Inside Catalog’s Curation Strategy That’s Hoping to Keep Web3 Music From Being Lost in a Sea of Noise
Major record labels are responsible for only one of every 26 songs released today, making music curation more important than ever
More music is being released into the world than ever before. Last month, Music Business Worldwide’s Tim Ingham spotlighted the shrinking market share of the three major record companies, Sony, Universal and Warner – despite releasing 3,940 tracks every day. “For every track released via major record company distribution today, another 24 are released outside their walls,” he wrote.
That’s mind boggling. Dan Fowler, director of Open Source Projects at HIFI Labs and author of the newsletter Liminal Spaces, put it this way: “Of the 196 million music tracks/videos available on music streaming platforms today, NEARLY 50% have been released since 2020.”
And of course, AI’s effects on the music industry are just beginning to take shape. It’s never been more imperative to tend to our catalogs. Matty Karas at Music REDEF highlighted Fowler’s quote in his daily effusion on the music industry, adding, “We. Need. Human. Curators. And. Editors. And. Selecters. To. Guide. Us. Through. All. That. Music.”
The word curation is derived from the Latin ‘curare,’ which literally means to take care. Without creating clear pathways for that care, we’ll be – indeed, we already are – lost in a sea of noise, floating in our own algorithmic bubbles. Web2 curation has failed to keep pace with the deluge, and if web3 is to avoid the same outcome, we’ll need to build lanes for the humans.
Even though catalogs in web3 are markedly smaller than in web2, some organizations are already doing this. As of this writing, there are a combined 3,500 total editions – i.e. distinct music non-fungible token (NFT) releases – on prominent music NFT platforms Sound and Catalog. That’s less music than the majors release every day. Onboarding friction and crypto stigma certainly play a role in that disparity, but so too does curation. To maintain a high level of quality and cohesion, most platforms handle curation in-house and gatekeep their offerings – usually setting the expectation that they’ll open their doors in the future.
The controlled environment gives platforms time to ensure growth won’t overwhelm their infrastructure, and to build sustainable curation strategies that anticipate scale. Planning for the latter is especially crucial in a web3 world defined by context and community-building – and not by algorithms – where reckoning with web2’s 100,000-new-songs-a-day problem would quickly become untenable.
Read more: The Beat: Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Fearless Exploration, Wild Awake Details Emerge and Water & Music’s NFT Collector Study
In the middle of 2022, after the core Catalog team had spent a full year listening to and assessing thousands of artist submissions, they brought in Athena Yasaman – who formerly worked in artist partnership and data curator roles at Twitch and Spotify – to be their head of community and curation strategy. One of her major undertakings was the launch of curation cycles, a step toward decentralizing the curation process that would ostensibly maintain quality.
The project orients around the election of ten-person curator cohorts that bring “on artists from music scenes, genres, identities and cultural backgrounds that aren’t yet well represented on Catalog, and artists that may not have heard about Catalog or be willing to experiment with a new tech if it wasn’t for their connection to the curator,” Yasaman told me recently.
I had the honor of being named as a curator to the third curation cycle, which brought me face-to-face with the onboarding challenges many web3 platforms are dealing with today, and into community with Yasaman, whose story provides a framework for the experience and for the paramount importance of curation.
Yasaman grew up in Sacramento, California. At the behest of her parents, she started playing violin when she was four, and for much of her childhood, her music world was informed by Suzuki violin tapes, playing in youth orchestras and the music of her parents' countries – her dad is Greek Cypriot and her mom is from Iran. At the time she was almost completely removed from popular music streams. “I was in fourth or fifth grade and just moved to a new school and all the girls were talking about going to the Britney Spears concert on the weekend,” she said. “And they're like, do you have a ticket? Are you going? And I'm like, who is Britney Spears?”
