Thinking about future neume requirements

[djfnd]

Hey ya'll. I said in the last open office that I would spin up an open discussion for us to talk about future requirements of neume.

To kick things off, it's probably worth defining what neume is / can be. I think that this can be summarised as:

• Indexing of all activity related to onchain music, and
• Decentralised through the network that operates it

The second element is obviously important, but I think this discussion should focus on the first point. Specifically, what do we mean by "all activity related to onchain music"?

In this past wave of development, this has predominantly been focused on NFTs, 721s, and also 1155. There has also been a steady development of ERC20 "social tokens", though they have generally been less impactful really.

An important point of clarification needs to be made that, in my opinion, "all activity related to onchain music" does not specifically only mean tokens with metadata that links to music tracks. I define, for example, "Black Dave"'s community token and Sammy Arriaga's "Pixelated" PFP series in scope. Basically, anything to do with tokens that creators are experimenting with.

With that said, in terms of emerging trends that I think we should be considering while planning out future neume development, I think there are some key themes that we should be considering, and whether they will require any changes to neume architecture:

• The move to Layer-2s, specifically Optimism (currently)
  • My assumption is that this will have minimal impact, as EVM compatibility is the most important element, but would be good to be sure
  • And how does this hold if there is a meta around L2 forks, e.g. Zorachain, Base, etc.
• The rise of Account Abstraction ("smart contract wallets")
• "Mutable" NFTs
  • i.e. where the media that an NFT points to can change over time - does this matter, or is indexing at the token level still the same?
• ERC 6551 - where NFTs themselves can hold assets
  • Likely gonna be development here where NFTs can act autonomously....
• Increasing development around curation
  • At a basic level we have been exploring things like wallet-driven indexing
  • As new social (lens / farcaster / nostr etc.) becomes more mature, I'd expect that moderation (a form of curation) becomes increasingly active as an area of exploration
  • Specifically in onchain music, the idea of discoverability and the algorithms that dictate it are very core as the verticle grows
• Increasing development of self-sovereign identifiers, e.g. Disco
  • And also "agreements" between those SS IDs

This is an incomplete list of the "known unknowns" in my head right now, but of course, the most important thing for neume in 12 months is very likely to not even be on that list.

It's super important that while we are building, we keep an eye on the future as well as the present to make sure that neume is serving its user-base well. This is of course no mean feat, but we can scale out efforts by taking up specific areas of interest to explore.

[vaughnmck]

A few thoughts:

1. what needs to be true in the next cycle for neume to create a ton of value for its participants based on what it's already shipped, e.g. smart contract wallets make it a lot easier for music app developers to build with web3 music
2. would mass adoption of any of the above developments lead to a situation where on-chain music data was more or less useful than it is today?
3. What's the path of "maximum interestedness"? I'd absolutely vote [ERC6551](https://twitter.com/VaughnMcK/status/1644624680144207874?s=20

[djfnd]

1. what needs to be true in the next cycle for neume to create a ton of value for its participants based on what it's already shipped, e.g. smart contract wallets make it a lot easier for music app developers to build with web3 music

This is gonna be key question for everyone to grok I think, what do smart contract wallets enable.

The obvious one in the context of neume I think is that multiple interested parties could set up a splitted wallet to drop from. So rather than the current state of splits being enacted somewhat downstream and control being within the single EOA wallet that creates the tokens, there is greater group control (basically a multi-sig).

In addition to this, I could see development of provable (onchain) agreements between smart contract wallets becoming an interesting area of development, though haven't specifically seen anyone going hard in that area yet.

The main impact though is likely to be easier onboarding for new users in the next cycle, which, as long as functionally there is no diff for neume between an EOA and a smart contract wallet, isn't too much of an issue for us to develop around.

2. would mass adoption of any of the above developments lead to a situation where on-chain music data was more or less useful than it is today?

I think that one of the issues with "web3 music" / "music NFTs" to date is that they have offered little more to a user than they can get from either streaming or downloads; i.e. the product is largely the same. The counter to that view is that music NFTs have allowed for democratised investment in music as an additional value opportunity to artists & fans/collectors.

Regardless, it's hard to argue against the fact that "web3 music" hit a ceiling in terms of users some time ago, and so there's a strong case to be made that it's important to build out something more than is currently offered through music NFTs.

The two potential areas of development above that feel most promising in this regard to me are Mutable NFTs and ERC 6551 as there is a massive design space in which creators can explore something that can be uniquely provided through onchain mechanisms.

3. What's the path of "maximum interestedness"? I'd absolutely vote [ERC6551]

Agreed.

[estmcmxci]

"I think that one of the issues with "web3 music" / "music NFTs" to date is that they have offered little more to a user than they can get from either streaming or downloads; i.e. the product is largely the same. The counter to that view is that music NFTs have allowed for democratised investment in music as an additional value opportunity to artists & fans/collectors."

That's right. At the moment, I don't see mNFTs in their current form providing value at an order of magnitude higher to consumers than streaming does. That said, we should think about how institutions will begin to adapt the technology and what role neume can play (ie. Warner x Polygon getting in the mix).

I struggle to see my friends and their local scenes picking up on mNFTs soon — they have less patience than I do and are less technically apt. For example, bridging ETH to Zora to mint a mNFT is a pain. I tried to explain this to normie artists and it was like a deer in headlights.

On the other hand, the bit about democratized investment is real. That's why my POV on Sound XYZ / Catalog is that I see them more as an on-chain crowdfunding mechanism than anything else, although I don't believe that they would acknowledge this themselves. I think that web3 is better suited for capital / governance than anything else.