I was I was home alone during chaos Fest and maybe six o'clock or something I signed off and I was like sweating. Like, I was like, I don't know how to explain what just happened to anyone. But like I am changed. It's really fun to
welcome to chaos radio. This is the story of 80 artists from around the world experimenting and collective creation.
We launched a project summer of 2022, where we created 21,000 unique music NF T's under the shared artists name, chaos, verse from song camp, a little family of music and love in web three.
Our community of makers is called Camp chaos. And here at camp we believe the most exciting part of this project is the making of it.
You've seen the process of are creating chaos, the trials, the tribulations, the music, the value flow. Now get ready to experience the launch event.
Will we harness the power of chaos
or be consumed by chaos? I'm Jada. And I'm LOSA.
Have a seat and let the story of the chaos launch unfold.
Oh, wow, it has been a minute Well, several months actually. And sorry to keep you all in the dark for so long. But don't worry, we're going to catch you up on all the happenings of your favorite headless band chaos. If this is your first listen to chaos radio, then you definitely should take a pause and jump back to Episode One. So that everything we're saying will make sense
for those of you diehard headless chaos fans out there in the ethers. Here's an overview of what we've been up to since June. On June third, chaos was officially born into the world. We released 21,000 Music NF T's and had a celebration that we called Chaos fest, which was an immersive online festival held within the song camp discord. About two hours into this little festival. We had sold about 2000 of the 5000 Kaos PACs, which generated about 350 eath. As you know it has been on a roller coaster wave since then. So to paint this grand feat clearly in June 2020 to 350 eath was about 600,000 US dollars. Not too shabby for grassroots web three organization turn headless band of 77 artists. Speaking of headless this turned a lot of heads, including billboard who reported chaos as the top NFT project in June 2022. We outsold big names like Snoop Dogg. Have you heard of him? And Steve Aoki, what about that guy? Can you believe it? If you've heard the music you can tell why this music is chaos music is beyond it is so epic. If you have not listened to it, please pull up a spin amp pull up a future tape and give us a listen. On behalf of the chaos fam. I want to thank you so so so so so much for being on this journey with us. It's listeners like you that make big dreams like being on the same list as Snoop come true. We know it's been quiet over here in chaos radio land. But that doesn't mean that chaos has not made big moves in the world. Since our launch, we had our first live performances in New York City and Los Angeles, a handful of virtual events and spin off teams and projects, all in honor of the ethos of chaos, creating collectively yet again.
But it wasn't all rainbows hype and Discordian love. Now there are actually some pretty challenging aspects to this last piece of chaos, which we're going to dive deep into that in our next episode, Episode Seven, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we talk about the future and how we got to where we are now, we wanted to give those of you who couldn't attend a live event a little taste of what you missed during the 2022 Kaos festival. So in today's episode, we'll start by covering the festival. After that, we have a segment featuring some chaos supporters and pack holders. And finally, we'll give you a little teaser for what's to come in Episode Seven. So please sit back relax and join us as we travel back in time and relive chaos festival.
And then we started
to go even further what
if we could actually dance with chaos wield that power together? Perhaps the most fundamental question what if we could become
I'm sitting here in the chaos radio studio. We are live streaming is the word live streaming I don't even know we're on disk we're on we're at the festival. Discord stream. We're at the festival the chat is going off in 3456 There are six chaos festival channels there's the backstage which I don't think there's just I don't shenanigans going on in the backstage people are like where's the water station? People are just going funny. I was lucky enough to meet up with fellow Kaos fam in person, but it was a truly special experience feeling the electric community energy at the chaos festival online. Hundreds of festival goers listening live excited to hear what we had been cooking up for weeks. The immersive experience was full of surprises and cuts me on the edge of my desk chair at all times
space here and I just feel like Eris is coming heiresses energy is coming online coming alive
I am Eris, goddess of discord, a member of the collective known as chaos. Welcome to our theater. He would suggest you make yourself comfortable but frankly, comfort is unlikely when in the presence of chaos. However, despite your discomfort, do not be afraid. For chaos is not simply a destructive force. Chaos is a mechanism for growth. Chaos is a crucible through which autonomy is achieved. Chaos is unshaped clay to be molded into a unique perception of reality. Chaos is a creative force, and the way the 77 Humans have sung and Goddess of discord. Our chaos
Eros is mesmerizing and her power over chaos is unlike any other. I must say Eris feels like a friend. It's chaos campers experienced heiresses lore all throughout camp. So during the festival, we wanted to make sure the audience members felt her presence as well. In a moment when the chaos packs were being minted by enthusiast collectors and supporters. The festival moved into intimate acoustic performances of some songs created in camp by certain members and guides of chaos.
