(upbeat music)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Fansome Power Business Hour.
It's a Monday, so that means it's the business hour, right?
This is a value cast, which is a lot cooler than a podcast.
It's a value cast because you,
the listener can send Satoshi's directly to the artists
and the guests that are on the show,
as well as the podcast host.
And if you love what we do, we would sure love a donation.
Satoshi's are fantastic for that.
Thank you very much.
So really cool show today.
We're actually gonna be talking about aetherium and FTs,
and we are going to be talking with a singer songwriter,
who lives here in Nashville.
She was born in Italy and her name is Villaleta Zaroni.
And she is absolutely crushing it
in the aetherium and the NFT space.
And I really don't know a whole heck of a lot about it,
but I've had a couple of conversations with her around town,
and I'm just blown away by her business sense, by her drive.
And then of course, WayT here, her music.
Oh my God.
WayT here, the string section on the tune you're about to hear.
So if you are curious about aetherium and NFTs
and the secondary sales and parrot radio and all this stuff,
this is gonna be a great interview for you to check out.
But before we bring Villaleta on the show,
let's check out this beautiful song called "Moonshot"
and then we will bring her on the show.
You ready?
Here we go.
[MUSIC]
I would cross the universe in circle around the sun
to find that little part of my heart I'd never know.
And I would give up everything.
I would defy gravity,
'cause something's out there telling me
I am not alone and I'm travelful and wide
to reach my destination.
Fly among the starters,
real-lighting constellations.
So fly you up my rocket ship,
I'm ready to risk it all.
You and me are meant to be the moon shot of the moon.
[MUSIC]
Watching out the windows,
the planets pass me by,
sending out a signal,
waiting your reply.
I'm not afraid of loneliness,
but you're the only thing at this.
So if you're there in the abyss,
send me back inside that I would travel
far and wide to reach my destination.
Fly among the starters,
real-lighting constellations.
So fly you up my rocket ship,
I'm ready to risk it all,
'cause you and me are meant to be the moon shot of the moon.
[MUSIC]
I will travel far and wide to reach my destination.
Fly among the starters,
'cause I know the truth will be waiting.
So fly you up my rocket ship,
I'm ready to risk it all, 'cause you and me are meant to be the moon shot.
You and me are meant to be the moon shot,
'cause you and me just might be the moon shot of the moon.
[MUSIC]
All right, everybody.
Thank you so much for joining us today on the Phantom Power Business Hour.
We've got an artist who's gonna join us on the business hour,
and she is a singer songwriter in the Web 3 space
who has been on Billboard for 10 consecutive months,
and the beauty of all of that is it's all Web 3.
And if you were to dive in and look on Spotify for her,
you're not going to see her there.
You might find some of some playlists she made a couple of years ago,
but would you please welcome
Bealette Zaroni here in Nashville to the show.
Bealette, thank you for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me, Jim, very excited,
and I hope it'll make this happen, yep?
Yeah, you are, I mean, you and I met at Bitcoin Park a couple of months ago,
and I follow you on Twitter and you've got an amazing community of supporters.
And you are all about the NFT space and Ethereum,
and you're starting to do, and correct me if I'm wrong,
like, you know, I'm gonna ask a bunch of stupid questions,
and I'm probably gonna say things absolutely wrong,
please feel free to correct me.
And now you're getting into ordinals on the Bitcoin side, correct?
Yeah, that's correct.
I would say I started with Ethereum,
and I stuck with it, and I'm still on Ethereum very much so.
But obviously, kind of the first quarter last year I found out about ordinals,
which were these very, you know, immutable, solid Bitcoin NFTs.
And so I've been, I've been diving into that quite deeply.
So yeah, and I would say the past nine months or so,
that's been my main focus on research, really, ordinals,
because it's very, it's more complicated than Ethereum,
in a way that NFTs work, but we can get into that, but yes.
Wow, okay, I wasn't expecting to hear that they're more complicated.
So let's start at the very beginning.
Let's go back to it, because you are, you really are a great writer, man.
Like you remind me, and I love your voice, you're kind of like,
you're at a Katie Malua out of London.
