Oh La La Wants to Aggregate Music NFTs — Are Musicians Ready?
Oh La La has already stepped on some artist toes by listing their on-chain music NFTs. Is the market ready for a music NFT aggregator?
In 2017 the seminal composer, modular synthesizer pioneer and “father of techno” Morton Subotnick opined about the limitations of search engines. “If I'd like to know something I don't know,” he said. “Well, [search engines] can't answer that question.”
It was a concept that’s stuck with me. What Subotnick was alluding to was the importance of organic discovery. Once we’ve heard of something, we can inquire further, but how do we ensure we stumble upon that first kernel? The discovery layers we rely upon – automated news feeds, algorithmic playlists – tend to use our own search histories to suggest “new” things, keeping us in our bubbles. They only perpetuate our sameness.
In music, major streaming platforms are notorious for creating feedback loops – Spotify’s Discovery Weekly feature are comfortable recapitulations of what you’re already listening to. But with 100,000 songs added to streaming platforms every day, we desperately need curatorial support, so algorithms it must be, right?
Web3 music is challenging that notion and has the capacity to perform the role of curation in a more human way. But that stands to change in the face of large-scale on-boarding. The fragmentation of music non-fungible token (NFT) platforms will quickly become a problem if we don’t somehow map and aggregate discovery in smart ways.
Enter Ooh La La, a “borderless (and free!) music NFT player and aggregator” that’s currently integrated with 16 different music NFT platforms and communities. The South Korean company raised $1 million last July in pre-seed funding to build the platform, and they’re tackling difficult, blockchain-related infrastructural issues such as aligning non-standardized smart contracts and cross-platform metadata to work toward a single interface for web3 music.
The work is important, but the “free!” portion is contentious. “Who gave you permission to stream my music for free?” artist Wayak recently tweeted at Ooh La La. After some back and forth in a Twitter thread, Wayak requested to have his music taken down (to Ooh La La’s credit, they took it down and sent the artist a direct message to continue the conversation).
Dozens of artists subsequently became aware that their music non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were being streamed, too, and without their consent, culminating in a 5+ hour Twitter space with more than 1,100 participants.
The spirit of data collection in web3 is open source and permissionless, and because blockchains like Ethereum are public, anyone can technically build on top of something like a music NFT – an inherent reality that’s integral yet often misunderstood.
Ooh La La recently tweeted a thread of apology surrounding their own misunderstood intentions, and in response, the artist Mark de Clive-Lowe summed up the disconnect pretty succinctly: “pretty wild that artists who willingly put their music on chain and are bullish about the tech are now taking issue with how their music is accessible on a permissionless technology. smdh”
I recently connected with Ooh La La co-founder Hyug Bin Kwon about his journey from the Korean AirForce to crypto exchange researcher to music NFT flag bearer. Though not a musician himself, he grew up admiring his artist and producer brother, Louis Maui (MKIT RAIN, Cribs), which introduced him to the flaws in the music industry and web3’s potential to fix it.
We chatted about his story, the structural difficulties of building consumer products atop decentralized technology and taking a step back to connect with artists and identify the best ways to create value in this rapidly evolving space.
Decential: I'd love to hear more of your origin story – like where you grew up, and when your relationship with music started.
Hyug Kwon: I actually [grew up going] back and forth from Korea and the US – mostly in Iowa and Illinois. I went to college in the states in Illinois. And then after graduating from college I ended up joining the AirForce as an officer.
That's where I met my current co-founder. We both ended up becoming researchers at a crypto exchange called Huobi. At the time it was one of the largest after Binance. We were reading hundreds, if not thousands of white papers trying to filter out the scams. And then after Huobi, I ended up founding a blockchain validator and infrastructure provider. We used to build a lot of public infrastructure, like wallets, explorers and developer tools.
Now, all these decentralized applications are an aggregator in one form or another – they just search the network for metadata information that meets certain criteria and renders that information.
The same is true for marketplaces or data analytics or any of these decentralized applications. And we were empowering developers and operators to build on top of the network and stabilize it by validating transactions and blocks. So it was natural to me when I saw that the music NFT space was extremely fragmented and everything was just scattered.
I realized that crypto wasn't just these consensus algorithms and zero knowledge proofs and protocol technology, but it was the innovation moving towards the mainstream end users.
I was mostly interested in music because I felt like, you know, not everybody plays games or collects art, but everybody in the world listens to music. And music connects us in ways that no other medium can.
Decential: Totally. Are you an artist yourself?
HK: I'm not an artist myself, but my younger brother has been an artist for most of his life. He's a hip hop producer in Korea. He started in LA and in the early days of YouTube he kind of went viral in the Korean community and then suddenly they were on these reality TV shows.
And so it was really exciting for me when one day I was walking down the street and there were people listening to my brother's music. And so music was definitely an interest to me. And also I knew that it's very difficult for artists to make money to make a livable wage.
I remember in 2017, since I was reviewing all these different blockchain projects, I remember the first art project was Maecenas. And then I remember the first music project was Musicoin, but that was kind of like its own blockchain. And then later on I saw Audius come out and then Catalog came out with the one-of-one mint platform.
After seeing all these music NFT mint platforms emerging from different places and even on different blockchains, I realized that there's a ton of missing infrastructure pieces for this space to really take off. This is designed to be a distributed network, so everything is really scattered.