This is really just the beginning of this next amazing hour where we're really going to be celebrating kind of what went on here.
That's Jack in the way, a guide and one of the MCS during chaos fest.
And celebrating some of the people that really contributed so much wonderful energy and creativity to this so sad. Alex said Alex, are you there?
Hello. Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes. Very well. Awesome. Welcome.
Want me to can you hear this guitar? Okay. Yeah, sounds great. Thank you guys. I'm gonna play a song I've never played in this way on the guitar before. It's one of my favorite songs that we got to do during chaos though. And this is called part time internet friends. Let me know if any of you guys clicked at this one. Because this was really fun. It was me and James. Doing it together. I might mess it up. But that's kind of what chaos is all about. Right? So we're gonna be okay
on the floor, thinking about the old me lying in your arms. It feels good to me we would be
one of the more memorable moments was Jonathan Mann also known as song a day man made it a live improv performance of a song based on random phrases and words that people typed into the chat.
In the spirit of chaos, and this here's a little snippet of bad people coming together to make something beautiful. This is a collaboration. Can you guys hear my guitar? Yeah, okay. Yeah. All right. So just start writing stuff and I'm just gonna start going
Hi Mark Galaxy Hello Jonathan Viking. Jonathan mushrooms possible. Draw euphoria, chaos, chaos, chaos chaos
let's paint the scene for you a bit chalky enter the chaos live chat room on song camps discord and see it flying with random words lyrics phrases, photos, gifts. To me, it is a dizzying flow of random inspiration for Jonathan man to pick from to create a song on the spot. Your palms are sweating, your belly is aching and laughter and you are embedded in this moment of creating together out of joy.
He gets my vote God the future so bound team is chaos. Chaos chaos loves you. Song camp is ready oh dope GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO Eris is your Aaron is your Gareth is.
Grading is bad grading grade.
23 wasn't important number throughout camp. So when the final 23 minutes before our site chaos dot build went live. We held a raffle to give away 23 packs for free one every minute. It was a perfect way to celebrate chaos. It was really chaotic. And really, really fun chaos
festival ticket, you've been automatically entered in a chance to win a pack 23 packs given away every minute for 23 minutes. We're about to get into it. If your name is called
Matt and I called out a lucky winner of a chaos pack every minute. And at the same time, Eris acted as a live stopwatch counting down the clock minute by minute keeping us on our toes. 22
minutes to chaos.
Oh y'all we got our second winner coming up. Second winner second winner.
And then there was this big dramatic moment where we knew it was time to unleash our project to the world at 5:23pm Eastern Time and other times other places on June 3 2022 Curiosity was officially
Okay, so we're opening we're refreshing. Refreshing cast dot builds, refreshing cast dot build here for checking out. What is it like to mint to Toshi, okay, it's open. Connecting the wallet here playing
with it with a DJ set by our fabulous chaos spam mark for Ditto. And God see, everyone in the audience was able to browse and comment on the chaos site designed by niche aka losing my ego, and Daniel Raj kind. While chaos music was playing for all to hear. In the first few minutes, we sold about 1000 packs, and that number quickly doubled to 2000. Now as of January 2023, only 2579 packs remain. And who are these people that decided to send their eath and support chaos? Let's talk to them. One thing we really wanted to understand from our supporters is why they support chaos in the first place. What does chaos mean to them? So we reached out to some of the current pack holders to get their story and we'll be hearing directly from them next.
