Mike Selling Music on Zora

[LPLStaff]

Mike announced on Twitter on February 5th that he was joining Zora, an online platform to sell products via cryptocurrency.

 

In this case, he is selling the Twitch instrumental jam "One Hundredth Stream" from you guessed it, his 100th jam on Twitch.

 

After hitting $3,000 and $5,000, the bidding at the time of this post has reached $10,000 already. The value is in WETH, a form of cryptocurrency, but it appears you can bid in dollars as well. The owner is getting 1 exclusive copy of the song from Mike - they will be the only owner.

 

Since the concept is pretty foreign to many fans, a lengthy discussion in the fanbase has taken place on Twitter on his exactly this will work. Mike said he is interested in doing it for more music as well, but his record contract might prohibit him from doing it for fully completed songs.

 

Mike added on Twitter: "The #NFT I posted will be (must be, by design) 1 of 1. What you own: the file (art?) I uploaded on the http://zora.co platform. I can’t upload that file again. You don’t own the “song” or “master” or “copyright,” but you own the file. For example, if I write an original lyric on a piece of paper, I own that lyric. If you buy that piece of paper, you own that paper. And it is one-of-a-kind. In this case, you get a certificate of authenticity via blockchain that you are the sole owner. (Experts, did i get it right?). Creators who have been commodified by platforms forever.
Here, the value of your work/art/idea is defined by the market. This NFT started at $0. Apparently, people think this creation is worth a lot more."

 

Here are some highlights of Mike talking about Zora on his Twitch stream.

 

 

 

Check out the auction here.

 

If you would like to contribute information on how this exactly will work and what the details are, please feel free to comment!

[JZLP-Benningstrong]

Perfect for crazy collectors.

 

It aint worth it for me I dont like the idea.

[martinez]

It is worth to point that the version Mike's selling is slightly different from the one that's already out there. Here's comparison:

 

snippet1 - version is out there

snippet2 - version that Mike is selling

Edited February 6, 2021 by martinez

[Coizu]

My understanding of everything:

 

Imagine Mike would release the song on a CD, but he will sell just a single disc. So only one person at a time can own that CD. That doesn't mean only that person has the song. The owner of the disc could rip the song and (illegally) leak it to the internet or whatever. But you always only have on person who owns the actual collectible.

The difference here is: there is not a real disc. There is only the song as a digital good. So how do you keep track who owns the "disc"? That's why this whole thing builds upon the block chain. After the auction, the new owner will be saved in the ethereum block chain forever. So you always have that block chain as a source of truth of who owns the song right now (while normally the CD itself would be the proof basically). Now that person could decide they want to sell that "disc" in a couple of years. The blockchain still has the information that can verify that that person is the owner and after that person sold it, the new owner will be saved to the blockchain, so you always know who currently owns it (and you have the complete history of owners for validation).

Another difference to the real world collectibles is (at least if I understood zora.co correctly): whenever the next person decides to sell the item, the original owner (in this case Mike) will get a cut of the money.

[leftshoe18]

This sounds really fucking dumb.

[martinez]

So according to what Mike said, you will get not a song but a mov video file with the song. Yes the preview on the Zora site is in mov format.

Edited February 6, 2021 by martinez

[blackout]

3 minutes ago, martinez said:

So according to what Mike said, you will get not a song but a mov video file with the song. Yes the preview on the Zora site is in mov format. And according to some Mike's tweets the preview is exactly the thing what you will get (yes the full video has 37 seconds).

 

This is getting even more ridiculous. 

[martinez]

14 minutes ago, blackout said:

 

This is getting even more ridiculous. 

 

Nah it's the full song I misunderstood some things what he said.

Edited February 6, 2021 by martinez

[Astat]

7 hours ago, leftshoe18 said:

This sounds really fucking dumb.