My co-founder is also a co-organizer of DeFi Seoul, which is the largest DeFi community in Korea, so we were also heavily involved with DeFi. And aggregators play an extremely important role there, like Zapper. So when I said, ‘Hey, I don't know where to find these music NFTs – it's just so fragmented and it only seems to be accelerating.’ And my co-founder said ‘Maybe we need a Zapper for music NFTs – like the aggregator.’
The current pool of retail collectors is very small, and retail money is going to dry up very quickly. So [we need to] find the next wave of collectors coming into this space, and [build] the infrastructure piece together in a composable way – like a web3 media stack being built as a set of media legos – to [see the most] interesting and novel innovations in this space.
Decential: I’m curious what those ideal routes are to explore and expand – specifically the scope of the retail collector. What are you doing specifically to onboard more people into this space?
HK: One of the things is just a simple interface to discover all of the music NFTs, and something to interact with those smart contracts.
But another thing was – for this space to grow 500 or a 1,000x – it needs to be able to capture more liquidity. Right now there's not even a place where you could look up the prices – like look up the value [of music NFTs].
Normally you have a place where you can browse through a list of products and evaluate which ones you want to buy, and then that leads to purchases and then so on and so forth. That's the conversion funnel.
Since we started Ooh La La there have been a lot of attempts to create this index and price aggregator, but music NFTs are very different from NFTs in that the metadata is just so messy. In order to create a coin market cap for music NFTs, you would have to aggregate everything.
And the more creative you get the more difficult it becomes to standardize. Especially when you create a custom contract – it becomes even more difficult to find your followers and collectors.
So right now I feel like music NFTs are closer to a consumable than a digital asset. If it's a digital asset, it should be much more liquid. I think this is preventing more collectors from entering into this space, especially like institutional investors. If you look at most exchanges, retail is like 10 percent and institutional is like 90 percent. But the thing is, for the 90 percent that come in, there's gotta be that 10 percent in retail. Right? And for the 10 percent retail to come in, there's gotta be some institution that injects the capital.
These things have to go hand-in-hand, so I feel like that kind of information – like the indicators to be able to evaluate these music NFTs as a digital asset – are just not in place because it's so difficult to aggregate price information and search everything in one place.
In our latest release we started adding more financial information, and you can look at the number of editions – the supply – and then you can look at the last price, and we're adding the total sales. And then we're gonna add a lot more like turnover ratio and how many unique users.
The second thing we're working on is there's not even like a drop calendar for music NFTs and because music NFTs are also very cross-platform. One artist will mint on many different platforms, so we should have all of that in one place so that collectors can keep track of their favorite artist’s drop.
And because of the recent aggregation scrutiny, we're also gonna start adding artist controls, like being able to manage tracks. It took a long time for us to basically rebuild the entire data structure because there were some artists that mentioned that they were unable to edit their profiles.
And that’s because the data is not stored in our database, like in a web tool. We're basically just calling public information and showing it, so if you want to edit that and remove that, then there have to be several steps to verify that person is the actual owner, and it's actually really complicated.
But we finally restructured everything, so now anyone who minted music NFTs can just connect their wallet and start editing everything. And then they can remove their tracks, and they're gonna be able to remove their entire profile.
Decential: Yeah I saw the thread that you posted that was addressing these issues. And I know there was a moment when Ooh La La was called out by Wayak, and then there was a follow-up from Wayak that said, for transparency's sake, you took down his music and you reached out to him via DM and Wayak tweeted ‘hopefully something fruitful can come from this conversation’.
Did you connect? Did some of these things like artist controls and opt-in and opt-outs come out of that conversation?
HK: Yeah, I reached out to Wayak and at first I was kind of nervous cause sometimes [people] seemed very angry. Some people were sending hate messages. But when I reached out to Wayak, he was actually very cool and calm.
He was very understanding and after he understood that our intentions weren't harmful, he was pretty cool about it. And he said that maybe if things change over time, he might be willing to get back onto Ooh La La.
So I was very grateful for his attitude, but it's very difficult to opt in and out, and it's because of the design of these decentralized applications, to create this permissioned layer on top of decentralized applications.
On the blockchain, there are thousands of decentralized applications that are programmed to show metadata if it meets certain criteria, so the moment you mint on an application like Sound, it's designed to show up in many different places. You can even go to Uniswap and search for music entities and it's there.
It's just that we've filtered it just by music because if you go to OpenSea, it's swamped by all these other types of NFTs and it's not a good music experience. And only a fraction of music NFTs are on OpenSea – some of them were on Zora, some on Manifold, and custom contracts are everywhere. So we felt like the future of music NFTs is a verticalized application where you can just find music NFTs on one application, one interface.
Decential: So what’s the business model for Ooh La La, given the provenance of the NFT is sending value back to the NFT creator and minting platforms?
HK: So just to be honest, we're still trying to figure that out. We've been around for about six months, so we're trying to learn from gem.xyz. Even though it's an aggregator, most of the money goes back to the original mint platforms or the creators. And gem.xyz might take a very small fee off of each trade. But it's not really profitable, so that's something that we're thinking about.
And then we're thinking about ways to create these album NFTs, since we're the aggregator that puts everything together. So each artist within that album can all digitally sign to create that album NFT, and then kind of be their own mini label. I think there could be interesting models with that.
But I think the most honest and natural way to create a business model in web3 is basically a small fee from every trade because that incentivizes the creators. In web2, Spotify makes all the money and then artists get a small percentage. In web3, through these trades, artists are the ones who directly make the profit, and the facilitators take a small fee, and if that fee doesn't make sense to both parties, they can just trade somewhere else.