It's gotta be good. I'll scream it out. Hey
hey, Phil make it in Bay all day often.
Throughout the chaos journey, we've heard from nearly all 77 artists about what this project means to them. We've heard their music, the process of creating the visual pieces, the design of the website, the design of the splits, and so much more. And in the spirit of being a truly community funded and community driven collective, let's turn that table and open the curtain to our wonderful supporters, friends and fans outside of Camp chaos. The ones who helped make this happen and continue to do so chaos pack holders range from longtime web three builders and investors to first time NFT buyers, yet, something they all have in common was an excitement and personal joy around the project and experience. Chaos Fest was an example of some of the energy that was building for launch that left a strong impression on a lot of our project supporters. And I have to mention that the OG idea for Kaos Fest was to have it last about two hours, maybe three in total. And they were people, supporters and enthusiast and first time web three dwellers who wanted to talk and jam and listen to the music and learn about this project. In total, chaos fest lasted almost 12 hours. And from what I hear, and the moments that I went myself, everybody had a blast.
That experience was crazy. I gotta give it to the chaos team and everything that they created for the launch. Yeah, so um, C mon I run a project called the quality we are multi chain web three wallet that specializes in cross chain bridging.
C mon has been in the crypto space since about 2014. Building various web three tools. We reached out to him because he was one of the winners of the Kaos packs during our raffle. I also got to meet him at NFT NYC and he's rad dude, shout out to C Mon.
It was definitely unlike any launch I have experienced of a project it felt like it was theater and the chaos team having 80 people up in the speaking box, just very well coordinated. And then 23 minutes before the launch, they started ruffling one one minute. So they had music in the background playing and at the same time. Matthew and a few other people every minute we're ruffling a buck, it just basically build up like this amazing amount of hype. You know, I was alone in my living room in front of my laptop, but it felt like you were really in the experience.
Headless chaos, and of itself is in my opinion, like the most ambitious exciting projects that I've seen since my tenure at web three.
Steph, aka crypto honey, as you may know her in the web three and Twitter land works at the web three incubator seed club, and has been following the journey of chaos and song camp for a long time though.
Part of my interest is supporting and being close to and witnessing the, you know, the most innovative projects in the space. And it's on campus 100% One of those projects so I have to attribute this quote to Jess over at SoundCloud. But I think it's really true that there are music and FTS before chaos and their music NF T's after chaos. Like I really believe that this is a defining moment in music, NF T's in this space. Think in the level of documentation, the level of complexity, the way that the smart contract was just totally built from scratch. Like everything, the whole experience.
I think pretty early on I was like yeah, I'm gonna you're gonna get me some of whatever whatever they decide to release.
That's Brody Conley, a core team member of the web three research, Tao, water and music. When we saw he bought a pack, we reached out to see why he decided to pick one up.
I you know, don't have the money to pay that much for four songs all the time, but like, I felt it was important to like strongly signal my support for this project and for the experimentation in the new model.
For many of the supporters we interviewed for the segment, their motivation for buying a pack or several seem to be about showing support for a new model that has game changing potential.
I just love that like there's a bunch of experimentation in the crypto space towards music with groups of musicians and like building community.
Blockchain Brett ie Brett shear is a name you definitely know of if you're in the music NFT space. He and his buddy Cooper Trooper give chaos their first chance performing live at a show at NFT NYC. More on that in our next episode
that go by blockchain Brett and I I'm the managing partner of palm tree crew crypto PTC crypto for short. To me, basically, headless bands are going to be the future of how music is created, or at least like a major part of it. Like, and this is obviously this is going to continue, people are going to Song camp is the first of its kind. Like if there's going to be a lot is gonna be a massive category, I think. I think
the magic here is if you have this creative energy, how can you then build different products that bring revenue in to support those creators in ways that individuals couldn't have done otherwise? I'm Adam Donnelly. I'm a partner at True Ventures.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Adam, another one of those big names in the web three Artspace. He identifies as an enthusiast of chaos. And his fund, True Ventures invests in companies like splice peloton ring. And he's also deeply involved in the music NFT world via his investment collective called noise now,
so we've now collected just under 700, individual NF T's, and we're just getting started. If I look at Camp chaos, which as of today, at 2000 Plus pack sold, it is the most successful music NFC release ever. Like it's amazing. And the last, the two biggest drops are two Snoop Dogg drops of 1000 each. And I think what's amazing is if you think about the 70 artists, 77 individuals and chaos as an individual, it will be hard for anyone to sell 200 packs of NF TS about 2000 packs of NF Ts, right. I think that's really powerful, where the group working together can create more value than any individual working by themselves. And I think that's really powerful.
