The House of Medici ruled Florence for 300 years. The family parlayed fortunes from textiles and banking into political power. From 1513 - 1610, they produced four popes and two Queens of France. And to fortify their influence, they used art. The Medicis financed much of the Italian renaissance, backing Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, Botticelli, Galileo, Machiavelli and other towering figures.

Imagine a cultural milieu without those names. That’s a hypothetical C.Y. Lee wants us to consider. After a fruitful tech career, he’s become a patron of the arts – especially of on-chain endeavors, like the recent “directory of inspiration,” Network Archives, which chronicles the tumultuous era of web3 music.

Lee contributed a piece to Network Archives called “Patronage is a Luxury Product” where he advocated for a resurrection of the benefactor model. He traces patrons across history, from the 15th century and the Medici family to the modern era – “Bandcamp, Patreon and 1/1 NFTs,” he wrote. Films are financed by executive producers, he notes – why not music? 

“I'm hoping some of my peer group – people who grew up around music but ended up making bank from something else – can still connect with emergent culture," he told me recently. “To start crafting stories that inspire people to replicate this pattern – of giving artists that they believe in money to keep them going. That's the game that we're trying to meme into existence."

Lee’s building that game with 20 odd creators – the most recent of which is Latasha Alcindor (aka the artist Latashá). He recently gave her $100,000 to help her fashion her storytelling container, Tash55. And as with the Medicis, there are no financial returns in this relationship. ROI – the “return on investment” metric that venture capitalists (VCs) bandy about – is purely cultural. 

Amidst an exploitative music industry and extractive creator economy, could patronage nouveau become a blueprint for music’s future? Can Lee and Alcindor effectively instantiate their modern-day reprisal of a centuries-old relationship? I sat down with both to find out.

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Lee grew up in a deeply musical family. His father, a premier concert pianist from Hong Kong, studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Yale’s conservatory. His mother was a music scholar who studied in upstate New York. His sister is a professional violinist.

As a child, Lee learned to play piano and cello. "I was a reasonably good cellist,” he said. “They let me in the orchestra, which had pretty high standards, but it wasn't a part of my identity the way it became a part of my sister's identity."

Lee was drawn to technology. “Legos were my shit, and software was next level composability,” he said. “Whatever you had at your disposal you could smash into something and then play with it immediately."

That affinity led him to MIT – where he discovered college radio and DJing – "this is the late 80s, so house and hip hop were my soul food," he said – and then into the nascent tech industry.

After a brief stint as a software developer at Apple in 1990, he went to Microsoft, working on what became Outlook, the company’s email client and personal information manager system. In 1999, during the Napster era, he went to RealNetworks (nineties babies might remember their RealPlayer app), which spurred an enduring interest in digital music distribution. 

In 2013, with Carl Tydingco – another former RealNetworks developer – Lee co-founded MusicNerd. “All these [social and music] services had API support,” Lee told me in a 2023 interview. (APIs are the means through which software apps can communicate.)

“Naively we're like, let's mash these things together, so while you're listening to music, instead of looking at the cover art, you can look at the person's Instagram – you can see what they've tweeted."

Conceptually it was sound – connecting systems to embed music within important social context. But it meant their product was at the mercy of corporate gatekeepers.

The gospel of decentralization

“When you use other people's APIs, you get fucked when they change their mind – for whatever reason,” Lee said. “We'd build on top of Spotify and Spotify stuff gets deprecated. Instagram cuts off access to its API.”

He continued, "and Bandcamp has been dead to me for 10 years, honestly. When they didn't put out an API, I'm like, fuck you" – this was right after Bandcamp had been acquired for the second time in 18 months. "If Bandcamp dies, who knows what access you'll have to all the music that's still in the stream.”

Platform acquisitions and API shutdowns are not uncommon (Elon Musk shut Twitter’s free API last February; last month, Instagram terminated its Basic Display API). Founder whims and corporate bottom lines can categorically disempower users, especially artists reliant on platforms to earn livings and keep their music “in the stream.”

