Posts in music industry
Why Square bought Jay Z's music service Tidal for $300MM, and how the NFT-driven transformation of music royalties and ownership can explain this future
Why Square bought Jay Z's music service Tidal for $300MM, and how the NFT-driven transformation of music royalties and ownership can explain this future

This week, we look at:

  • Square acquiring Tidal and its 1-2 million of subscribers for $297 million, and the logic for what a payment processors has in common with the creative industry

  • How celebrities and creators like Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, Grimes, 3LAU and others are generating millions in NFT sales

  • The impact on the economic model of the music industry, including a look at royalty structures, revenue pools, and financial vehicles when tokenized

  • The philosophical divide growing between a feudal platformed commons (e.g., YouTube) and a collectivist anarchist capitalism

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philosophy, NFTs and digital objects, music industry, paytech, social & communityLex SokolinSquare, Tidal, Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk
How a moment on the NYC 6 train turned into using NFTs in the $74T supply chain industry before NFTs were cool, with Tyler Mulvihill of EulerBeats
How a moment on the NYC 6 train turned into using NFTs in the $74T supply chain industry before NFTs were cool, with Tyler Mulvihill of EulerBeats

In this conversation, we talk with Tyler Mulvihill of Treum and EulerBeats, about how he became involved in the very first non-financial production grade blockchain use case, tracking & tracing tuna from Fiji to New York using Treum. Additionally, we explore the nuances of NFTs and how EulerBeats is using bonding curve economics to price the future of NFT use rather than mere collection.

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visual art, music industry, NFTs and digital objects, supply chain / tradeLex SokolinTreum, EulerBeats, Sacramento Kings
Why Peer-to-Peer models fail against oligopoly, with Lending Club shutting down p2p platform, Seedrs/Crowdcube merging, and Morgan Stanley buying Eaton Vance for $7B
Why Peer-to-Peer models fail against oligopoly, with Lending Club shutting down p2p platform, Seedrs/Crowdcube merging, and Morgan Stanley buying Eaton Vance for $7B

This week, we look at:

  • Lending Club, the peer-to-peer lending innovator, turning off peer-to-peer lending after having a bank in its pocket

  • Consolidation of the UK's largest crowdfunders, CrowdCube and Seedrs, and their limited economics

  • The scale of the Morgan Stanley and Eaton Vance deal, creating a $1.2 trillion asset manager

  • The struggle of peer-to-peer models more generally, and whether the blockchain movement can overcome the Prisoner's Dilemma

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digital lending, p2p & crowdfunding, music industry, asset management, decentralized financeLex SokolinLending Club, Libertarians, Napster, Kazaa, BitTorrent, Spotify, Compound, Aave, Globacap, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Tence, Covestor, Motif Investing, Kaching, Monzo, Crowdcube, Seedrs, Eaton Vance
Artificial Intelligence that writes pop songs and paints portraits
Artificial Intelligence that writes pop songs and paints portraits

The image is taken from an AI paper which explains how to use generative adversarial networks (i.e., GANs) to hallucinate hyper realistic-imagery. By training on hundreds of thousands of samples, the model is able to create candidates representing things like “just a normal dude holding a normal fish nothing to see here”, and then edit out the ones that are too egregious.

The reason the stuff above is so scary is actually that you can mathematically transition in the space between images. So for example, you could move between “a normal dude” and “just a normal fish” and have nightmare fish people. Or you could create a DNA root for an image which is part dog, part car, and part jellyfish. Check out the video below and the very accessible https://www.artbreeder.com/ website to see what I mean.

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artificial intelligence, visual art, metaverse, music industryLex SokolinJared Tarbell, Mario Klingeman
Double Standards -- Fortnite game praised for black-out, neobank Chime upsets 5 million customers
Double Standards -- Fortnite game praised for black-out, neobank Chime upsets 5 million customers

Let’s look at the recent Fortnite blackout and compare it to neobank Chime's embarassing down time, as well as explore the business model implication of what it means to be the social square where people hang out. Does Finance have such an equivalent? Maybe it is Venmo, crypto Twitter, or the credit unions. We also look at statistics behind influencer marketing, and how influencers have usurped the position of music labels. Perhaps banks should get ahead of this game too.

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metaverse, neobank, credit unions/small banks, marketing, music industry, social & communityLex SokolinFortnite, Twitch, Chime, Venmo, Galileo, YouTube, Instagram