LEVON HELM, NFT’S, AND THE COMING CULTURAL TSUNAMI
Creative people will create whether they are paid to or not. But they work much, much better if they don’t have to worry about the rent.
‘The Band’ weren’t always ‘The Band’. They started out as ‘The Hawks’ and were the backing group for Ronnie Hawkins—a charismatic singer with more charm than ability who constantly toured the clubs and bars of the US South and the Canadian North during the mid-60’s.
Then ‘The Band’ got a big break. A very big break… they graduated to being the backing band for Bob Dylan, who at the time, was up there with The Beatles.
The Band’s learning curve went vertical and to cut a long story short they became the last word in authentic, late-60’s/early 70’s rock folk— single-handedly inventing Americana— and producing such stone classics as ‘The Weight’ and ‘This wheels on fire’.
Most of The Band’s members sadly followed the hairpin career trajectory of many musicians but what kept them going through the wilderness years was a steady stream of record LP royalties of 70,000 dollars a year or so each. Whilst this provided a living far below the extravagance of their golden years they could at least keep their heads above water.
Then came Napster and suddenly ‘information deserved to be free’ and that included The Band’s back catalog and musicians who should never have had to worry about money were suddenly deprived of almost all their income.
Fast forward a couple of years to Levon contracting cancer. To save his farm and leave a financial legacy for his family before his death he was forced to play gigs basically until he collapsed. Meanwhile the Napster dude Sean Parker was offering the actor who played Gandalf a million dollars to officiate at his wedding.
A similar but less spectacularly melodramatic fate befell many creative people from the 2000’s onwards as musicians, artists, journalists and photographer suddenly found their business model untenable. The entire creative middle class was hollowed out. It used to be that artists starved in a garret for the first part of their career until they got a foothold. Now artists starved in garrets period. A few made out but the long tail economics of this are even more excruciatingly unfair than what happened to poor Mr Helm.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau reports that $456 million would be created per year if people had to pay for the creative work they consume. But how to enforce this? How to change things so that creative careers become viable again?
I don’t think we’ll ever go back to the model we had before. But there is a solution for bringing back scarcity and value to creative work; a form of digital copyright that can create online scarcity, protect IP, sequence royalty streams, and put money back into the pockets of creators: the NFT.
When people think of NFT’s they still think of Crypto Kittes and Bored Apes but literally anything from a line of writing to the blueprint for a skyscraper can be minted as an NFT.
And the programmability of NFT’s offers an innovative way to compensate creators because the smart contracts powering them can be programmed to grant fees to predetermined blockchain addresses…. and voila, welcome back royalty streams, all is forgiven.
The scope of this invention is immense and could encompass everything from journalism to music to film to fashion to complete virtual experiences and could potentially give birth to a Second Renaissance, unleashing a vast cultural tsunami that will sweep us all up.
This technology is too late to save Levon Helm but it might save countless other creators from penury and put their careers on a paying basis and that will be good for all of us.