I love Katie Malua, yeah.
Oh, I love Katie.
You're like, when I listen to your stuff, it reminds me of her,
and it also reminds me of Diana Crawl.
But let's go back to the beginning of your songwriting and,
and the beginning of your artistic career.
Give us a little background on, on how you started musically,
and how you started writing.
Yeah, so, well, I grew up in Italy.
I'm born and raised Italian, and I started playing music when I was very young,
about five years old, and I'm classically trained.
So Piano was my first instrument.
I did 10 years of classical training.
And then, sort of, in my teens, after picking up the guitar on my own,
I started writing original songs, and I was playing in a couple bands.
My dad's a musician as well, so we were playing together, as you do.
Right, would you have a musician, dad, you know?
And so, that is always exciting.
Oh my god, my daughter wants to do music.
Let's go.
So that happened to me, and then, when I was 18,
and I was still in high school, I auditioned for X-Factor, Italy,
the talent show.
And I passed the auditions, and I ended up, like, getting to the,
all the way to the final of the show.
Wow.
Yeah, it was great.
It was great.
I had a great experience, and I was still very young,
and it was a very, you know, crash-intensive crash course on how does the music industry work?
Because in the space of three months, I was glorified,
and then I was rejected, and then I was, I had my first encounters with major labels and middlemen
who all told me, "You either do what I tell you, or I'm not going to work with you."
So everything happened in these three months.
I ended up signing a record deal with a major label that was affiliated with Sony,
and, you know, it was only 18, and no experience whatsoever,
and I didn't realize that the kind of contracts that they offer to these talent show people,
artists are what you call 360 degrees contracts, meaning they just,
everything you do, as long as you are with them,
and even longer sometimes.
So, yeah, it was a terrible contract that they offered me,
but they said, "Hey, we want to make five albums with you, and make you star."
I know five albums as a lot.
Wow.
Yeah.
You hadn't even lived enough for five albums yet, right?
Exactly.
But I was excited, and I was 18, and I was, by myself, without a lawyer in their office,
the day after the final, and I just signed it.
You know what, it takes normally to sign any deal.
There's like months of negotiation, right?
Oh, you are.
Yeah, I just fell for it really bad, but, you know, I was only 18,
so I'm glad I did this because I was young, and I had time to learn and get out of it,
and I'm glad I got, you know, that out of the way early on,
so I knew what I didn't want for the future.
And I think that was really the start, you know, my really bad experience with the label,
because then what happened over the next couple of years, the label shelved me, as they say, right?
They produced a record, it turns out, you know, they didn't like it, or it was too late,
the momentum was gone, and they just kept me there doing nothing for two years,
doing really dirty things as well, like in terms of, you know, lying to me,
and things like that, it was just really bad.
But I was able to get out of it, thankfully, because they didn't actually fulfill their duties of the contract,
which was we have to release this album.
And they did.
So I was able to get out, but I think that was the start of, you know,
me really not agreeing with the rules of the game, of the music industry,
how an artist should behave if they want to fit into those narratives.
I'm glad that happened because it led me here, and the eight years after that,
I was just always independent, independent artists.
I had independent managers, and I did sign a publishing deal.
I regret doing that too, but anyway, it's amazing.
But, you know, I was able to have a lot of experiences and tour.
I mostly made my income through touring, and I played all over Europe hundreds of shows,
I wrote songs for movies and commercials, I acted in movies myself, I'm in a couple films as well,
and just diversified a lot, and everything that I was doing.
So, that's my background, but yeah, 10 years of, you know, full-time independent artists,
kind of careers, what I'm coming from, really.
Wow. Okay, so you're out of the label, and then you're out of the publishing deal.
And what, now, we talked a little bit about this when we met last fall,
what sparked your interest in getting your music onto NFTs,
and what put you on this path of cryptocurrencies with your music?
Yeah, it's a good question, because it, like, so what happened was, of course,
the pandemic was in, right, and it was really impossible.
That was making any money, like things were not working out for me.
And music was my full-time job, right?
So, it was like, oh, exactly that I was in Germany,
that they have a really good support system for artists there when they need it.