There is power in numbers and chaos definitely shows us that. And part of the appeal of this collective creation model is ensuring everyone on the team is valued, which is one thing that Brody really liked about chaos.
I thought it's really interesting the way chaos works out, its flipped through through, you know, self evaluation, and the sort of Coordinape method of evaluating your peers.
check out episode two of chaos radio for a deep dive on how we figured out compensation by voting on our contribution every two weeks. But what Brody is saying is that the fact that we all decided what the value of our work was, is much different than the current model of negotiating your value with several different groups, like with publishing companies, record labels, and distributors, to divvy up the ownership in a song or catalog.
But it doesn't end up with these groups of people actually working together in the most productive way sometimes, because everyone is still like always considering their own their own purpose or organization first, rather than the whole. With chaos. It's like saying, oh, cool, there are these direct to consumer tools provided by web three technology, but we can use them in a communal manner. And also recognize that those middle people like they are an essential part of that process. And if it kind of like, goes against that narrative of we just need to get rid of all these people. Because ultimately, it is for an artist to go it alone. There's too much labor that needs to be done. There's too much work in order to be able to find the time to make good art, while also doing all the things required in you know, the current state of the marketplace. Like I think that's essential. It is a team and so much of the traditional music industry does doesn't play it up like that.
But even though there was a lot of promising ideas and excitement around the potential for positive change with chaos is a new model. And what folks are supporting here, it's important to remember these kinds of systematic transformations don't happen overnight. And without their own setbacks.
I think the precedent that Shawn camp just said and cash has sent you know, just put out there is still being
learned that's blockchain but again,
like it has not been digested by the space yet and understood like okay, this is not like it took a while for people to realize how important it was reported IPs to use commercial licenses in their NFT. This is something of that magnitude I believe, and think about the fact that like we've never had and then if you could purchase that like cruise the secondary sale of like a royalty of the of the NF of like these NF T's and such a crazy innovation like I also think that is major and he's going to be a precedent that lots of other projects are going to fall
off these new models and technology GS have the potential to improve the pathway towards making music a more viable career path.
When you're when you're growing up and you're wanting to play music, you're Charlie told two things. One is you're not good enough. And then two, it's not a real job. The experience for a young musician or any other coming musician, like there's not a lot of ways to make money,
Adam points out that one of the historical ways to make it in the business is to sign an often exploitative record deal.
And so what for me, if you can get more pathways for artists to get early revenue, and start to support themselves, you kind of have two things, plenty but more power back in the artist hands. And so the individual artists may not need to sign that deal that maybe not as good for them. In addition to that creativity comes from psychological safety. And if you like you need some money to be psychologically safe. And so if you start to get more money to artists early, it doesn't, it opens up the potential for more artists to take it more seriously as a career and really have the time to hone their craft.
I don't want like I don't like the fame part of music and that today, it's absolutely linked to how you make it as an artist is if you whether you're famous enough and whether you can grow your audience enough.
As artists, we constantly are fed that to be successful, we need to achieve stardom individually. I remember the first time I told a family member that I wanted to direct films and make music, they responded with masa said by most, you're going to be famous. But thankfully, it's not the only way. We don't have to succumb to an individualist agenda, there are new modes of survival, especially when we come together as a respectful collective of artists, Simone from the quality makes the point that maybe this idea of needing to sign some big deal to get huge distribution, to gain a huge audience is something we can actively build an alternative to.
