-Benn Jordan