So, I was able to, you know, get by, but it was really hard,
and mostly it was hard emotionally, right, because the world was changing,
also the music industry, as I knew it, was changing,
because now you had TikTok, right, and TikTok and all that stuff,
that was the main focal point for anyone giving you any opportunities.
And I just didn't feel like that was, that I fit into that.
You know, I didn't want to go and do, pickdog dances or mimeing to my own songs,
doing silly things, like, it's just, not something I saw myself doing,
and to me, it wasn't worth it, you know, I always said,
if you're going to do music, it's really hard, you have to love it,
otherwise, like, you love, you have to love everything about it,
otherwise, it's not worth it, to me, that was a worth it.
So I get myself actually one year deadline, and I said,
if in the next year, nothing happens, that like gives me a clear sign of this moving forward,
I'm going to pursue a different career, you know, I'm going to do music as a pleasure,
but I'm going to pursue a different job.
And so I came to Nashville, I wasn't living in Nashville yet,
I was living in Germany.
I came to Nashville and recorded my album, "Moonshot", five songs here at Soundinporia,
and in Nashville, amazing musicians.
- It's a studio. - Oh yeah.
- It's a studio, and it's gorgeous.
- With my co-writer and Matt Rawlings is a producer,
he's a Willie Nelson's producer, so I really went all out to like,
make this work, and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to push this record
to see if I can get it somewhere."
Like, I have no concrete plans, labels are turning me down,
everyone's turning me down, but we'll see, I have faith,
and then I go home for Christmas, and my mom of all people tells me about NFTs,
and she doesn't like, she doesn't own any Bitcoin, no Ethereum, nothing,
she just knew about it because she's very well informed, so...
So she was like, "Before you quit, you should try this,
because you only have six months in your imaginary deadline,
so you wouldn't want to keep going."
And I jumped right in, and immediately I realized
that there was a community of people that were buying art online,
whether it's, you know, PFPR, you know, monkeys, or whatever,
like, final or music, for the sake of owning it.
- Now let's back up real quick, what's PFPR?
Because PFPR is a picture for proof.
- Profile picture, that's what they call them.
- Okay, all right, all right, all right, okay, good.
- Oh, like, you know, board ebbs and, you know,
Netflix and all those NFTs avatars, so to speak.
People were buying those, but also just fine art,
and music for the sake of owning it, right,
because what happens with tokens on the blockchain,
whether it's an ordinal or an NFT,
you have verified authenticity and ownership of that token.
And something that with music is not a thing anymore, right,
because we stream, and that's it, we borrow,
and we don't own anything, and nothing is authentic.
So, yeah, I jumped right in, and in the space,
so a couple of months, I had basically built a small community
and playing on Twitter spaces all the time, live performing.
And I dropped my first collection, Woon Shot, 2500.
And NFTs, we just had $1 million in secondary volume, so.
- I saw that, and I'm stunned by it,
and so people who don't understand, I mean,
that's secondary volume, we're not talking primary volume.
So, now, when I go on your marketplace,
when I go on your website, and I click into your marketplace,
and I can see that I can buy into Woon Shot for point one,
Ethereum, which is about 230 bucks, is that right?
- Yep.
- Okay.
And then on the secondary marketplace, that means that if you,
that if I own Woon Shot, and I sell it to somebody else,
that you can still make a cut on that, correct?
- Yeah, we have 10% royalties set.
- Okay.
- The royalties, unfortunately, are not on chain,
because it wasn't available at the time.
When we minted Woon Shot, it was something that was
really solidified later on.
So, the royalties are just kind of down to the marketplace
that you're selling.
It don't kind of like ordinals is the same way.
You don't have royalties on chain for ordinals,
but a marketplace can set them up, you know, for people.
So, yeah, we have 10%.
- Okay.
Now, also when I look at your collection, Woon Shot,
I see five songs, 2,500 unique artworks,
and then you separate them out into different rarity frames.
So, does that mean there's only 2,500 copies right now
of Woon Shot that you have for sale?
Is that correct?
- That's right, and there's only ever going to be 2,500.
- Oh.