Ditto. Call me pessimistic, but this seems like the kind of thing that ends up killing the concept of the album AND touring. If you're Mike, what's the point of investing a bunch of time and money into recording an album or going on tour when you can make one song at a time and sell it to people with massive amounts of disposable income for $10,000+?

 

This is Mike going the route of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and considering the definitely near-zero, possibly actually-zero number of people in this community who can afford to drop $10k on something as insignificant as a song, we're clearly not the target market.

 

Somebody call Martin Shkreli.

[eyesburning]

33 minutes ago, Astat said:

Ditto. Call me pessimistic, but this seems like the kind of thing that ends up killing the concept of the album AND touring. If you're Mike, what's the point of investing a bunch of time and money into recording an album or going on tour when you can make one song at a time and sell it to people with massive amounts of disposable income for $10,000+?

 

This is Mike going the route of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and considering the definitely near-zero, possibly actually-zero number of people in this community who can afford to drop $10k on something as insignificant as a song, we're clearly not the target market.

 

Somebody call Martin Shkreli.

 

Idk, this does sound very pessimistic...I think Mike is someone who loves to try out new technologies and it's more about the novelty/idea in this specific instance. This would also get old quickly if he'd sell a new "exclusive" song every month. I might be wrong but I doubt money is his sole motivator at this point. And 10k isn't even that much if you compare it to the profit of one (successful) album or a tour, no?

[Stranger]

28 minutes ago, eyesburning said:

 

Idk, this does sound very pessimistic...I think Mike is someone who loves to try out new technologies and it's more about the novelty/idea in this specific instance. This would also get old quickly if he'd sell a new "exclusive" song every month. I might be wrong but I doubt money is his sole motivator at this point. And 10k isn't even that much if you compare it to the profit of one (successful) album or a tour, no?

 

he just trying out the technologies. Mike always one step ahead. soon, we might see other artists use this as the platform. i dont think he's gonna use this for a long term. he tried it out mostly because his friend, Bobby Hundreds shared an article few days ago and he might wanna try and see how this is going. 

[hahninator]

Rare post from me these days.

 

I don't see any harm in Mike trying something new here. LP/Mike have always been innovative when it comes to releasing things, trying new methods of releasing stuff, etc. He's given away some songs on Twitch for free lately too. This isn't incentivized by money, I mean Mike is one of the most selfless guys in the whole world of music. He is right when he says the fans are determining the value, I mean no way did he think a random Twitch instrumental jam probably most of his Twitter followers have never heard of would get to $10,000.

 

I spent some time discussing it with fans on Twitter with the LPLive account the past day. It seems like a lot of us still don't understand how this works, and I think Mike not explaining it at the start when he announced it just further compounded the issues. It's a very foreign concept and people want to know detailed specifics - if Mike will only sell this exactly once, if the winner can hold on to it forever and the song is never heard by anyone else (like the Wu-Tang Clan example Mike gave), if the winner can turn around and sell 20 copies of the song for $5,000 each, etc. When he said "you are not buying a song", that made it even harder to comprehend it. He technically is arguing it's a .MOV file with the full song (and probably some skull artwork attached to it in movie form) instead of a song, but it IS a song - just in a movie format. He says "you are not the owner of the song", but Mike's definition of owning a song and a fan's definition of owning a song are much different - like yes copyright wise, Mike is right and yes, download-wise, the fan is right.

 

One thing I don't understand is when he says if he put a song up for download on the streaming platforms, he wouldn't get much money. But the Zora website says he is getting only 15% of $10,000 with this purchase. How is that any more money than the streaming platforms? It seems like a large loss compared to those, actually.

 

The Wu-Tang example was a bad one for him to use because if you imply that it's similar to that, then fans will make the logical assumption that the buyer can purchase the track and it is never heard by the masses. That's exactly what happened with Wu-Tang - Martin bought it, went to jail and the US government seized the CD, never to be heard. Now people think the auction winner for $10,000 can hold on to the track and no one will ever hear it, lol

 

The fact that most fans don't understand terms and abbreviations like NFT, WEFT, cryptoart, cryptocurrency, blockchain, etc has made this quite difficult to understand. He says he will release more music this way and that's cool, but it'd be nice if he explained on a stream more about it. In the clips I saw on Twitter, I believe he said he was going to release this to streaming for fans but is just selling the one copy. He has every right to do that since he made the song, what's the harm in him trying that?

