Headless Chaos: How collaboration can transform the Web3 music industry
Songcamp’s inspiring Web3 journey to breaking music boundaries sees it experimenting on the edges of blockchain technology through a headless music artist.
In this article, we discuss:
The Songcamp story
What makes what they do unique
Why music needs Web3
How others can learn to succeed like Songcamp
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The way music is created, released, distributed and consumed is changing.
But for many artists, the cycle is the same. Focus on your music career and the business of it. Go to music school, or don’t. Put out a song, then an album with your name boldly written on it.
Matthew Chaim was such an artist until he found a way to merge the Web3 ecosystem with music production and distribution. For the third time in two years, he’s organised collaborative songwriting camps which have successfully released generative music as NFTs.
Faces of Web3 spoke with Papa Jams, one of the community members, about Songcamp and how the world can take a leaf from the book of Headless Chaos, a band made of 77 artists committed to building a headless music artist.
The Songcamp story
In March 2021, Matthew Chaim—the portal opener—put a discord together as a place for music and the internet to crash into each other. He called it Songcamp because, after attending a songwriting camp in 2017, he’d experienced incredible growth creatively and as a human being.
From a networking standpoint, attending these camps opened doors for him over the years as a musician and songwriter. So Songcamp served as an innovative flagship experiment to create and release music.
“Songcamp is a collective of artists, musicians, graphic visual artists, economists, strategists, developers, engineers, and a variety of talents that are motivated and passionate about unravelling this new experimental ecosystem and seeing how it can be used to enhance the possibilities for musicians,” Papa told Faces of Web3.
The camp gave the artists who participated a sense of belonging while they stretched the edges of music and Web3 together. In addition, the songs created in Songcamp were designed to give the audience an immersive, interactive experience.
From one musician to a creative army
So far, Songcamp has embarked on three successful projects.
The first was Camp Genesis, a group of 13 people banding together for two weeks to create and release music as one-of-one NFT. “When the pandemic was getting going, 13 musicians got together and created three music NFTs and sold $34,000 worth,” Papa said. “It was incredible.”
A few months later, in summer 2021, they ran a bigger songwriting camp called Camp Elektra with 42 people. This one had a pop-up production house created around it, bringing sound designers, visual artists, voiceover actors, and storytellers together.
In a 2022 interview with Adam Levy, Chaim said the “idea behind this project was that there’s a world/planet called Elektra where music is energy; it’s dying, and we’ve been sent there to save it with our music.” They created three music NFTs and sold about $130,000.
The third, Camp Chaos, started in March 2022 with 80 people and ended with 77 people, including 45 artists, operations executives, visual artists, a dev team, and a core team. In eight weeks, they created 45 songs using discord, Notion, Zoom, a few Web3 apps like Coordinates, and the blogging platform Mirror. The goal was to release these songs as an NFT collection totalling over 20,000 unique tokens.
“Camp Chaos is the intention to create this headless artist, this headless band cult,” Chaim said. “The idea was to embrace that chaos and use it as the inception for something new, authentic and sometimes weird.”
The camp birthed Headless Chaos, a group of people from around the world who worked in different time zones and spoke different languages.
That made it quite chaotic.
While, at first, the people involved didn’t have any real idea of what Songcamp might entail or what the outcome might be, they banded together in good faith, made some songs, and put them on the blockchain. That resonated with an audience.
Songcamp grew from there, maintaining inclusivity while trying to make this Web3 infrastructure accessible to all.
Becoming part of a headless artist
Many musicians are discovering new tools NFTs can bring to them as well as new methods of how to collaborate, create a community, and showcase their art in creative ways.
Those interested in becoming a member of the group can start by joining the discord. There are a variety of skills that musicians can leverage.
The Chaos camp started as an open call to anyone in the community who joined the discord, wanted to participate, and could invest a minimum of 10 hours every week over the course of five weeks.
“The focus for us is on the music and communicating the message that this is possible for any collective of musicians looking to participate in the space. We’ve published an article that tells you the steps on how to do this yourself. We’re trying to be as open source as possible so that others can do the same for their creative endeavours. We’re looking to expand that inclusivity and accessibility for those who see the possibilities but don’t know what step to take.”