- Yeah.
- Okay.
- Yeah.
- And if I'm not mistaken, Papa Zaroni did the illustrations for it, right?
- Yes.
- That's a cool stuff, man.
- That's a really cool stuff.
Your dad's really talented fellow, that's really neat.
Okay, so you did, so Woon Shot was the first one,
that was the first collection,
and you launched that in April of '22.
- Yep.
- And that's, there's also a full album on Woon Shot.
Explain to me how that works.
You got a five song Woon Shot, ETH,
but then you also have the full record, correct?
- Yeah, so the way we did it, basically the full album that you see,
so people are going to check out my marketplace.
They're going to see everything that I have available for sale,
and they are different price points.
Obviously, Woon Shot is obviously a little more expensive,
you know, 230 bucks is not for everybody,
but we give out some free NFTs to current holders,
depending on like how many NFTs they had,
back like summer last year, two years ago,
summer two years ago, if you had like all the five songs
from the Woon Shot original collection,
then you would get a free mint of a different kind of token,
it's called an 1155 token, which means it's like the same NFT,
but replicated a bunch of times.
- You can have different images on an 1155, is that right?
- On an 1155, it's one image,
whereas the 721 token, which is what you see with my dad's illustration
with all the 2500, those are 721 tokens,
meaning they are unique tokens, each and every one of them.
They have different images,
whereas an 1155 is one token that's just copied,
however many times you want.
So we just give those kinds of tokens for free to people,
and we knew they were going to be at a cheaper price point,
and they're very easy to purchase, you know, it's all the same,
and just kind of for them to have, almost like for them to be my record store, right?
So if you, Jim, wanted to go get my full album,
you know, and you weren't so interested in the utility
or the different artworks, but you just wanted to play through all five songs,
like a CD, you could just go get that one.
But you can only buy it from my collectors because they have it.
I don't have any, and they got it for free.
So you're giving them, basically, you know, giving them value,
you know what I mean?
I delegate them to be my sales.
They are your record stores.
Right.
Okay.
Now, here's a stupid question for you,
and I told Joe's going to ask dumb questions, and here's a quick one.
No, more questions.
So do you have to attach a piece of art to one of these NFTs?
Yeah, I mean, to one of these songs, like, I mean, you can just upload a song, can't you?
Yeah, I mean, yes, you can totally upload just an MP3.
A lot of people do that.
Or music videos as well, music video, mix tapes, whatever you want.
Really, I like to do art because my music and visual art goes very well together.
You know, they go very well, ever since you could print records.
And also, for the way I built my ecosystem, I utilize the variations in the artworks
to kind of create a reward system amongst my community members.
So, yeah, and they love the art, you know, they really do.
Like, it's fun for them to have, like, for you to have a unique copy of a song
that you like with your own artwork, nobody else has, you know?
Yeah.
Well, and for anybody who's listening who doesn't know Violeta and doesn't follow her on Twitter,
first of all, do that.
But on your Twitter, like, I've seen you go around the country and do how shows, do private shows.
You did a cruise with your listeners.
Is that right?
That's right.
I mean, anybody who thinks that this is an viable business model
or who thinks that you cannot live off of this, you are incorrect.
Look at what Violeta is doing here.
I mean, this is like, you're doing this full time.
This is your gig now, right?
It is.
Yeah. And it's funny because I moved to Nashville.
I haven't played a single show in town because I'm just doing this.
I just do have what?
You know?
I love that.
Yeah.
You know, gigs in Nashville are really weird.
We could go on for hours about playing on Broadway or versus the few clubs around town
that do original music, things like that.
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you on that.
The other point that I wanted to bring up real quick,
you talked about earlier in this discovery phase and how you didn't want to be an artist
that focuses on TikTok and doing dances and things like that.
And I could not agree with you more.
Like, what so many people don't understand about independent artists is what TikTok and Instagram does to the artist in a negative way.
Like, it forces them to become content creators, which is such a different mindset than being a songwriter.
And it's so damaging.
Yeah, I think in a way, I'm a content creator still now, but I find it differently.
You know, it's different.
