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Cherie Hu from Water and Music discusses Web3 at Consensys 2022.

Water and Music, the newsletter and research DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) creating the guide for innovators to the music business, was created to facilitate conversations between people in music tech. The company is now taking it one step further and actively engaging with the industry's hive brain to design research initiatives and rewards everyone that is involved.

"My 'why' for this membership is helping people to better understand the world, as well as understanding their role within the global community," begins Cherie Hu, founder of Water and Music. She wants to help people get the best possible education so that they have the best impression on the people in their field. Cherie's main tenets, especially in the context of reporting for business, has always focused on writing that can be used in action. "At the conclusion of each article, you'll be armed with an understanding of what to do for your business or to improve at your job. Making sure that you are able to bridge the gap between what the society need and our writing, is very important," Cherie explains.

Today, the Water and Music team has increased the frequency of'research sprints' lasting about 10 weeks, where they select a specific topic in order to gather as much data as they can for their clients. For these research sprints, once they have decided to choose a topic the team will go out and talk to the Water and Music community: "We ask, 'What are you currently concerned about?' and we crowdsource [those responses]. The structure of the report comes directly from those requirements," she tells me.

As is the norm, Water and Music research sprints are incredibly collaborative and community-centric. "It's an ideation process that is bottom-up and we recruit a number of individuals to assist in the research process," Cherie says. As of now, this Water and Music community has released two reports in this group arrangement. Keeping on-trend, they sold NFTs in retroactive fashion, which meant that if people would like to contribute to the research, they could - and the proceeds were distributed equally among contributors. "It's clear to me that the result of this research was superior to if a single person attempted to study every aspect. This research would not be complete!" she smiles. "It's made me believe in the value of not just creating connections, but more importantly, combining information."

Regaining power

"It's more of an academic term, but I think that it is applicable to Water and Music: we're in a group of practitioners," Cherie continues. "The concept was first introduced in 1991 by the cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger] and is a term used to describe a group of individuals that do not just share the same interests and passion, but also come together with the sole aim of finding out how to make something better."

She explains that this can correspond to people who are in the same industry or in similar roles across the different industries. These people communicate regularly, and exchange knowledge. Water and Music will contribute to this by producing media and building tools as well as facilitating peer-to-peer learning: "That'll be a really crucial aspect of the future plans: breaking down information silos in the world of music, and encouraging everyone to become more cooperative," Cherie adds.

There's a certain element of 'taking the power back' in this. Cherie hopes to assure artists that they have more power than what it appears: "Certainly, in the streaming industry, there's increasing consolidations which are led by Spotify and other big tech firms. Royalty rates are going down -- well, the trend is all downwards! -- so we're giving artists the ability to comprehend the wide range of alternative choices. We're equipping artists and the others around them with the ability to be more innovative."

Sux3d7DLXXZZZHfaqDqtw The Water and Music team

Cheire clarifies that the phrase "community of practice" initially was a reference to professional groups, but it can also be relevant to creative communities for example, as we have here. For Water and Music the exact goal is to promote the music industry, and it's all down to the personal motivation. "I'm motivated by this work due to the fact that I played piano. I spent much of my time around classical musicians, but I love interacting with all artists as well as hearing their thoughts on where tech is going," Cherie continues. "Hopefully, whatever knowledge we put out there helps artists and their teams understand tech better, to enable them to create cool artwork!"

Through the rabbit hole

The latest analysis has focused on the chaos that is Web3 which is the concept of the next generation of the internet built on blockchain technology. "We're trying to understand what's the State of the Union for technological trends in the field of music, particularly the ones that have a lot of noise," she explains. "Web3 is a perfect illustration due to the sheer amount of chaos; nobody knows what's happening. It's the most extreme rabbit hole and it just goes on and on. It's as if, "What's going on ?'!"

The music industry is it is not surprising that one of the top worries is that of fan-generated opinions. "I believe that's one reason why a lot of performers aren't performing NFTs in the moment: because of the fear of backlash from the fans," she muses. "We did a report on concerns around Web3. Naturally, in the field of music there are many concerns around licensing as well as Intellectual property (IP) that are impacted by NFTs. That was a whole chapter!"

The tlg9Yi9H8w9qUpATyR6 The Water and Music meetup at the NFT.NYC conference

The next collaborative report within the community is already in progress. "We're looking into even more mysterious topics now, for example the metaverse, what ever that is!" Cherie jokes. "We're not even trying to build anything right now; we're just trying to figure out what people's opinions are about it, as well as what the people have a hard time understanding." The book includes interviews with artists, startups' founders, as well as industry experts on how they view the metaverse and what they're hoping to achieve in it and also what's proving to be challenging.

Cherie mentions that the goal is to combine this research with building online tools to address these issues. "We tried this on a couple of Web3 topics already, such as second-hand sales of music using royalty shares and NFTs. A few smart contracts say that between 10 and 20% of the secondary sales will go to the artist who originally created it and a lot of users have been expressing the idea as a profit. The reality is that the majority of NFT's don't generate a secondary sale," Cherie explains. She says that she thinks the value lies on the personal interaction and relationship that the NFT is a part of, and not so much in the opportunity to having something to sell onwards again in the future.

In addition to the report, Water and Music will be developing a tracker dashboard that users can input an NFT collection and see if there have been any further sales and if so, how the NFT has moved through the market. "We are looking to develop more interactive tools: it's as interactive data journalism particularly for artists as they are probably those who think the most about the release or pricing NFT drops. We're building crucial frameworks and tools that will assist people in doing this analysis task themselves."

Conflicting visions

Cherie observes that certain terms that are new and exciting are becoming more muddied rather than clearer with time "For the metaverse, for instance, there's an enormous gap between how the concept of metaverse was historically as well as conceptually defined to the 1960s." She elaborates her Water and Music team is building a framework for understanding historical definitions of the metaverse and the gap between expectations and actuality.

"The first sci-fi books with a metaverse reference had the vision of an connected virtual and IRL worlds. We are so far off from that vision right today. But at the same time within the music industry the artists say "I've launched my personal metaverse!' even though they essentially mean the concept of a virtual universe.

"There is a direct conflict between conceptions of metaverses," she adds. "You are dealing with Meta (Facebook's holding company) as well as Epic Games on one side: both are centralized and one entity owns everything however, there's the idea of a Web3-forward decentralized, metaverse with interoperable identities and assets. It is logical to at least experiment with blockchain technology and the role it has in supporting the process, yet it completely contradicts Facebook's approach."

Cherie believes that the metaverse has "just turned into this vague word that anybody can utilize for their own benefit" and she would like to cut through the nonsense. It is in line with her raison d'etre: Water and Music analyzes and critically look into the subject, then be able to provide practical information to help people decide what to do. These are real-world applications also, for instance, providing assistance to artists and their staff when they are evaluating partnering with certain metaverse-based platforms.

The Water and Music meetup at the NFT.NYC conference

Cherie ends her show in a typical fashion by encouraging collaboration among her Water and Music community. "In the next couple of months, we'll be carrying interviews with artists, platforms, and startup founders. Our research into the metaverse is likely to continue throughout the summer into the fall and if anyone is interested in getting involved with this, please let me know. If you have suggestions for people to interview I'm open for suggestions!"

For more information, you can follow Cherie for updates on Twitter: @water andmusic. To become a member of the Water and Music community, and gain access to the community's in-depth research reports and Discord server, go to waterandmusic.com/membership.