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?