An Interview with Sky Swans about Music NFTs
Since the NFT boom began in 2021, music has been one of the many forms of art attached to NFTs and tokenization, yet there haven’t been a large number of successful projects involving the concept.
Fortunately, the team at Sky Swans took the time to talk to BCCN3 about their project and how they are working to empower independent artists using the blockchain and decentralization to provide new avenues of royalties, IP rights, and grants for upcoming musicians.
How did you guys meet each other and begin working on Sky Swans?
Alexander Jackson:
Me and P [Patrick Joseph] actually met 18 or 19 years ago. I think I was 18 or 19. P was like 21; and we met while I was going to school at Johnson and Wales University in Providence.
I had a friend of mine who would always see me freestyle and knew I loved music. One day he was like, “one of my friends has a record label.” I was like, “What do you mean? One of your friends, a 21-year-old, has a record label?”
Sure enough, that was P. He had started Mafia Soul Records, which still operates today; and we just became really fast friends. Then we spent the next two years that I was in Providence working on music together before meeting Ian a little later.
Ian Reilly:
Jackson and I met through just mutual NYC musicians and friends at the Sapphire Lounge. I actually went to school for audio engineering at City College in Manhattan and had my little community of audio engineers and music producers.
Jackson was originally friends with a close friend of mine named Colson Picard, who's a collaborator songwriter that I've worked with for many years. They worked together on Jackson's first full-length album, Back in November, with Daniel Linus.
Maybe three years ago, when Jackson had the first ideas for his second album - The War on Gravity - that's when he and I became much closer because Coulson thought we would work together well and so far we have.
Alexander Jackson:
As an artist, producing an album together is the time when you grow very quick bonds because when you're in a studio trying to pour your heart out into something, you're going as deep as you can with somebody.
You guys all seem to have a lot of musical talent and audio engineering skills, but where do the blockchain skills come into play? How did that get into the mix?
Alexander Jackson:
15 years ago, when I moved to New York, I started in the corporate fashion world. I basically started a small independent record label and a menswear company. I did that for about eight years, but it got to a point where I just came to a place in my life where I want to find a new balance.
About four and a half years ago, I transitioned into tech. I always loved the scalability of technology, how quickly it can be adopted by a large number of people; and after about two and a half years, I knew the language, I knew the jargon, and I really just started to look for myself to see where I can navigate my skills.
It was early in 2021 when I started to look at NFTs and blockchain. I was reading articles about NFTs, and some of the first guys releasing music NFTs. I thought “can I reach out to some of these guys?” and started a series of conversations that just kind of opened my mind up to what the possible future of music NFTS could be. P had some familiarity with the blockchain and NFTs too, going back to 2019, 2020.
That was what the Sky Swans eventually became. We wanted to build a community of artists and music lovers who are ready to learn, grow, and give them opportunities through our grant submission process.
We want to be a catalyst for the future of artists. Artists, 95% of them have a really hard time making money off of their art. Sure, we all know the exceptions, we all have friends who've done very well for themselves in that world; but we want that 95% to be able to create their own ecosystems.
There's a real emphasis on empowering creators and musicians with this kind of concept. How do you see things like NFT royalty structures and decentralization helping independent artists?
Patrick Joseph:
The music industry is probably one of the hardest places for independent artists to make a living for so many reasons. I've been doing this, the education part and looking out for artists, for more than a decade now and continuing to do it on a daily basis right now has shown me a lot.
Even $20 is more than what 95% of artists are making right now. There's not really a lot of money estimated for independent artists unless you are in a real specific niche.
Alexander Jackson:
Once artists get to the point where they recognize that they can just have their agreement in a smart contract, there's no need for lawyers. That’s a cost cut that's almost immeasurable.
To have a lawyer come up with a simple agreement on splits can be thousands of dollars that an artist just doesn't have, especially independent artists. So for us, one of the biggest things about NFTs is that these contracts themselves developed to a point where they can address the complexity of revenue, distribution, and music.
Now, as things grow, and people want to listen to music in this format, what kind of reproduction rights will holders have? Are they going to be able to reproduce, replay, or perform the songs?
Alexander Jackson:
The Swan Songs are eight bar loops of original music, and you get the full IP rights of that. So you will have the ability to own this eight bar loop of music; and we're going to have sort of varying levels of complexity, those varying levels of complexity will read in the same way that traits read.
A big part of that is how a lot of music production now is taking samples of things, or taking little sound bites, and being able to use those like splices.
There's a lot of these platforms right now where you can just go in and do well and buy these different things, but even on those platforms, you don't always have exclusive rights.
With a smart contract, you kind of eliminate that, because you're basically writing in code, “here's what this is, if you're holding it in your wallet, and here's the rights that you have with it.”
More on the technical side, how do you maintain audio quality? When it's tokenized and uploaded onto IPFS and Opensea, does the sound begin to change or suffer?
Patrick Joseph:
I usually upload HD WAV as I'm making the token. From what I've noticed, with my previous uploads, that doesn't lose quality.
Alexander Jackson:
I don't know if there is a possibility that Opensea does some level of compression if you're playing something on Opensea; but most of the time, if you're playing something on Opensea, it's because you're just looking at a preview of something.
We are deeply making sure that when you get one of these Swan Songs, the ability to basically intake that file and use it in any way that you want, whether that's put it in your iTunes, put it into your dock, your DOS system, your digital audio system, you know, whatever it's going to be, we want that to have as little friction as possible.
I'm also assuming at a certain point, there's going to be some sort of live events attached to this collection?
Alexander Jackson:
100%, we’re making sure we’re down at Art Basel this year. We're also looking into things like South by Southwest, as well as our own individually produced events.
We're kind of looking forward to really seeing what locations would sort of be most attractive to our overall community, and like, where the most people would be able to take advantage and have benefits of that.
We’re super excited about giving away these grants also, to help more and more artists become the stars of their own communities. Having the ability to actually pay for a backing band to come on and support some of those artists that again, wouldn't have the resources to be able to do that.
I can tell you, as an artist, I didn’t know if I'd have the resources to be able to put a band behind me and do the shows that I wanted to do. It’s too much of a financial hurdle; but that’s what we want to do: help these artists go in front of a live audience and feel really confident. It's going to be really helpful to be able to support them in multiple ways.
We're very excited about the kinds of events that we'll be able to throw. We're lucky to have a network of people in production, who run venues and organize some of the biggest music and entertainment events that happen in the US. We have a lot of amazing resources that we're going to be able to tap into for independent artists.