But I think what music entities are doing is kind of like really challenging that notion of Do you really need to grow to that level in order to be a quote unquote, successful artist that is making, you know, art that is moving the world forward.
think that the biggest innovation here was showing a model of collective creation.
collective creation is a very fulfilling art form. That's Brody from water and music. Again, he had some great observation here about how these new experiments can help find a better pathway for the future, or at the very least create an example that others can follow. For those who want to take this career path.
It opens up space for these debates. And it also opens up space to like contextualize this project and what it's achieved, relative to the existing structures. And I would say that I think that's really, really important to put in the energy to actually intervene and show a different model, get allows people to then have those productive conversations of like, how is this new model different from the old model? How is it better? How could it be improved, it gives you like a relative perspective for analysis, which I think is essential to figure out where to go and what the best models are.
Building this new model is something that's really hard to do in a group, let alone a group of 77 people, strangers all across the internet who have never worked like this before. All the difficult parts, the beautiful parts, and the hard parts of building a new model from scratch is why chaos radio was born. The place where we share all sides of the process of developing something new in that music NFT world. There is no perfect model and a major feature and challenge of chaos has been the scale and the hard realities of building in a decentralized organization,
like the world is not a perfect place and things are not always easy. And so navigating such a big group, but making it work by being like, brutally open with each other. And coming to those conversations, though, in good faith. But everyone is focused on actually the same objective together and knowing that that you have those conversations. I admire that a lot.
Though we held space weekly for office hours, a place where the operators hoped for Kaos members to come to them with any thoughts, ideas, concerns, etc. It later was revealed that not everyone felt that they could voice their observations and concerns. Shortly after the launch of the project. We ran into one of our first major conflicts as a community. Stay tuned to hear more about this on our next segment, where we will dive into the post Camp transition
Something we didn't mention is that around the time chaos launched the whole NFT web three crypto world entered a bear market. And that's not honey and teddy bears. Our world was entering a financial crash. Which percolated far beyond the web three world. Chaos members eath value were fluctuating minute by minute. That combined with a fair amount of exhaustion led to a lot of chaos, taking a bit of a break from the project, myself included. But not everybody needed some time away. Several members were energized to help plan our first performance at NFT, NYC. And a group of members started initiating the steps for a web two release. Here's chaos members, Mark Rucker and Meghan Kinney in a planning meeting, talking about the web to release and why it's something that we should be paying attention to. The flip side
of what we're trying to do is to show that we have value from web three to web two, and it's like, I'm looking at this and going if we get 5 million streams on a song that already sold the empty space, that's going to explode the value to what we've already built. And I think that's where it will show everyone that actually does music isn't just meant for people on Twitter, it's meant for everyone, you know,
a really great story story behind it. And that is really beautiful and how I read it.
A few folks got together about eight cast members who wanted to keep the momentum going and start taking the 45 amazing songs created during camp and devise a plan to release them into web two.
For you just kind of want to tell everybody, I put a doc together yesterday, dropped in the web to chat. And I'll kind of walk through that today. This week, Levi and I met with ASCAP to kind of go over the collection there like the mechanics behind it. We also met with revelator yesterday with young Spielberg as well, I think the video might have been posted
already. But when the team brought these plans and ideas on how to split web two funds to the network, it really didn't go as planned, it became clear that a few members of chaos were concerned that value flow splits for the web two rollout, were going to mirror the framework used in the NFT splits.
I just I mean, there's just been so much dancing, and so much conversation about so many my new things that I think are important, but it's like at the end of the day, I think that the first split didn't work out properly. Cody, who
goes by my world was a producer and songwriter in chaos. Here he is sharing his concerns on a camp wide call during the beginning stages of the web to rollout.
And sure it's an experiment, but in my opinion, it was a failure. And to think that we're going to take that to web two, which is a whole different game, and use the IP rights of the musicians who created those songs. And there's going to be people who didn't touch a song making twice as much of them in perpetuity. I mean, it's, it's asinine.
