The Nina Protocol Formed More Like a Band Than a Startup and Wants to Leave More Cash and Control With Artists

Investigating how NFTs could invigorate underground music and indie labels led to a much larger realization: ‘Oh, this is actually a tool for anyone to make releases’

Five years ago Thurston Moore told me how the “languages of counterculture” and “spirit” infused his then-new record Rock’n’Roll Consciousness. After four decades of making music in an olio of subcultures, the Sonic Youth guitarist realized the connective thread for his own journey – and for kindred souls that have followed similar paths – was spirit. "It's a like-minded feeling, regardless of anyone's attachment to ideology or religion," he observed. "I've dealt with a lot of creative people who are agnostic in their purview of spirituality, but they have such spirit. They're a manifestation of what they don't believe.”

While much of web3 music is well-intentioned and rooted in a powerful ideology of decentralization, there hasn’t yet been much palpable spirit. Through the Nina Protocol, a new web3 music protocol for buying, selling and streaming music, Jack Callahan, Mike Pollard and Eric Farber are trying to change that.

Before they started Nina, the three artists had known each other for years, frequenting similar music circles and operating in various roles across the industry – from running experimental record labels to soundboards at noise shows.

Their work forced them to reckon with an exploitative industry that decontextualizes music and obscures the ways people connect through it. Through web3 they saw an opportunity to build something that ameliorates those ills, and through their Moore-esque backgrounds, they saw how to write its story in the languages of the counterculture.

Callahan grew up playing the drums and studying jazz in Minneapolis. He moved to St. Louis for high school, where he dove into more underground territory – DIY punk, noise, ambient, and experimental electronic music – and started doing live sound for bands.

He’s spent most of his professional life as an audio engineer. For about five years he toured and did sound for Moore, and he still runs a small mastering studio in Queens. He also operates a small label called Flea and makes electronic music.

Callahan first met Pollard at a show in St. Louis in 2007. Pollard, who hails from Chicago, was in town to play at a small noise festival called St. Louis Noise Fest, where Callahan was multi-tracking and recording the shows on his desktop. Pollard was running Arbor at the time, a small label he started at 14 that put out early music from artists like James Ferraro and Oneontrix Point Never, becoming a pivotal label for the 2010s American experimental scene.

Interests and motivations change a lot as a teen, though. Not wanting to forever carry around a project from adolescence, Pollard shuttered the label in 2012. He taught himself how to code and landed a job at a startup in Silicon Valley. Pollard wasn’t fulfilled by the work, though, so he quit and moved to New York, continuing to work as a “mercenary freelance developer” to make ends meet. There he started making music and putting out records again, reconnecting with Callahan and other musicians.

One of those was Farber, a Boston native who started playing music at a young age, gaining traction with his high school noise duo, Truman Peyote. Farber started coding in college while building HTML splash pages for bands and fake record labels. He moved to New York after school and started programming full-time. Like Pollard, he used the skillset as a means of facilitating his music-making – they even unknowingly shared a bill when they were 19 at “a basement show somewhere.” They became friends about six years later.

One night last February, near the apex of non-fungible token (NFT) mayhem, Pollard and Callahan met up at McSorley’s, an Irish ale house in lower Manhattan. Both were trading crypto but remained skeptical of the kinds of money NFTs were generating – Callahan called the hype “insane and cringey.”

But after a couple beers they got to talking: “What if you applied this to a small record label or something?” Callahan asked. “Look at underground music right now – it's dismal since the rise of platforms and social media. There's no context for anything. Everything is flattened to the timeline where your tweet is right next to, you know, Jay-Z's tweet or whatever.”

Read more: How to Dip Your Toe Into Music NFTs and Allow for Imperfection With Prolific DJ Bergsonist

Indeed what hope do underground artists have in an economy that rewards whoever gets the most attention? The duo roped in Farber and got to work. “Programming became fun again,” said Pollard. “The task at hand was one that actually seemed worth getting into – rather than making chat apps and shopping carts and stuff like that.”

The task itself wasn’t the Nina that exists today, though. “We never got together and said ‘let's make a business plan and become a startup,” Farber said. “We were talking about it in terms of this one idea that we had – let's make this one thing a release that's on chain. And as we started developing it, it kept getting bigger.”

