Some years ago, Brian Eno coined the term “scenius” as a companion to “genius.” Where genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community. It’s an admission that, in reality, each “genius” is simply a representative of some flourishing scene. Put another way, “when buoyed by scenius, you act like genius.” 

That sentiment is made manifest at Songcamp, a community of musicians, artists and strategists “with a deep interest in learning what happens when music and the new Internet crash into each other.”

Songcamp has held three virtual, experimental songwriting camps to date, complete with lore and novel web3 mechanics. The most recent camp, Chaos, was a 77-person headless band that created 48 songs and generated about half a million dollars in revenue.

During Chaos, artists shuffled between bands, ultimately creating a song each with three different groups. At the end of the camp, after delivering their third and final track, some of the musicians still had energy and wanted to keep making music.

The Songcamp artists Steph – who makes music under the artist name Dontmesswithjaun – and Michael Onabolu took up the charge to direct that energy toward a peripheral project inspired by CC0, a creative commons license that allows creators to waive all copyright and related rights. 

Lucas Nicoll and Sarmad Ahmad – who use the artist monikers Shamanic and Greydient, respectively – signed on to the project, and musician and software engineer Kevin Neaton later joined to build out the tech. In total, 20 Chaos musicians, developers and visual artists formed the Internet collective CC0lab, creating 16 songs in a two-week minicamp. Importantly, all the songs were released into the public domain.

Classic Brian Eno

“What really matters are the human pieces we input into technology. What use we make of ever evolving tools,” Steph said. “And we got to make this project focusing on that, on all the passion and love we have to create collectively instead of thinking about the output.”

I sat down with Nicoll, Ahmad and Neaton to discuss the complex dynamics across licensing and copyright, as well as the blockchain’s potential to create a more sensible system and the scenius ethos of collective creation that sits at the heart of the project. 

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“It’s interesting – the precedent of copyright and how much that impacts even releases of CC0 music,” said Nicoll, who’s a self-described “creative software addict and mixed media artist” based in Salisbury, a medieval cathedral city in southern England.

“There was a period of time where – through most of the main distributors – you couldn't release your music as CC0. If you wanted to release CC0 music and have it be accessible on Spotify and collect streaming revenue, you had to lie to your distributor essentially, and release it as [your] copyrighted music and then do another release somewhere else that released it as CC0. It’s this strange legal gray area. [Today] some distributors will let you release your music as CC0 and still collect rights or royalties on streaming platforms, but a lot of them won't even let you.”

It’s an odd phenomenon. As individuals, we consume the information of others for the construction of ourselves, so it makes little sense to claim sole ownership of the material that comes out when we put pen to paper. But we’ve been conditioned to believe it is our own, and to celebrate – and pursue – the quality of genius.

“The way industries are set up now – maybe out of convenience –is that there's this individualism, where you create something under an identity and release it that way,” said Neaton, who works across many projects including Public Assembly – a builder decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that spun off from Zora – and neume, an “open source, credibly neutral, socially scalable, indexer” for on-chain music. “But in reality, nothing is created in isolation. We're always building on the past. You’re always hearing something and ingesting that and spitting it back out. So if we’re honest about it, you would have to attribute your music to quite a lot of people.”

Nicoll added, “There’s something interesting there in the black box – like our inspirations and how that leads to our creative output. On the surface you might think, ‘I was inspired by this artist and I put my own spin on it,’ but what is your own spin? Your own spin is this soup of creative inspiration that you don't fully have control over.

Listen: Big Brother and the Hodling Company Podcast With Matthew Chaim of Songcamp

“It's kind of mad actually, that we exist in this dichotomy where if you want to release music, you have to individualize it to the point where you say this is a hundred percent mine – I created it from nothing,” he continued. “But then these same corporations go around and take an AI model that has the same process and say ‘no, it belongs to everyone – we can create whatever we want out of it.’ What a strange juxtaposition – on the one hand we are forced into individualizing ourselves, but on the other hand, corporations can completely collectivize us.”

Many folks’ main beef with artificial intelligence is that it insults our unctuous sense of intellectual property – our own individualized creative intelligence. Machines learn from information (much of it copyrighted) and then use that as the basis of new material – it’s worth taking one humbling step back to acknowledge that that’s how we operate, too.

And perhaps it’s that strange juxtaposition that makes us pretty terrible at tracking who’s responsible for creating what. “Funny enough, there's [another] black box that comes down to attribution and tracking these things,” Ahmad said, referencing the vast swathes of song royalties that go unallocated because of oversights like incorrect metadata. “But then with the blockchain, we're now finally getting what could be called a singular place that you can go to check these things.”