At 16, Yasaman bought a Fender electric violin on eBay and left the orchestra world behind. She wanted to join a rock band with some older guys in high school, which – to the dismay of her parents – she did. “My parents hated it because the vocalists were often screaming,” she said. Yasaman spent the rest of her teenage years playing in two different bands and going to post-hardcore and metal shows.
In the late aughts, shortly after high school, her music world continued to expand when she heard Madlib’s Shades of Blue and a BBC essential mix by Flying Lotus. “Those two specific music experiences triggered my interest in electronic music and hip hop, realizing how intrinsically connected they are to older musical traditions like classical and jazz that I grew up on.”
Exploring those connections continued to expand her distinct music palate, giving her the kind of breadth that makes for good curators. When she went off to college at Humboldt State University, she and her housemates started putting that range to good use, building playlists on an emerging platform that had just arrived to the US: Spotify. “I realized whatever it is we're seeing right now, this is the beginning of the future of music consumption,” she said.
Armed with a major in studio art, a minor in business administration and a certificate in museum and gallery practices, she hit the job market and applied for a gig at the streaming platform. Her application, like so many others, got lost in the wash. But by now Yasaman was invested in the space, so she went back to school, eventually earning a Masters degree in global entertainment and music business from Berklee College of Music.
After graduating, she began interning at The Echo Nest, a music intelligence and data platform that powered solutions for major digital outlets – one being Spotify. As Yasaman was transitioning to a larger role there, Spotify purchased the MIT-grown organization, and by the time she went full-time, she found herself working for the streaming behemoth.
She spent the next four and a half years there, working in data curation and editorial roles in a tenure highlighted by Fresh Finds, the playlist series she co-founded that gave preference to independent artists and labels.
“When I first joined the company, I had a hard time finding artists I was unfamiliar with through Spotify’s playlists, which were filled with more established artists that were often label priorities,” she said. “I had my Spotify work on one screen and I had the SoundCloud or Hype Machine tab on the other, because that's how I was finding music at that time."
Listen: Big Brother and the Hodling Company | Heno
At the company’s annual Hack Week in 2014, Yasaman and a few colleagues teamed up to explore a new playlist model that prioritized independent artists that had never been placed on a playlist. "I wanted to recreate a similar experience to a SoundCloud style feed and those early blog days," she said, "where you’d constantly stumble on teenagers that weren’t connected to the industry and had like a few hundred followers and a fire track." Fresh Finds emerged, elevating important music buried by the algorithm and catapulting little-known musicians from dozens of monthly listeners to tens or even hundreds of thousands.
But as popular as Fresh Finds was (and continues to be), independent music wasn’t a top priority for the company – it simply didn’t add to the bottom line. Facing slim margins ahead of their IPO, Spotify transitioned from being a ‘music company’ to an ‘audio company,’ a move that was meant to appeal to shareholders, not artists. Disillusioned, Yasaman left the organization in 2018, and a year later, she settled into a music partnerships role at Twitch.
“The business model [at Twitch] is better than Spotify's as a creator because it's a minimum of 50 percent of the revenue from the [subscriptions] versus, you know, a dividend of $0.003.” And even though artists tend to net less than half of the take, the margins are still sizably better than in music streaming.
Yasaman’s time at Twitch overlapped with the pandemic, which hit artists – already inordinately reliant on live performance revenue amidst an inequitable streaming economy (98.6% of Spotify’s artists are making just $36 per artist per quarter) – especially hard. “Everything was closed in 2020, but for me it was the busiest year of my career,” she said. “I couldn't imagine a platform in web3 taking that big a cut – it would feel so wrong.”
Yasaman first became aware of Catalog in 2021, when friends and colleagues began talking about it on her timeline. “I started poking around the site and recognized a lot of the artists that I feel are tremendously talented, but typically overlooked in the traditional industry, minting and selling their [1/1 NFTs] there,” she said. “The look and feel of the site also immediately resonated – it’s absent of gimmicky vibes and buzzwords; the focus is truly on the music. I let them know they caught my attention, and things progressed from there.”
