It's a fairly simple and common story. It wasn't a dream but an illusion\! We thought that the music market operated differently from other markets. We thought our new tools would be a remedy to a social problem. At least i did. I was convinced that if Internet could put a [freshly grown global multi-billion dollar industry](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/inside/cron.html){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} could suddenly be on the brink of fall, Internet had to be bringing a new variable to the table. And it's almost true: music is a bit different. And while the variable internet brought to that table was indeed new, it wasn't any different. Was iteven worse?
###### {: width="749" height="403"}Meme stolen from a meme-thief in [AnarchoMemes](https://t.me/AnarchoMemes/8505){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}
The music market is shady. I haven't lived long enough to say it always was, but reading about it's history unravels vast amounts of drama. Eitherway it's not the shadiness of the music market that sets it apart from others. It's how it's value is being created. In that sense, making music is like any art: it can be compared to printing your own money. You do something with a couple of tools and little funky shit. And boom\! Well… if it was that simple right? It has to be determined by some marketing chief that the music may generate profit first. Sure, there are many acts that are being blown up by the marketing department of a major record label, who never see any real success in the usual megastar sense. But it's out there and known. Not first because of any particular magic musical value, but because millions of people were made aware of it. Music doesn't have to bring any actual value to society to become valuable: it will not transport goods, build housing, make food… Sure, it might bring motivation to someone doing all those things, but that's about where it stands in terms of meaningfulness. The value of music is organic and arbitrary at the same time. Like a living-dead [Schrödinger cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}. Or a ticket to an upcoming lottery. Yet entire buildings of people depend on it to pay their rent and feed their families…
And the shadiness remained while the transfer to the Internet went on, worse it got amplified. Now music wasn't only a mean of generate capital or motivating workers to produce, it also became a tool of surveillance. The industry abandoned sales and opted for [rentification](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giovanni_Dosi){: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}. Why sell an album for 19$ when you can rent it out for 9$ per month? Centralizing like this comes with added benefits: there is no need to risk capital in producing a bunch of expensive packages that might end-up in a pile collecting dust if the product flops. And the nature of a central source of the music being a database, enables for exact monitoring of what plays, when and by whom\! Better yet: If the data gets correlate with social media profiles, age, gender, sexual orientation and religion can be correlated to this data, commonly refereed to as ["mood-and-moment" data.](https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly){: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}
Of course not\! Dreams don't die, silly. If anything adversity tends to sharpen the escapism they contain. As the corporation and government slowly catched up with the web. Huge silos where emerged, capturing the social essence of it into the well known services that have come to be almost familiar. (They certainly don't need another mention here). And the information flow halted. What was once a wild jungle of cross-pollinating ideas and wildfires became a massive apparatus of advertisement and monitoring. A wall was built around the general public. To most people joining internet after 2010, it quickly felt like technical progress was merely another button in their favorite app or a better way to weed out annoying acquaintances. But beyond those walls, passionate geeks kept on building. This time with the errors of the past in mind. Not aiming for perfection, but for alternatives. The silos had to be gone and to do this, protection from it had to built-in the tools, getting inspiration from century old techniques of power-shattering: decentralization and federation. Making it impossible for a single entity to control the network had to become an integral part of the system. The fediverse, the dweb, IPFS among others. There didn't just appear of course and while a majority had their eyes on social media, a forum was exploring new ways to approach one of out most fundamental tool of communication: money.
> “*We can’t imagine to enter the Information Age without changing the fundamental and most used communication tool: Money*”
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> – [Bernard Lietaer](http://lietaer.com)
## Yeah, right, whatever this got to do with music...
Now, i understand this is a lot to unpack and i'm doing my best not to dewleve into details.