[Diaux]

This take me back to the old Project Spark collab for GATS and how that game just fall flat a couple of months after it was release. Who knows maybe this time is different and next year the song is gonna cost a lot more or is gonna get leak (which personally is what i'm waiting for)

[Justin]

I don't really like the idea of this, and I disagreed strongly with Mike saying how cool the concept was when Wu-Tang did it.

 

There's a lot about the Once Upon A Time in Shaolin album that was pretty crappy. For one thing, it wasn't even created as a Wu-Tang album. RZA was convinced to call it that after their producer pitched the idea of being super artistic and selling one copy of the album. Some members, like Method Man, thought that idea was stupid to begin with.

 

The price quickly disqualified like 99% of their fans, and it was bought by a corrupt scumbag who wound up imprisoned a few years later. I don't see how Mike saw all that, and 6 years later is still saying it was a cool concept and a good idea lol.

 

I think Mike is just doing what he's always done, and trying to experiment by doing something different. That's fine, but I personally don't like the idea and I hope this doesn't become a thing he does with all the Twitch jams from now on instead of further Dropped Frames releases.

 

Actually, on the subject of Wu-Tang: Yes the album sold for $2 million, making it the single most expensive musical work ever sold. Didn't they still lose money on that, though? I mean if a regular album in stores these days costs like $15 let's say. That means OUATIS sold the equivalent of 133,333 units if it had been widely released. The thing is, they sold all that at once, but there's a cap on it. They'll never see another dime from that album ever. It can't be sold commercially until 2103. People born today won't even be able to hear that album until they're 82 years old.

[LPLStaff]

There's no way they earned money on the $2 million if it took 6+ years to record with all of the studios, features, time, producers, engineers, staff, travel, etc. Chinese Democracy was like $13 million for a budget, it's easy to see how this would exceed $2 million. Had no idea a film was being released about Once Upon A Time in Shaolin too; they got money from the book rights and movie rights then. This album is really worth its own discussion in here because of how interesting the story is.

This COULD be a very dangerous concept (in general for musicians, not talking about Mike here) and should be heavily frowned upon if it's done the "Wu-Tang way" and the music is not made available elsewhere. But Mike says he plans on making it available to fans, just not THE original file. He isn't the type of artist to ever make something so exclusive that only 1 fan would hear it. In fact, he's made his career by doing just the exact opposite. The example of Wu Tang probably made everyone like, "oh shit."

[Soeffingnaive92]

I’d pay that much to get an exclusive LPTV video with Chester recording vocals for Friendly Fire and then get the MP3 of the song as an exclusive. 
It’d be cash grab level 10000 and I know they’ll never do something like that because LP and Warner are classy, but at least it’d be juicy. 
Anyway, Mike can do whatever he wants with his music, not bashing him, plus, I’ve seen his IG story and, if I understood it correctly, part of the earning of the project is going in charity.

[Cesar656]

Dont really care about the selling thing, but that instrumental is fire

[Coizu]

I have a strong opinion about all these blockchain things but I initially didn't really want to be too negative about it, but since most people have a very critical view on this I thought I will share my rant about it anyway.

 

First of all, this is a typical example of blockchain tech in general. Some people think all that blockchain and crypto stuff is the most genius thing that happens to human kind within the last thousand years or so, while the rest of the world just doesn't care at all. Instead of taking a step back and questioning if all of these things are necessary and if they actually solve a problem that really exists, people invested into crypto and blockchain tech try to push it even further with services and more tech that build upon blockchains. But what never gets solved is the problem of people understanding it and actually using blockchain tech. And for me the whole reason why this is not happening is: there is no need for it. All the problems blockchain startups try to solve were never any problems to begin with.

