Big Brother and the Hodling Company: Recent Episodes
MacEagon Voyce
Big Brother and the Hodling Company is a podcast about music + web3, where MacEagon Voyce speaks with the pioneers working at the music-web3 crossroads. Together we're fending off Big Brother, defying the blitzkrieg of domination and death rays with good music and structural transformation.
MacEagon Voyce is a writer, musician, and tech founder. After five years of balancing culture journalism at VICE with people ops work at various startups, he founded a social music app called Grey Matter and started falling down web3 rabbit holes. He’s especially fascinated by collective ownership and realigning platform incentives around the creation of public good.
Nick Merich is a seasoned entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in launching, building, and growing businesses in the music, media, and tech space. He cut his teeth in music by building and growing Songlink, a smart link tool for artists, and stayed in the industry because of the artist relationships he built along the way. He then helped expand and deepen the community surrounding music NFT platform, Mint Songs, before taking over growth at Arpeggi Labs, which offers a suite of web3-powered creation tools.
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Hu is an award-winning journalist and the founder of Water & Music, a collaborative research community that focuses on the intersection of music and tech. Cherie is one of those rare humans – extremely intelligent, curious about the world, strong ethical foundation, and very low ego.
We chatted about all kinds of: playing piano, almost taking the conservatory route, thinking laterally, on-chain music, AI. And the catchphrase for the whole thing: I’ve never seen eggrolls go so hard.
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Garrett Hughes is a music and technology lover from Richmond, Virginia. His loves have collided a few times, most notably when he co-founded the music NFT platform Mint Songs, which thrived until it didn’t, ultimately sunsetting, until it rose from the ashes earlier this year, when the tech was purchased by Napster.
Today Hughes is an engineer at Dune Analytics, but he’s still an advisor at Napster and stays close to music. We chatted about his journey, covering everything from love to on-chain music trends to the great outdoors.
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Stephen Laddin is an LA-based, upstate New York-born writer and producer who focuses on creating content that normalizes underrepresented voices. He's written and produced a number of short films, and he – like me – derives great joy in interviewing artists and creators. He writes for spots like High Times and AskMen, and he hosts the "Lights Camera Crypto" podcast, which is also beneath the DeCential umbrella. We chatted about his journey, from baseball card collecting to web3 to finding inspiration in the voices of his interviewees.
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Xcelencia is a Puerto Rican-born, Florida-based artist has been one of the best at marrying web2 and web3 opportunities – or rather, ignoring the strange tendency many have to keep them separate. His new album 'El Nino Estrella,' for instance, uses dynamic non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) to creatively transform their appearance via external triggers, like when a track gets to 100,000 Spotify streams.
We chatted about the album, crate-digging, mindmaps, and the supreme importance of imagination.
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Vaughn McKenzie-Landell is the founder of Butter, a protocol for DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) Governance. In the past, he was an aspiring singer who ultimately chose a career in technology, eventually merging the two to focus on how the latter can be used to disrupt the walled garden surrounding the former. He built JAAK and is now rallying around a new project called Juice. We chatted about these endeavors, learning Japanese, how to better capture value in music, and a great many other things.
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Matthew Sanders, aka M. Shadows, is the lead singer of the band Avenged Sevenfold. Sanders has become one of on-chain music’s most outspoken champions, and I wrote a piece about the ways in which he and Avenged Sevenfold are using web3 to cultivate their community, based on a previous conversation we had — which you can read on Decential’s website — but for this conversation we dived into other things: the human voice, psychedelics and the limits of speech, the origins of Avenged Sevenfold and writing a record about the positivity of meaningless, and embracing the beauty of our impermanence to find joy in the short time we have on this earth.
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Simon de la Rouviere is a builder, musician and creator of all sorts. He co-designed the ERC20 Ethereum standard, invented bonding curves, and is now working to produce new science fiction using some web3 mechanics through his business, Untitled Frontier. In the past he also spent some time in the music industry, pioneering the first smart contract royalty payments with Imogen Heap at Ujo Music, and he introduced one of the first music non-fungible token (or NFT) collectibles in 2017 with the artist RAC.
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The North London native infuses his love of films, stories, and human experiences into his music, borrowing from UK dance music, hip-hop, and soul. His musical ethos is oriented around the concept of finding beauty in imperfection, and he embraces new technology to help share it, which includes selling 21 non-fungible token (or NFT) collections, and co-founding the collective Wild Awake, a music project focused on building scenes that uses web3 technology.
We talked about the importance of creating scenes, reorienting our mindset around music’s inherent value – that is, it makes sense for it to cost money – and growing a project by speaking with people, one by one, and gathering around a shared love for music.
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Benjamin James is the founder of Ziggy Ziggy, a music brand that celebrates on-chain music culture – named after one Ziggy Stardust. He’s also a writer for Billboard and a former artist and producer. James used to run a small record label in the north of the UK, where he joined forces with a brother-sister combo of vocalists and started a group called Mausi. Together they built a career as artists, touring with big names like Charli XCX and Rudimental before succumbing to the suppressive power of a major label.
We chatted about the incredible highs and lows of that journey, getting his eyes opened to a flawed music industry, and finding hope in on-chain music culture and technology.
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Kiddest Sinke, Cole Ryan, and Ben Frigeri had intimate roles at the web3 label Dreams Never Die — which despite raising $2.5 million, building a dedicated community of passionate music people, and recently selling out 1000 founder passes in less than 24 hours in a strong signal of the brand’s commitment to web3 — decided to restructure the organization and revisit their mission.
Tumult followed, and none of these three – Kiddest, the organization’s Community Manager, nor Cole and Ben, two of the Dreams Never Die co-founders – are at the organization any longer.
We dove into their stories, their passion for the work that Dreams Never Die was doing, and their continued belief in the importance of centering music and community in their work.
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Alec D'Alelio is a musician, collector, and builder at the vanguard of the web3 creator economy. Aside from making music, D’Alelio also leads growth at Reveel, an on-chain revenue share protocol, and governance at Campfire, a gathering place for music makers and culture builders.
We chatted about documenting his musical life on the internet, starting on YouTube from the age of 11 and continuing across the Lens ecosystem, and a web3 journey that began in 2017 as an intern for Berklee School of Music professor, serial entrepreneur and web3 advocate, George Howard, transcribing and digesting years of interviews and making him a believer, too.
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Ladi is a native New Yorker who grew up writing songs, winning an award from ASCAP New York before moving out to Los Angeles to pursue songwriting. The pandemic interrupted that journey, but led her to web3, where she’s held various roles, from Head of Community & Partnerships for EQ Exchange, a web3 music startup co-owned by Ashanti, to Director of Social & Partnerships for Campfire, a guild and community for web2.5 music artists and professionals, and manager of pop fusion artist TK, whose Eternal Garden release – an audiovisual music non-fungible token (or NFT) collection generated over 38 ETH, which as of this recording is about $75,000.
Ladi also has a newsletter and a podcast and is incredibly active across web3 music communities. We chatted about all of her projects, as well as the importance of partnerships in web3 community building, the role of AI in the music industry – and how web3 can actually work alongside artificial intelligence to curb some of its potential harm.
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