The chaotic structure
The first Songcamp project was orderly and broken into different stages. The aim was to bring everyone together with a vision of creating a headless artist who would break the bounds of music in the Web3 space. Over time, it became less organised, allowing people to connect in unique ways.
The structure was pretty simple.
In the beginning, three artists (for instance, a producer, vocalist, and instrumentalist) who’d never met before were put in a group. They were given one week to produce a demo, after which everyone met up in discord to listen to it together. Then the smaller group was given another week to deliver the finished master. After these two weeks, they split up again into different groups with entirely new people to work with.
“That kind of discombobulates any of the practices and norms they’re used to just to unlock creativity powerfully,” Papa told Faces of Web3.
All the music is made collectively. Being a headless band means they’re leaving out the egoic sense of “I did this, I deserve more,” and that adds more value to the entire project.
For every amount made from each collective, about 30% is put into a community wallet to fund future projects. That way, there’s a value flow to everyone involved determined by their unique contributions to the camp.
In the first two weeks, everyone who participated in the camp was paid $0.3Eth (about $1,405). While musicians would normally spend money on production logistics before they can make money from their music, Headless Chaos musicians were getting paid upfront because the previous camp had done well.
When the resulting NFTs sell, three factors determine how people on the team get paid: hold back, gratitude, and self-selection. You can read more about how Chaos artists are paid here.
Listening to NFT music
Once music is released, it is readily available to listen to by anyone. The NFT component is just about ownership.
Papa said, “It’s a bit like the Monalisa, which is very valuable. I think at least 20 million people go to see her at the Louvre, and they charge about $20 for that. However, there are copies of the Monalisa everywhere. The story began when the original painting was stolen from a gallery a long time ago and then returned. Over time, a bunch of parodies were made of the artwork, and it gained prominence in the cultural eye.”
In the same way, NFT music is widely available. You can check out how to access the music on our website, chaos.build.
The future of Songcamp
The songwriting camp has progressed, and it plans to continue on that upward trajectory. However, it’s a community endeavour, so what the future looks like is still a bit of a mystery. Due to the size and scope of the project, it may be difficult to hold more than two camps every year.
With Camp Elektra, the group realised that the process of creating art was art in itself. They worked online together and found innovative ways to create music, and capturing and documenting their work was akin to them making art.
That birthed Chaos Radio, an experiment in immersive digital theatre. It tells the story of how Chaim built a songwriting camp, and it documents what’s happening in the camp in real-time through calls, chats, interviews, and voice memos.
One thing is certain: there will be more camps around how to integrate the architecture of Web3 into the world of music and help artists realise some of the value that they’re putting out into the world.
Emulating Headless Chaos
Headless Chaos puts into perspective the idea that you can achieve more when collaborating with others. And as Papa said, the Songcamp story is truly remarkable in the way it “utilises a part of the architecture in Web3 to bring together a group of artists from around the world to create art that’s hopefully very meaningful.”
For many groups who want to adopt the same successful model as Songcamp, Papa admitted there’s no guarantee they’ll be just as successful. Nevertheless, the key lesson to take from Headless Chaos is that “you could go off better together than you can alone.”
To increase the likelihood of success, however, one effective marketing strategy involves working with a community of talented people who can share the redeeming qualities of the project with the world in unique ways.
Headless Chaos had a team of podcasters who helped distribute their work across all the podcasting networks. There’s also a writing team focused on telling Songcamp’s story, publications to share the story engagingly, economists, and big industry platforms.
“In the discord, there is a community of people who talk about how to set up a wallet, how to set up an NFT and put it on the blockchain. There’s a lot of notation, literature and resources to accelerate you on that path. It all sums up to a great piece of the puzzle.”
As crypto prices continue to drop and PFP projects rule the market, Songcamp and Headless Chaos are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the music industry through Web3 and blockchain technology.
You can purchase a Chaos Pack containing four music NFTs for 0.2Eth here, or stream the whole catalogue here. You can also follow Headless Chaos on Instagram and Twitter.