Zora is a prime example in my opinion. No one understands it. And once people get a rough idea, they still don't see the point. If you want to auction something unique, just use Ebay and have a centralised system that tells you who the current owner is. Why is another level of complexity necessary here? How does crypto help? I think the only reason crypto is necessary here is because otherwise no one would care about the idea of owning a digital item. The whole point is to find an application for crypto, no matter how much sense it makes.

 

So why are people out there bidding 10k or more for a thing no one understands and no one actually cares about? My explanation is that there are a quite some people who invested a lot of their money into crypto currencies (and some of them made quite some money with it) and they really believe in the tech and its future growth. So those people are inclined to spend more money on crypto related services. Imagine you invest 90% of your money into crypto and you see it growing and growing. You start to really believe in it and you start to invest more and more into it and you also start to spend more in the whole ecosystem to "get the ball rolling".

I would make a bet that whoever wins the auction is a bigger fan of Ethereum than of Mike.

 

I might sound like an old guy who isn't open for new tech but I think crypto is a super interesting tech from a pure technical point of view. I host a tech meetup where I live and I heard various talks about it and I am always interested in inviting people to talk about it again. But so far I have never had a person there who was able to convince me that there is an actual problem that blockchain tech is going to solve. All of the problems are always made up.

 

Mike has always been interested in tech and he just wants to try something out which is totally fine.

But I think if something needs that much explanation and is still so confusing for everyone, it is probably not going to be a thing.

Maybe the world is just not ready for crypto yet.

[Rasputin 93]

17 hours ago, hahninator said:

One thing I don't understand is when he says if he put a song up for download on the streaming platforms, he wouldn't get much money. But the Zora website says he is getting only 15% of $10,000 with this purchase. How is that any more money than the streaming platforms? It seems like a large loss compared to those, actually.

From what I understood: he'll get the full 10k from the bidding. The 15% apply only if the bidder will resell it (which obv can only happens once as well, because the digital item aka NFT is still "unique"), then Mike gets 15% of the price it'll get sold to the consecutive owner.

 

Also I heavily doubt he'd get 1,5k from one single song that would be one of these CoronaJams on streaming platforms, indeed, anyway.

Edited February 7, 2021 by Rasputin 93

[LPLStaff]

$21,000+!

[JZLP-Benningstrong]

1 minute ago, LPLStaff said:

$21,000+!

 

Would love to know what the highest bidder is thinking 

[Coizu]

18 minutes ago, JZ-AmendsStripped29 said:

 

Would love to know what the highest bidder is thinking 

 

The highest bidder has half a million USD laying around in various Ethereum tokens so I guess it's a rich person who doesn't really care that much about $21,000.

https://etherscan.io/tokenholdings?a=0xf69ea6646cf682262e84cd7c67133eac59cef07b

Edited February 7, 2021 by Coizu

[JZLP-Benningstrong]

2 hours ago, Coizu said:

 

The highest bidder has half a million USD laying around in various Ethereum tokens so I guess it's a rich person who doesn't really care that much about $21,000.

https://etherscan.io/tokenholdings?a=0xf69ea6646cf682262e84cd7c67133eac59cef07b

 

that guy should pay Ostrish for the HT documentary

[Soeffingnaive92]

If you’d buy a copy of every  existing version of Amends and Amends stripped you wouldn’t probably spend 500 $. Like, lol. 
 

 

 

ignore me, I love being a dick around here 

[Justin]

1 hour ago, PurpleFlinstoneVitamins92 said:

If you’d buy a copy of every  existing version of Amends and Amends stripped you wouldn’t probably spend 500 $. Like, lol. 
 

 

 

ignore me, I love being a dick around here 

 

True, but also Mike didn't set the price to be what it is. I think he started it at $0. Fans bidding is why the price is insane lol