As a decentralized ledger, the blockchain has the potential to create stronger attribution standards for music, and that opportunity isn’t exclusive to the individual. “In the web3 space, no one was really doing CC0 for music,” Ahmad continued. “Everyone was kind of like, ‘no we want attribution for our songs, not to give free reign over them.’ So that was one of the reasons that we tapped into it for our project, being like, ‘Hey, we just did a really cool project as a faceless brand for Chaos. What happens if we make more music and give it out for free – is it going to proliferate the brand or is no one really gonna care?’”

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Over two weeks, the collective created 16 songs, minting the tracks’ stems – i.e. isolated audio elements, like a song’s guitar line or drumbeat – on Polygon and then uploading them to the music creation platform, Arpeggi. Neaton also uploaded the music to Arweave so each song could be applied with a “CC0” tag. “I wanted it to be stored somewhere where it would exist forever, and have a timestamp associated with it,” he said. 

Applying attribution at the collective level and waiving all rights proved to be an act of creative liberation. “The excitement of releasing music as a faceless band opened up some new energy to make us think about new ways of ascribing organic attribution,” Nicoll said. “That was some of the motivation behind why we wanted to approach it as a CC0 project. It felt like by giving up attribution, not only would that result in a novel project, but it also freed up the types of collaborations that we could do.

“I made music that maybe I wouldn't have made before,” he continued. “Because this is CC0, I have a sense of freedom in how I express – or how we express – together that maybe I wouldn't have if we were retaining all the rights. Conceptually there was this opening up of borders and expression – a kind of liberation in how we'd approach these tracks, how they got created. And it was really beautiful, actually.” 

The songs were initially released as “3D cloaks,” paired with pieces of art in a virtual CC0 fashion show. Later they were compiled into a mixtape and then released as 1:1 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the music NFT marketplace, Catalog.

The team announced “a remix cooperation,” and began exploring other developments for their project. But the collective, already creatively drained by the intensity of Chaos, quickly lost steam. “Chaos had finite timelines and a structure, which led to energy being directed in a certain way,” said Ahmad, who also works in an operational role for Songcamp. “The remnants of that energy are what turned into the CC0 project. But because there wasn't a very clearly defined outcome of what we were trying to do other than, ‘Hey, we're making some really cool music and we're gonna put it out,’ we lost some of that momentum.”

Ahmad alluded to more existential concerns as well. “One of the things that's been on my mind when it comes to web3 music or even CC0 stuff is the curational and visibility aspect of the things that we're doing,” he said. “As much as we care about these things, like attribution – they kind of don't matter, right? We're just data. Whether it's on Arweave or it's on a server that's centralized, it's just a bunch of data out there amongst a shit ton more data.”

The blockchain ostensibly offers paths to aid in what Neaton called “organic discovery,” where explorers can trace attribution routes across artists, engineers, producers and other folks associated with the creation of a song. By adding hashes to each file, “you can set up a system where people are able to upload their derivatives along with all the files they used and have that automatically match up to see [which files they used and who they’re attributed to],” Neaton said, “so you start to build up a graph of attribution.”

That vision is strong, and reminiscent of Supertight Woody’s Noun Sounds project – the artist has released dozens of his own tracks for completely free use, leveraging CC0 licenses. “This NFT is on the blockchain, so you can prove that you own the original,” Woody told me. “So if you encourage people to use it – ‘Hey, go remix this, use my loops, sample it, et cetera, et cetera’ – the proliferation or the marketing of those assets then adds value back to the original.”

Concerns over curation and visibility are real, but all things considered, perhaps this is our best route forward. “We are in an interesting position right now where the stems exist and the attribution through the blockchain exists,” Nicoll said. “Whether it's original project owners or entirely new actors who find out about the pieces that exist, if there is motivation there to do something with those pieces, they exist.”

The point is these pieces of art can be built upon without constraint. “We are fortunate to possess a legal mechanism that grants us the ability to return creative works to the public domain, enabling others to freely build and expand upon these works,” Neaton said. “Music gifted to the public domain is just the start—an invitation to collaborate in the creation of something new and potentially unexpected—another invitation. Through collective creation, we relax the constraints of individualism and reveal the potential of the group.”

Perhaps we’d do best to untangle ourselves from our predilection for genius, and from the laws of copyright that enable it. The spirit of “there’s no such thing as an original idea” rings true, and to pursue singular ownership of our inspired art is an insult to all those who inspired it. As individual creators, we are representatives of countless flourishing scenes – buoys for our true collective potential.