That one thing was an early nineties jazz recording of the pianist John Paul Larkin, who would come to be better known as Scatman John. Callahan and Pollard talked about tokenizing it as a joke, and began referring to the project as Scat Coin – until it grew much bigger than that.

“When we were like, ‘Oh, this is actually a tool for anyone to make releases’, then we tried to come up with a new name,” said Pollard. “I proposed Shawn off of Shawn Fanning, the Napster creator, and Eric said, ‘That’s a terrible name – you need something nice like Nina.’ And then we're just like, ‘that's kinda good though.’”

Eventually the co-founders realized they’d accidentally started a company. “We were probably about six months into coding 16 hours a day and then we were like, ‘Oh shit, I guess this is a startup,’” said Pollard. “These guys were on the precipice of getting evicted from their respective apartments. There were various loans between people. I feel like I gave Eric a loan. My brother gave Eric a loan. Eric gave Eric a loan,” he continued. All three laughed.

Startup lore is rife with rags to riches stories like this, but as a music startup, Nina has to tread with care. Building something costs money, but because artists have been systematically hosed by every tech innovation the industry has ever championed, musicians eye so-called tech remedies with a healthy dose of skepticism.

“I'm also a musician and I'm skeptical of a lot of that shit, and a lot of it sucks,” said Callahan. “And we're at this point right now where we are trying to build trust with a lot of people that that language is super foreign to.”

“I think we're building this for musicians who are not quite ready for this,” Pollard added. “But I think that they will be more or less forced to use this tech the same way they have been by every other platform or service online that they've used. And we want to make something for them and we want them to know that.”

It’s been Callahan’s role to bridge the gap and convey that message. “I was just hitting up people who I thought would be interested,” said Callahan. “Do you trust me that it's not a scam? Do you have something that you would upload to this? Here’s what it is.”

What that is, in Pollard’s words, could be the “infrastructure for the next 50 years of music.” When artists sell their music on Nina, they retain full rights and pay just a one-time cost to cover transaction fees on the Solana blockchain and storage fees on Arweave, a protocol that enables permanent data storage.

Artists get to choose how many NFTs are in each release, as well as the price point and the percentage they take on secondary sales. The initial sales go entirely to the artist. Accustomed to a streaming-centric industry that only gives them 12% of its revenue, that’s a galvanizing proposition for artists. And for 226 of them so far, it’s worked.

Trust was still a necessary precursor, though, and Nina’s early catalog is filled with music from artists in the team’s own experimental scenes. That makes it substantially different from platforms like Sound.xyz, whose catalogs reflect a more crypto-native, tech-literate crowd who tend to skew toward EDM. For underground artists like Bergsonist, that’s a selling point – she described Nina as “a niche that’s also part of the underground scene in New York, so it feels real.”

“Right now, Nina is a reflection of us as the creators of it,” said Callahan. “There's actually cool music made by musicians who have real fans and play real shows, which is not necessarily the case for the other platforms.”

Like those other platforms, Nina isn’t yet open to all, but gatekeeping was never the intention. In fact the idea was to create an egalitarian alternative in the face of other web3 music platforms’ exclusivity.

“Everything was invite only and we were kind of like, ‘let's be open from day one,’” said Farber. “And then we realized we had to stagger it, because certain things weren't done and there were issues with identity and legality and copyright.”

While they tend to the fine points, they’re playing temporary curators, and though it leans experimental right now, they don’t want Nina to be the “techno protocol” or “ambient protocol.” They want to build an open protocol where each piece of music creates infinite paths of exploration.

It’s an idea Farber defined as “context as curation,” reflected in their Hubs feature, a mechanism at the protocol level that tracks relationships built around music. It’s Nina’s connective tissue, enabling music folk of all kinds – from curators to labels to journalists – to see how music disperses through fans and communities.

And that’s the kind of consciousness we need in music tech – one that grows organically across contextual webs of shared meaning, like Thurston Moore has cultivated throughout his career. By leveraging spirit – something we all have – Moore gave his experimental music an uncanny degree of approachability. He helped make the counterculture an accessible source of energy without renouncing its deep-seated sense of opposition.

In kind, web3 presents an opportunity to rewrite the conditions of our relationships in those countercultural dialects. And Nina, who formed more like a band who found they could make music together than a startup that saw a monetizable opportunity, is channeling that spirit.