All this underscores the gospel of decentralization – and the power of the blockchain. In 2017, Lee and Tydingco began to dabble in crypto. They started collecting non-fungible tokens (NFTs), eventually transforming Music Nerd into "a directory of artists and collectors" that helped people find each other on the blockchain. 

In an interview, Alcindor asked Lee why he became so interested in collecting music NFTs. "The music industry has always been terrible,” Lee responded, “web3 just seemed like a way for artists to take control of how they were going to make a living doing that art.”

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Alcindor was born and raised in Brooklyn. "I grew up in a pretty lower middle class home where there was no idea of being an artist as an occupation," she told me in an interview last year. She studied African American Studies at Wesleyan, focusing on Psychology and Black Performance Art – and specifically hip hop. 

Around 2010, she wrote a play called The Memoirs of Hip Hop, where she embodied and personified the genre. “I was like, alright, I'm gonna go to Broadway – that's what I'm gonna do.”

She ended up working at Chase. “My mom was like, you need a job.”

While at Chase, she performed across New York, earning a name for herself at poetry slams and cyphers. Soon she started rapping, and found herself sharing stages with stars like Kanye West, Q-Tip and Big Sean. But, tethered to her day job, momentum remained elusive. 

“I quit Chase three times,” she told me. "I was writing in notebooks every day that I wanted an angel investor to come into my life and help me move out of my crib and do music.”

In 2016, after hearing Alcindor on SoundCloud, a woman – a well-known poet who chooses to remain anonymous – reached out, eventually becoming her mentor. In time, she became her imagined angel, giving Alcindor $10,000 to leave Chase for good and focus on music.

Discovering NFTs

That same year she started dating her partner, the filmmaker Jahmel Reynolds, known professionally as Jah. When the pandemic ravaged live performances – Alcindor’s primary income stream – Reynolds encouraged her to explore NFTs. 

She caught the first wave. In 2021 alone, her NFT sales amounted to more than $100,000. "Artists were making money that they never had seen before, and never knew they could be valued at – or that people would meet that value!” she told me. “In web3 I made what I could've made through a record deal without giving away the rights to any of my masters."

But when the bear market arrived, NFT platform builders borrowed market dynamics from what they knew: web2. As free editions gained popularity, the race to the bottom began to mirror the reality artists were trying to escape – platforms exploiting creators for their own survival, and labels offering venture capital-style deals, prioritizing vanity metrics over artistry to determine how resources are allocated.

"The label that we were working with on [my track “Who I Am.”] was pushing for us to shoot a music video,” Alcindor said. “The cost was around $10,000 and the label was like, ‘we're gonna get some finances for it.’ They gave us $500."

In October 2021, Alcindor minted that music video – directed by Reynolds – on the NFT protocol Zora. Lee had heard Alcindor through Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, so he recognized her name. He purchased it for 3.5 ETH, the equivalent of about $14,000 at the time. “I was like, who is this guy? Cause he's showing up,” Alcindor said. “He actually cares about this thing.”

The patron arrives

Added Lee: "Back then, any 1:1 collect would be followed by DMing each other and then getting on a video call [to answer], 'who are you and why did you do that?'"

They did, and they stayed in touch. When Alcindor became the Head of Community at Zora – a position she held for nearly three years – she started the education program Zoratopia, and Lee sponsored two events. “I didn’t think of it as executive producing back then,” Lee said, “but in retrospect that’s what it was.”

At the time, Alcindor was also working on Tash55, the “sonic world of all of my beings and things that I've done,” she explained. "I invited C.Y. to the studio one time to check out what we were working on. He started telling me about his interest in being an executive producer, so I kept that in the back of my mind.”

Quickly “all my beings” became too encompassing to build alone, she said. “Building a vision that can truly catapult a career takes time, experimentation and resources,” she told me. “So I was like, okay, let me get my shit together and I'll talk to C.Y. about it."

After many calls and studio visits, they came to an agreement. There would be regular check-ins, and "proof of work" through on-chain deliverables – “I airdrop C.Y. works that I’m building and he’s the first to see what’s in the work,” Alcindor said. But there are no strict contractual obligations. The bottom line: Lee is giving her $100,000 to make art.