Like, what I'm doing now when I create my content, even this, right?
The podcast is content.
It's in a way that I decide, you know, first of all, I decide what I want to do and what I don't want to do.
And it's all very, like, final, like, the ultimate goal of my content is to promote my music
to sell my product, which is my music, whereas I feel like on TikTok, what TikTok has really pushed is the artist as the product.
Like, you become you, your personality every second of your life that you should document on TikTok becomes the product, which I think is messed up.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
Well, let's get back on the on Ethereum and NFTs.
And again, I encourage people really to follow what she's doing.
She's a great leader in this space.
And you can see her performing constantly and traveling constantly, completely outside the world of Spotify and iTunes and things like that.
Now, where, uh, parrot radio is an app that people can listen to your music on, correct?
That's right.
Yeah, it's, it's like a music NFT player slash music gallery slash CD player.
Um, yeah, I mean, it's, so I'm glad you brought them up.
They are amazing people. And I actually met them in a Bitcoin Twitter space because they were originally on stacks.
So they were, they were basically providing a music player and a gallery, virtual gallery for NFTs on stacks.
Um, and their founder works at gamma, which is the lead leading art platform on ordinals.
So we met in the Bitcoin community, so to speak.
Um, and they worked with me for six months to launch on Ethereum as well, because Ethereum has a big, bigger music community than stacks does and then, uh, ordnose does obviously.
So they launched on Ethereum and what you do, the reason why it's cool is because you don't have to connect your wallet.
You can simply paste your wallet address.
Um, and view and listen to the NFTs in your wallet in a, under like a playlist form, you can create different playlists, you can, you know, put them in different folders, group them together, separate them.
And just like listen while you go by your day, right? Like on Spotify, which isn't possible within fts because you always have to go to a marketplace or a website.
It's very not user friendly with pararadio you can, but the cool is that the cool thing is that I could go to your wallet, you know, I could paste Jim Costello, you know, dot ease or whatever and listen to your music and fts.
Um, and so in that way, it's like you're being highlighted as a collector, you know what I mean?
It's like highlighting ownership and patronage and everything that goes behind, um, an artist putting music and fts.
And if a song is on pararadio, it means that the artist has been paid, you know what I mean? Like it's not a free out.
And it's not up to the listeners to tip. No, this NFT was bought. The artist was paid and you can now consume the music into the collector's house and you're highlighting the collector as well.
So, do you have to, um, maybe you answered this and it just went over my head, but like, like, like my mom, like if my mom wanted to listen to your music and she doesn't own any Ethereum and she doesn't own an NFT or anything like that.
But if she downloaded pararad, could she listen to your music on it?
She could, she would just need to like paste or type in an Ethereum address like a ENS name, you know, violeta zironi.eth and she could literally view and listen to all the music in my wallet.
But I like the concept because it's like I'm, I'm going to your house to listen to your records. So it's like almost like you're a curator, you know, the collector is a curator and is curating their wallet, like a music gallery, like a music museum, you know.
Oh, okay. So like, I could start.
All right. Yeah. So it would be like like my own little record record store, my own little spot that everybody comes over and listens to.
That's right. Play list type of thing.
Yeah, exactly. So if you had a sick, you know, music collection in your wallet on Ethereum or stacks, people may want to go exactly to your wallet because you're the only one who has those NFTs and they can only listen to from your wallet.
But they'll look at Jim like he's collecting all these sick things, you know, like, you know, yeah, all right.
And everybody wants to come out and listen to right.
Okay. So they're kind of like a playlist in that space. So how many, how many other artists are are in this space? How many other independence do you do you run into? How big is the market right now?
The market is small is very small. It's I would say there's I would say there's less than a thousand artists that are like in the world that are doing, you know, I don't know that are making a full living out of it.
I would say less than 50. Wow. Maybe less like that are making like a good, you know, full full time living that they don't have to worry, you know.
But other than that, there's a lot of artists that, you know, put out music and both they do it both on Spotify. They do the regular thing.
But yeah, it's super small. I mean, I think people are still making that transition, you know, they they have to understand that they have total freedom when it comes to using the blockchain for your music.
