At Ship or Die during Solana Accelerate 2025, Audius CTO Ray Jacobson joined Dan Smith (Head of Marketing at Artist House) and Clayton Blaha (Founder of Material Nonpublic) in a straightforward and honest panel titled “Web3 Music Isn’t Working.” The full fireside chat is available to watch on YouTube here.
“Consumer Web3 isn’t working. Music entrepreneurship isn’t working either,” Ray opened, not with pessimism, but with the intent to bring clarity. The session set out to answer a big question: Why hasn’t Web3 music lived up to the hype? And more importantly: What needs to change?
Across the board, the panelists pointed to three key breakdowns:
Ray highlighted an early realization Audius came to, which is that the music industry simply can’t be bulldozed. It can be reimagined, and real progress in that pursuit also means partnering with players operating within the existing system — i.e. publishers and labels— instead of trying to throw it all away.
Dan and Clayton both noted an important shift post-COVID, being that artists are more aware of community and ownership than ever before. The Web3 tools that will help define a new era of the music industry support that shift; ownership of digital data, programmable payments, decentralized access.
But to make these tools a “no-brainer” for the artists that could benefit from them, they have to feel like tangible, real-world upgrades, not speculative add-ons.
“We should really try to stop talking about artists as crypto friendly or not crypto friendly or ‘Web3 music.' We are all music builders...we should just build cool things and actually build something that's just a community tool. ” –Ray Jacobson, CTO Audius
Not even close. Many projects flamed out, yes but music itself isn’t going anywhere and neither is the push to make it more fair, open, and innovative.
Web3 music doesn’t need a rebrand but it does need to evolve past buzzwords and tech-related abstractions. We need to build experiences people actually want to use — because when the product is good, no one cares what’s under the hood.
“I think what we need to see is people being super creative and building really awesome music experiences where, like, a very niche drum and bass fan experience is probably going to look very different from the K-pop [one]. It's wildly different cultures and subcommunities and that's what our tech can enable across the industry, not just speaking for one audience. And I think that's what we need to just keep pushing on for this to work.” –Ray Jacobson, CTO Audius
As the music industry continues to evolve, Audius is here to disrupt the status quo and reshape connectivity between fans and the artists they love, for a more collaborative and community-driven experience.
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