While not everyone felt the same way as Cody, these are some important and eye opening points. And they might feel a bit contradictory to the praise we heard earlier in the episode from Kaos supporters and enthusiast. And on this same camp wide call Cody brought up and additional concern he had for the transparency around the core teams compensation.
At the end of the day, there were admins and there were operators that were getting a salary during this camp. And at the end of the day, like how many people here knew that how many people here knew that when you were giving your gave every week to these people that you saw every single week, when you were giving your pay up to people that you could have paid as musicians how many people knew that they were also getting paid an actual salary?
So yeah, those people were compensated and it was a conversation at the beginning of camp with that core team during the pre camp stuff of whether we should also be exposed to the project that we were about to stand up and we felt that yes, we should have skin in the game on the chaos side too. I think moving forward Yeah, I think we would probably do things differently probably like
I still wait I'm sorry brother I gotta cut you off skin in the game is way different than three times with the artists
I don't know what to say to that. Like maybe Yeah, we could we could challenge the split and dissect it and and say which like what is the right number? So
I'll just Want to kind of jump in just
from like, oof, things got a little intense here, it's kind of expected when you have a large group of passionate artists who really care about their livelihood and their craft. So right, as we started transitioning into web two planning, there were a couple of value flow related concerns brought up by a few members, including my world, and Tyler Cordy, who you just heard. One, it was regarding the web, three splits. And the other was regarding compensation of the song camp core team.
And as you heard, over the course of several camp wide calls, there were some conversations that got quite heated. Here's some chaos members going back and forth from the conflict.
You know, I think we all got into web three to, you know, find a place that was going to properly value musicians, and not the admins that are managing it.
And I, I felt really elated throughout the whole process of the web three split, like that was a really positive experience for me, and I think a lot of other people. That's Megan Kenny. But then to try to fit back into an old paradigm and how much it brings up, we can contemplate what's more important all day long. But at the end of the day, if the music that's being made, doesn't have anywhere to go or doesn't have any opportunity or support, it's not going to be heard
that too much to say. These tough conversations bounced between the concerns over value flow in general, and transparency about core team salaries.
The fact that we're learning information about pay right now, like live stream, and that changes a lot of thoughts and opinions. So first off, like, I respect the shit out of you guys, but like, we got to build what we're saying we're building. Like, if we're gonna go every day on Twitter and say, we're valuing artists, we're bringing a new music industry, we got to start doing like right now.
Yeah, I think the fact that it's imperfect is like 100%. The case, like, changing shit is really difficult. The design of these things on day zero, today, whatever we're now the perspective is insanely different, so many things that could be better. And I think this is like, baked into the DNA of this thing is to challenge what we did and make it better. I guess what I find beautiful about what we're doing is that we called all 77 people here, artists, and I think what we're doing is we're being creative, through the full stack of the whole thing, all the way down to the distribution mechanic. And I think that's beautiful, because we're like, closer, we're on this call for three hours I kind of talking about this stuff, and maybe is important for us to say, well, this is what I do. And this is what you do because we haven't had these lines of communication in other worlds.
And we will be diving into those communication lines very soon. But what happens next? Did we find a way to move forward together? Or did eras finally get the best of us?
In our next episode, we'll talk directly with the people involved in the conflict and resolution,
answering questions raised from the big learning moment around value flow. How did the core team respond to the concerns raised? What were the splits and money breakdown? Are we recreating the same problems in the music industry that we have been aiming to build an alternative for? There's a lot of juiciness coming in our next episode, including Big updates about some upcoming events.
Stay tuned for Episode Seven coming very soon. Bye.
This episode was brought to you by the 1000s of collectors of chaos, again period after that Yang period, taking a breath, yoga, meditating, showing up in a bear market and great web three fun.
This episode of chaos radio was executive produced and edited by Levi Downey co narrated by Jada and Llosa. That's me. Production and story help from Julie Kwok young Spielberg and Jack in the way mixing by prod Colin theme music by Josh lippy and mastering by Connor Dalton. Special thanks to the chaos festival organizers, our fellow chaos members who helped fund this episode of chaos radio. And last but not least, the song camp core team. Thanks, y'all.
