Music Industry Remodel?
Boho Bones’ upcoming drop offers token holders commercial rights to 150 unique loops.
From De La Soul to Katy Perry, sampling and remixing have become a cornerstone of the modern music cannon. In theory, the process is relatively straightforward: take a beat that already exists, edit it, and loop-over another track. Bam — you end-up with Jesus Walks. From a legal perspective, this process is anything but straightforward. While I am not equipped to go through the legalese of “sample clearance”, I can say affirmatively that it is not artist friendly; which is where Boho Bones comes in.
Boho Bones is offering 150 unique tunes for token holders to remix/sample/reproduce as they see fit. No legalese, no additional fees per play, no stealing from the artist bullsh*t. Simply, if you own one of the 12,345 Boho Bones tokens, you have complete commercial rights to this library of 150 songs.
Earlier this week, I met with the Boho Bones crew and got a peek under the hood.
So, you’re really giving away all commercial rights to your songs?
Part of our roadmap includes releasing a loop library for token holders. If somebody holds a token, they can download all 150 pieces of music in the library, which they will have full commercial rights to. We encourage the community to mix, remix, and use this music as desired. We couldn’t be more excited about it, but then again we are music and art nerds.
Where are the tracks coming from?
When you have an award winning producer on your team (Andy) who is also a technologist creating badass blockchain systems it was a bit of a no brainer to get him on the beat. He writes and records each piece.
I actually stayed at his house over the past few weeks while we buttoned up some last minute moving pieces of the project. I always knew when he was working on the project because the windows would be shaking in my room. The only problem was that they would typically be shaking from 3 to 10 am.
From what I’ve heard, the tracks are sick — what kind of background does Andy have in the music biz?
Andy had been in the industry for over a decade. He’s worked as writer, producer, and general band dude for the likes of Sony & Disney. He was eventually drawn to Blockchain after some harrowing industry experiences.
What about the rest of you, what’s everybody else’s background?
We’re a team of artists and creatives with ambitious goals to shape the world. We’ve seen the big tech and the global music industry take and take from artists. We saw this project as a way to push back. That means supporting creators by providing them with platforms, grants, and anything else we can do to help them break through the industry bullsh*t.
Very interesting, so, what’s the end-goal for the project?
Great question! We don’t envision there being an end to this project per se. It’s all about the community and artist empowerment. Once we pull off the initial NFT sale we will put a hefty chunk of proceeds back into the community through the creation of artist grants, community events in the metaverse, IRL experiences, and so much more. We want the community to guide us, and want the proceeds to fuel the excitement for this space.
Okay, I’m sold, when are the dropping and how much can I expect to pay per mint?
Ehhhh. We’re leaving the drop date a mystery for now. We want to avoid whales swooping in. We consider the surprise drop a good way to keep everyone on their toes and reward our early supporters. On top of that, we’d like to do our best to make sure network gas is as low as possible before releasing. We will be announcing the drop first on our discord. Oh, also, minting cost will be .08 ETH each.
When I purchase NFTs, I try consider the ‘special sauce’ of the collection. What makes this collection different from all the others? A good deal of value in this space is driven by historical significance. With Bored Apes, it was the community, with CryptoPunks, it was the original 10,000 piece collection, With Stoner Cats, it was the private access to the episodes, ect…
Boho Bones is unique in that it is the first collection to offer commercial music rights to a community. As the title suggests, could this signify a new model for the music industry? Historically, commercial song rights were litigated until an agreement between the original producer and artist was reached.
Could we soon enter a world where token ownership, rather than producer-publisher litigation dictates song use?
