Web3 Music Label Dreams Never Die Fights to Discover Artists and Avoid ‘Signing TikTok Data’
Three friends who loved finding new music are now signing artists at the forefront of music + web3
“Join us to escape the crisis, the clout, the content, the engagement farming, the dystopian nightmare that is the modern music industry.”
In 1968 Philip K. Dick asked Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The dystopian work inspired the Blade Runner films, and provoked prescient questions of aliveness and empathy in a world increasingly populated by machines. Today, our reliance on algorithms and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence makes these questions more urgent than ever.
What does it mean for the dreams of creators, for instance, if we train machines to create in our image? “It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation,” reads one of the novel’s famous lines. “This is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life.” Indeed. But perhaps dreams never die – at least while there are those of us who believe that great creations will always break through the noise.
I recently sat down with Chad Hillard and Cole Ryan, co-founders of the record label, Dreams Never Die, as well as Head of Artist Development, Ben Frigeri. The trio have been colleagues for several years, initially working together at the music blog, Hillydilly, best known as a key player in breaking Billie Eilish. The label was one of the first music projects to embrace web3, and they moved about 15 ETH in their first year releasing music non-fungible tokens (NFTs), rallying around a passion for discovering and sharing excellent music.
The team just launched their founder pass, a token that represents membership and alignment with the Dreams Never Die community. “Join us to escape the crisis, the clout, the content, the engagement farming, the dystopian nightmare that is the modern music industry,” reads the founder pass OpenSea description. The 1000-NFT release sold out in less than 24 hours, suggesting a strong counterbalance to that bad dream – the latest in a story that started many years ago.
In 2007, Hillard started the music blog Hillydilly, inspired by his passion for music discovery. He’s not a musician himself – “I defer to the Rick Rubin interview on 60 Seconds where he said, ‘I have no talent. All I know is my taste,’” he told me – but sharing music discoveries has been a passion since the arrival of Napster in the late ‘90s.
“I had a CD burner and I became obsessed with downloading music and discovering it, because back before Internet discovery, you had to go buy CDs, and I was way too poor to do that,” he said. “I became that kid that everybody came to in high school to get music from.”
Read more: The Beat: Music NFTs Turn Lukewarm But Don’t Focus on the Money, Songcamp and Metalabel Sow Optimism and Spotify vs TikTok
Hillydilly became an extension of that love for music sharing and discovery. “We're just a bunch of Internet music nerds who, one way or another, stumbled across the music blog that Chad started and joined the team,” said Ryan, who first joined as a writer about 10 years ago. “We were just pure music fans. We discovered this, we'd post it and just let people run with it,” Hillard added.
In 2020, the New York Times chronicled Billie Eilish’s rise to stardom, crediting Hillydilly for helping break the artist by boosting “Ocean Eyes” on the blog. “I found ‘Ocean Eyes’ when it had 100 or so plays on SoundCloud,” Hillard tweeted in 2018. “There was no push behind it, we didn't get emailed about it. If we don't share that, who knows what would’ve happened.”
Eilish is perhaps the most notable amidst a laundry list of early Hillydilly artist discoveries that range from Lorde to Halsey, but the team realized that acts of discovery weren’t sustainable in and of themselves. They got them cred, but you can’t buy groceries with cred. “We realized we need to sign the masters or at least manage the talent, otherwise the lights are gonna go out,’” Hillard told me. “So that's what Dreams Never Die was.”
The team launched the label in 2019, orienting around a long term plan to build a catalog of music. They signed 25 new artists and released 150 songs, generating more than 60 million streams. But the industry was changing. Music blogs were dying and Spotify emerged as a dominant source of discovery, driven by data – leading the team to transition Hillydilly into a curation platform-blog hybrid called Before the Data.
At the time, the team was observing a misalignment in the ecosystem between the deluge of new music – about 100,000 songs get added to streaming platforms every day – and the toxic zero-sum-games of social media platforms that encourage picayune competition, where the joy of discovery falls to the wayside.
“We all enter this business as music fans, but learning how to identify scalable talent takes many, many years.”
“If we posted an artist, it would have like 150 shares and like 50 likes,” said Ryan. “People in the music industry are always trying to share things early, but pretend that they found it on their own, and we don't wanna play this petty game.”
“We didn’t wanna lose our ethos, so that's why entering into web3 was such a cool proposition for us because we have a 15-year story – it's bulletproof,” added Hillard. “A lot of the ideology within web3 is artist fairness, [the people that show up] are in it for the right reasons, so we've just been ticking every box.”