Yasaman joined Catalog in 2022 about a year after its launch, tapped to evolve and scale the curation program, which resulted in a more nuanced approach that was underscored by the arrival of curation cycles. “We don’t know exactly which artists the contributing curators will onboard to Catalog, but we trust their judgment,” Yasman told me. “I think about this a lot like deciding to go to a party — you don’t know what tracks you might hear, but you decide to go based on the DJ’s taste.”
I’ve been paying attention to Catalog since its inception, attracted to its ethics as a champion for context – “music is valuable, and how you discover it matters” – permanence – “these records live beyond the reaches of our platform, enabling artists to capture the value of their music for eternity (even if Catalog disappears)” – and a commitment to giving artists 100 percent of revenue from initial sales.
One of Catalog’s most fascinating discoveries is that they see “no correlation between an artist's monthly listeners, social following, and their success on Catalog” – a testament to our overreliance on vanity metrics. A high follower count does not equal quality.
So when I was named a curator, I thought hard about the right way to approach the task – like what’s the most inclusive way to be a good advocate for my music communities (the ones from “music scenes, genres, identities and cultural backgrounds that aren’t yet well represented on Catalog”)? And who should I ask first?
There were also logistical questions. I was allotted up to four invites with a limited amount of time to use them – how should I coordinate with the artists in my community who use communication channels ‘irregularly’? How much time should I leave the invitation extended before moving on to someone equally deserving? And what’s the best way to approach those who are justly dubious of new technologies that promise disruption but inevitably get sucked into the extractive vacuum of the status quo?
I started small, messaging a handful of folks. Responses ranged from skeptical to interested, and most were at least curious. Many wanted to learn more, some disappeared, a couple said ‘sure’ and then disappeared, and one person already familiar with crypto declined due to “prohibitive network costs,” since each transaction on the Ethereum network costs a gas fee (Catalog does offer a Mint Fund to cover artists minting their very first NFT, but that didn’t apply to this person).
Gabriella di Capua
In total, I started conversations with about 15 artists, and thus far, two have been onboarded to Catalog – Delcu, an excellent DJ from Sao Paulo that I first saw at a Mamba Negra party (if you like to rave and ever find yourself in the Brazilian capital, look up Mamba), and Gabriella di Capua, a jazz singer from Milan.
I discovered di Capua’s music in 2021 and we collaborated on a couple pieces of content for my startup, Grey Matter. She’d had a little bit of exposure to crypto, having done an NFT release last year with an organization called Brots, but onboarding was minimal and hadn’t required getting a digital wallet.
For sake of provenance, Catalog does require one, so di Capua downloaded a Rainbow wallet and set up her profile. “It was really, really easy to upload a song. And it's cool because on the homepage you can read all the comments of other artists,” she told me. “I uploaded two songs, but I didn't upload the songs from my record because I don't own all the rights – I don't have many songs [that weren’t released on] the label.”
One of the major issues still facing music NFT platforms is ownership, and that too factors into the catalog size of web3. Catalog has strict rules against people uploading music they don’t own all the rights to unless they have the necessary clearances (i.e. licenses, rights, consents and permissions) to what’s being put on the platform. One of the hallmarks of the blockchain is immutability, after all, which makes addressing copyright infringement retroactively quite difficult. Last year the well-known NFT platform OpenSea admitted that more than 80 percent of its NFTs were “plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.”
Owning all the rights to a song is fairly rare in the legacy industry, as labels, songwriters, producers and other contributing entities often share ownership of a track. But as alternative routes gain traction – as the majors get outnumbered on releases 25-to-1, as collectives and platforms like Catalog offer artist terms that trounce anything that Spotify or Twitch can offer – it’s going to be hard not to look hard at this world.
The next generations of music-makers – those who can more viably release their music and retain the rights – are already flooding the world with music. In this next phase, as platforms nudge their doors ajar and more artists start to look toward web3, curation will continue to be vital. We must remember to take care.