Cryptowinter storms have sunk the ship. After a speculative tornado fueled by those who wanted to make money at all costs, Web3 now faces an uncertain future in which some remnants of the wreck try to rise back to fulfill the promises they gave us at birth. No matter who you talk to in the sector, everyone seems to continue to see incalculable potential. The problem is that at the same time almost no one is able to describe the various use cases in detail. In fact, at this point, the concept and everything that goes with it seems to continue to serve as more of a marketing gimmick than real progress.
At least that was the feeling at the Web3 Music Summit Madrid, hosted by Primavera Sound. If anything on the panel was surprising Large entities on the web3: What awaits us in the future? was that several people responsible for technology in some of the major organizations of the cultural industry around the world, such as Warner Records and Sony Music, carry out their duties from their respective areas marketing. “I am a team of one and an extension of the marketing department”, confirmed VP of Web3 and Innovation at Warner Records, Jacqui Bransky. And the same is happening with his counterpart at Sony Music, JR Walker, and with the Coachella festival, Sam Schoonover.
Although the latter two hold their positions from supply companies, the organizational structure clearly shows that blockchain applications are possible at this time (blockchain) into the cultural realm are focused on “improving the user experience and supporting creators to help them grow their businesses,” Schoonover said. And when asked what projects they launched thanks to technology that would not have been possible to create without it, he answered He was the only one who was able to lead by example: “We did a campaign where we sold lifetime tickets to the festival, it wouldn’t have been possible without it blockchain“.
It’s a bit hard to understand when you consider that e.g. Our ID will last a lifetime without being attached to a crypto wallet or NFT. In fact, Anand Venkateswaran himself, who became famous for managing the purchase Every day: the first 5000 daysthe first and most expensive work auctioned in NFT format by Christie’s in 2021, for which it paid $69.3 million, a few months ago it acknowledged that the million-dollar acquisition was in part a strategy marketing make yourself known. And he also had a hard time finding examples of things that could only be done with them blockchain.
It is true that because of the same thing marketing which now serves as leverage for technology, between 2021 and 2022 both cryptocurrencies and NFTs experienced a speculative boom that resulted in countless losses in value and accusations of fraud and scams. Recall that when the first ever tweet in NFT format was first auctioned at the beginning of 2021, its price reached 2.6 million euros. But when its owner tried to sell it a year later, the maximum offer was only 250 euros. Or what is the same, lost more than 99.99% of his investment.
In the case of lifetime passes to Coachella, in the absence of more technical details about the initiative, he’ll have to trust Schoonover. If it is really true that it is not possible to create a lifetime record without any other tool above blockchain, We would be facing one of the first use cases in the culture industry that really make use of technology to do new things that would otherwise not be possible. But be careful, just because there are few examples doesn’t mean blockchains and Web3 are as unlikely as Zuckerberg’s vaunted meta version.
It’s actually a bit reminiscent big data in its early days: the few experts who master the subject know that they keep the promise, and although the rest of the people do not understand anything, everyone tries to understand it in order to learn how to use it. “Forget everything you know, this is something completely new,” Bransky said. He even admitted that he always tries to choose “words that aren’t scary” to avoid rejection of the ideas he suggests about technology. Why talk about “cryptowallet connection” when we can say “loyalty program”?
REJECTING THE “HYPE”
Maybe it’s one of the things brought on by cryptowinter, an allergic reaction to the same expressions that played in almost every Super Bowl commercial just two years ago, and were even promoted by Paris Hilton. Web3 Music Summit Madrid has now clearly shown that Interest has decreased, but at the same time it has focused on those sectors in which it really has potential. In fact, the arts and media industry is one of four areas highlighted by McKinsey in its report Web3 beyond the hypealong with decentralized finance (DeFi), video games and social platforms.
When playing gamesFor example, the possibility that items purchased by players that are only useful within any given game can become digital assets whose ownership is registered on the blockchain. is another classic example of an impossible application without blockchain. Another thing is that industry giants are willing to let players take their valuables assets and they can resell them outside the platforms without having any say in the transactions. But the potential is there and it is undeniable.
For Venkateswaran, “the first use case that became really obvious is that of digital artists who can solve the copyright problem with NFTs.” So it’s no surprise that SGAE president Cristina Perpiña was the fourth member of the panel. In fact, instead of talking about the possible use cases of applied technology as a concept marketingfocused his speech on how use it to help creators focus on what makes them different: creating.
“If no one pays for music, then creators will stop creating because they will have to find another way to survive,” he said in one of his interventions, despite the fact that the entity’s position on these new forms of intellectual property certificates is digital was also not completely clearly. Branský had time to mention that, for example, compared to the months it can take artists to collect their earnings from Spotify, “with blockchain “It can be done automatically. Thus, more than acting as an artistic support in itself, technology becomes a means to speed up and improve the financial side of thingswhich doesn’t hurt either.
“As the infrastructure supporting native Web3 assets matures and technology continues to evolve, new native Web3 equivalents may emerge that replicate some functionality of existing services. We are already beginning to see the emergence of marketplaces, payment networks and platforms for deposits and loans. Web3 natives. Many expect the emergence of Web3 gaming, social and media platforms. Although it is difficult to predict which use cases will scale the fastest, it is possible that there will be multiple platforms, both traditional and Web3, co-existing that will offer similar capabilities,” the McKinsey report concludes.
So maybe Web3 is a bit like the Titanic. His grand inauguration ended in tragedy, but over time all his appeals have become objects of value incomparable to what they originally had. The difference is that instead of a glacier The shipwreck was the fault of those who tried to use it for profit for no reason. Fortunately, now that they have also sunk, there are those who continue to try to salvage the hidden treasures of technology to turn them into objects of worship. Piece by piece.