“It’s been a game changer – helping me bring on a management team, engineers, a visual squad and creatives,” Alcindor said. “C.Y. [recognizes] that artists today are essentially running their own startups and need investors, patrons and advocates to push the culture forward.”

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For Alcindor, this deal is a no-brainer. But Lee’s incentives are less clear. Startup investors expect financial returns, so why did he do that?

In Network Archives, Lee outlines his motivations: to “vicariously experience the artist's process,” and be part of the project’s “manifesting.” He also cites posterity reasons, and points to attribution being “a crucial part of the project's realization." But most salient is the justification he shares with Alcindor: “I want everyone to see each other as artists and then realize, ‘I can be a part of making the culture happen that I want to see.’" 

As the Medicis understood, art is a powerful tool for projecting cultural sophistication, and enabling influence and legacy. But it’s our collective agency that holds the system together. We, as appreciators, have a vested interest in ensuring artists we love can spend their time making art.

Lee understands that. Via his family, he has an innate empathy for artists. He’s witnessed the shortfalls of the label model and creator platform machinations. But for patronage to take root, it’s got to scale far beyond Lee. Can he convince less predisposed peers that this is worth their time and money? 

"I do think there is sort of a ‘psy-op’ thing we're trying to pull off here,” he said. “If asked the right way, [a lot of my peer group] would be excited to participate and invent that protocol.”

And Lee’s been asking. “It’s a slow, personal, incremental process,” he told me. “But it is coming along. When I started this in earnest last year, there were three things they had to get their heads around: crypto concepts, culture being a public good and their patronage of an artist being a positive force on pushing culture forward.”

In the past few months, he said, crypto has become more of an “implementation detail.” And he’s begun to use familiar parallels that help people relate to the protocol’s other pieces.

“The most ridiculous form of this is the non-profit gala,” he said. “It's a big social pressure crucible – a game where you donate as much money as possible and justify to yourself it was a good idea.” 

Today the most visible gala is the haute couture fundraising festival held each year by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). In 2024, hundreds of attendees paid $75,000 a pop. The “psy-ops” in play here is that people are paying to be seen at the world’s most prestigious fashion event – which is actually a fundraiser for a museum.

“Clearly we can make up a new mechanic that has the same effect,” Lee said. “It's not a GoFundMe – that's wrong. But there's some analogy of a gala that's gonna work for the way culture works today."

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In 2021, the Met hosted an exhibition called "The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570." The show’s central figure was Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574). When Cosimo became the second Duke of Florence, his family’s political power was fading, as were the “Renaissance ideals of balance and rationality,” wrote the New York Times in a review. “The task as Cosimo saw it was to maintain the illusion of Medici power through art.”

To gain advantage, Cosimo leaned on new technology – specifically the growing use of oil paint over egg tempera, which produced more vibrant textures and colors. Oil paint was also easier to replicate, making it possible to copy and distribute Medici influence across Europe.

The Medici legacy is testament to the virtue of combining cultural and financial returns. Today, on the brink of an oligarchy where CEOs get paid nearly 400 times more than a typical worker, balance and rationality are once again at stake.

In the past year, Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, has sold company shares seven times, giving himself about $350 million. He’s a non-musician and he’s the richest person in the history of the music industry. In a streaming ecosystem where it takes 10,000 plays for a song to earn thirty bucks, the abject asymmetry is difficult to stomach. It seems so simple to inject half that cash back into the music – if for no other reason than to buoy his tarnished cultural cachet.

Over the past five years, the culturally vapid plutocrat has become a character archetype. Succession, Triangle of Sadness, The White Lotus, Blink Twice, Saltburn, The Menu, Parasite – the tone-deaf magnate has replaced the Germans and the Russians as society’s de facto villain. We see ourselves represented in the 99 percent. We feel the inequity. 

And when we celebrate these stories, we're celebrating the executive producers financing our discontent. “Who is this guy?” we might ask. Because they’re showing up – they actually care about this thing.

lead image: Latashá