In October 2021 the team announced they’d be converting Dreams Never Die into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) – one of the first record labels to do so. David Greenstein – the co-founder of the music NFT platform Sound.xyz – and Chris Anokute – an A&R executive who’s held key roles at Virgin/Capitol Records, Universal Motown Records, Island Def Jam and Epic/Sony – were enlisted as advisors.
The music research DAO Water & Music profiled Dreams Never Die a few months later, differentiating the project from other music DAOs by its desire to use the structure to scale alongside its artists – and unlike many other DAOs, to forgo a token sale for a more traditional seed capital raise.
Hillard and Co. successfully raised $3 million, with $2.5 million coming from the investment firm Polychain. Newly resourced, Dreams Never Die opened an office in LA, began organizing in Discord and signed Sloe Jack, the first artist to debut his first song on Sound.xyz. “We've been doing weekly chats, just really building a community organically – brick by brick,” said Hillard.
The project isn’t fully decentralized, though. The core team reserves control over much of the creative decision making – which in the case of a record label, requires a lot of industry wherewithal and experience identifying great artists. “We all enter this business as music fans, but learning how to identify scalable talent takes many, many years,” Hillard said.
Today, discerning future stars is difficult even for the most seasoned seekers. “Five years ago we saw an industry where you could listen to a song and have confidence that that song could perform really well – just based on the quality of the project,” said Ryan. “You could have a way higher degree of confidence that that was going to make an impact and actually jumpstart an artist's career.
“Nowadays labels have just given up with the domination of TikTok and data-driven playlists,” he added. “They're signing TikTok data. We didn't want to just sign the data like everyone else – that's not what we're passionate about.”
Although the project is still centered around collective trust in the team’s passion and taste, there are decentralized elements – “more than any label I've ever seen before,” Ryan said. “We view it as a mentorship – an internship where specific individuals that we identify within the community have a unique skill set and we can onboard them into the space,” Hillard said.
There’s a scouts ecosystem, for instance, which activates young music discoverers and compensates them for their discoveries. As they grow, they get funneled into larger roles, expanding the team’s scope for identifying talent.
“We have this community and system set up where anyone can start sending us music and it'll go directly to us,” said Ryan. “We'll decide if the song is a pass, worth sharing on our music blog or if we're gonna reach out to [the artist] for Dreams Never Die consideration.”
That strategy is part of a two-pronged approach to their business: breaking artists through the community and scaling talent that they discover. “I prefer to do both because not every artist is a star,” said Hillard. “Most artists are just songwriters, but we're in the music business. It's a hits-driven business, and we want to scale a global star. This is not some fun thing we're doing – this is a serious business and we intend to become a global record label that's known for breaking stars.”
The Founders Pass is for the music heads who believe they can achieve just that goal – or at least agree with the project’s spirit (Disclosure: I own a Founders Pass and a Sloe Jack NFT.)
“It's an activated community that is there because they love the mission,” said Frigeri. “They know who the artists are and they're aligned value-wise with what we're trying to do and with what the artist is trying to do.”
Hilliard added, “We're opening our doors to invite people into the ecosystem. [Co-founder of Interscope Records] Jimmy Iovine is always famously saying there's no way for record labels to be directly connected to the fans of the artist that they signed. And now with NFTs and the blockchain, that's possible. Basically instead of a one-way relationship, it becomes two-way and we can provide direct value to people that are in our community.”
That value will come in various shapes and sizes – some yet to be determined – but examples include exclusive access to dinners in the team’s LA house, merch, a token-gated website and allow-lists to other projects the label collaborates with.
“It's a tricky balance – being open and inclusive but then wanting to create specific value for certain people because you have to operate a business, at the end of the day,” Hillard said. “We don't want to make this a super expensive project that's all about the floor. It's about onboarding people and it's about maintaining a balance – not being too tribal about things, not being too black and white. Like we make fun of TikTok, but also TikTok is very important. So that's our whole ethos, you know, trying to keep a fine balance.”
Ultimately we’ll need to find balance between the extremes: algorithm and curator, human and AI, the legacy industry and the blockchain-powered music world. We cannot erase history and we shouldn’t ignore the future, but for the survival of our culture, we must guide it in more empathetic, equitable ways. To prove that dreams never die, we must have counterbalances – those that shine rays of light against that ultimate shadow.