The Emo Thread Genre • Page 318

I typed this into Spotify. CSTVT?

 

New emo album cover just dropped

 

Lands somewhere between shoegaze, grunge, noise, and post punk

 

pretty lo-fi revival type stuff. im really really digging this

 

Yeah, that’s 19 minutes of music I’ve listened to a disgusting amount of times this year. They’re working on a follow up right now too!

 

Hell yeah give me a Armlock lp soon

 

This album rules

 

Chill emo riyl American football, empire empire, Christie front drive

 

Long thread.

Nothing much to say except for

 

?

 

Topshelf going to be selling their bands discographies as NFTs. Can't wait to own the first 15 seconds of Weed Science.

 

Cool, that label is dead to me.

 

All joking aside, the thread is worth a read - Kevin is definitely looking at NFTs beyond the scope of the crypto-bro-stock-easy-gainz phenomenon that we are all painfully subjected to. I don't entirely buy it, but his perspective is more subdued than that of the freaks on the internet screaming about how their AI generated clipart of an robot ape is worth 2 billion dollars or whatever.

He doesn't really talk about NFT integration into the label in any meaningful manner.

 

yes. i would never in a million years participate in that but what he’s saying makes sense. it helps to actually read the thread.

 

How so? Nothing about it makes sense. Plenty of saying 'this is the future, strap on-board!', nothing saying what the benefits are beyond a nebulous 'the individual is in control', and no examples of how that's beneficial to me. I don't want to be in control! If I lose my Bandcamp password somehow, or my account gets hacked, there's ways for me to get back into my account and still have all my music. What happens if I lose my private key? What happens if I get a virus and my private key is compromised? If something happens to my bank, I have FDIC insurance to make sure I still have my money. What happens to my crypto wallet in a similar situation? How is Ethereum an 'open protocol', when a big Ethereum hack has already caused the protocol to fork? How is something like OpenSea not centralized and platform-specific? People have had their NFTs literally removed from their magical decentralized MetaMask wallets. What benefit would a hardcore band get from performing a 'web3' show over the streaming shows we've seen over this year? How is any of this 'sustainable and accessible?' What benefit do I gain, as a consumer and music enthusiast, by digital music becoming a scarce resource?

 

I am totally new to this stuff and his thread did help me, as he's a person I trust based on his work/business ethics and mentality over the years. I'm still reticent to "strap on-board" to anything I don't really know about, but everything kinda sucks the way it is right now, so I'm trying to be more open-minded to new possibilities.

These are totally fair questions and ones I wouldn't even think to ask. He seems open to having productive conversations. Why don't you ask him?

 

yes.

 

I’m not the biggest NFT fan but I think he articulated his points well and I’m not going to “cancel” or “drop” the label over this, especially when some of my favorite bands are on the label.

 

I actually want to see what answers to those questions would look like. You should ask him.

 

he has an account on this website and posts in this thread often. it wouldn’t be difficult to ask him.

 

there is also a topshelf discord where Kevin is exteremely open about web3

 

this post made me realize i have no idea how to read twitter threads. haha.

 

i read a book last year called 'convergence culture' by henry jenkins that was published in 2006. in the book, jenkins hypothesises that media, and the consumption of media, will change with the new web 2.0. he argues that a new internet is on the horizon, one where the individual is in control and will be able to participate in the internet, culture, and media like never before! it is an incredibly dated book and a relic of a bygone era.

reading through kevin's tweets made me feel like i was reading something written 15/20 years ago about the future of the internet - he even uses some of the exact same phrases and buzzwords they were using back then ("a new internet is on the horizon", "individual-centric", "you are in control", "participate in the new internet").

it should be obvious why "we are all eventually gonna navigate the internet from our wallet addresses" is a laughable statement - your relatives can barely use facebook! telling people in 2021 that, in the future, music will come in the form of nfts is akin to telling somebody in 2006 that zunes will be the future of the music industry!

i think kevin, like everybody else in the world, realizes that musicians are not getting paid enough for their art through the current spotify model, and is trying to find a way to resolve that - which is obviously not a bad thing! however, he is wrong to think that nfts are a sustainable solution to the spotify model in the same way that the industry was wrong fifteen years ago to think that making people pay 10 dollars for an album on itunes was a sustainable solution to piracy.