And that's a concept that we're not very familiar with as artists. And sometimes we're scared of it as well. Like, oh my god, all this freedom. It's all up to me. What am I going to do?
Yeah, well, it's such a, I mean, you just rattled off another three hours of podcast there in that paragraph.
Because it is so early in this space. And there's still a lot of technical jumps, you know, technical hurdles for people to get over.
But what the sovereignty of it all fascinates me, the direct connection between the listener and the artist fascinates me. I mean, I've seen it over here on the Bitcoin side.
You know, with artists like Joe Martin and just loud and man like Quacks and my daughter.
And then when you run into one head first into like the announcement of UMG and bit and tick-tock the other day and this Spotify backlash that is growing.
I have never been more excited about the industry than I am now. And I and after listening to that last paragraph from you.
I completely understand why you don't put your stuff up on Spotify. Because it would it would water down the value of the NFT. People would be like, well, why the hell would I?
Why the hell would I, what would I buy it? You know, I mean, you could, I don't think there's a.
I think there could be some value, right? If you wanted to put your music on spot, but by the way, I agree with you. Like that's been my reason why I haven't put my music out on Spotify.
Because for the time being, it would dilute the value. It would water it down and you would be like, you know, why would I buy this if I can, if anyone can listen to it?
The reality is that anyone could listen to the music on my marketplace freely or on paramedio or whatever. I don't want to align with Spotify's way of operating at the moment.
I disagree with it. It's like when you're vegetarian, you know, and you know, I don't want to eat or vegan. They caught the music and I was like, what's Donald's, dammit.
My friend Tony Parisi, he, uh, what is it? Somebody, well, someone was saying the music and a few artists are like the vegans of web three because
they're outraged and they just do things out of principle, you know, the moral grounds are very high. I'm like that. I'm the worst, pretty radical. I'm like, I don't want to align with them, but I don't judge anyone who wants to do both.
Because like if you become huge on Spotify and for some reason you manage to funnel people, you find on Spotify back to your NFTs, then.
Okay, that would be great, but nobody's really managed to do it yet. So.
Well, now what, so what's a common criticism that you hear about as a musician with respect to getting in this space or just from the general public, like what, what's a common criticism that you hear about Ethereum and NFTs?
And, and how do you overcome it? What's your response to it?
Well, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of misinformation actually, especially when you speak to people that are not familiar with blockchain at all.
You know, one of the biggest things is is bad for the environment. You know, that's something that, yeah, I know people really.
I know, can you bring? Well, there's, yeah, I mean, if they're, I understand, you know, there's so many things that are bad for the environment, you know, like.
Living, living on a planet is bad for the environment. Yes, a lot of them.
And I mean, I wrote my master's thesis on sustainability and environmentalism. So I'm, I'm pro sustainability in saving the environment, but anyways, I digress, keep going.
Yeah, that's one of the things. And then of course, the scams, you know, NFTs are a scam. Why do we have to do this? You know, if you, if you try to onboard, so to speak, your normal fans, because I had some from my previous, you know, my time before Web 3.
I managed to onboard one person out of like almost 200,000 followers that I had in the other platforms, one person took the time to learn and download a wallet and buy some NFTs and buy some Ethereum.
So the, the barrier to entry is pretty high. Also, you know, there's just not a lot of education. And I find, I find a lot of like, you know, just misinformation in general, also like in the Bitcoin community.
Sometimes, you know, there's a lot of resistance towards NFTs and stuff. And I really think it's because there's just, there is in that depth of knowledge to what NFTs can do.
Not just as a, you know, I don't really see them as a financial thing. It's, it's a way to authenticate something that nowadays, like it's the best way to authenticate a provenance of something.
But I mean, like it's got a timestamp. It's got, you know, a wallet that is coming from and it can be counterfeit. It cannot.
So, yeah.
I just for the sake of transparency, like I own a very, very small amount of Ethereum and I'm, you know, 99.99% Bitcoin.
Yeah.
And, and I still, and I have a lot to learn about the space, but I'm so excited to have you on because I, as far as independent musicians go, like I have to remain agnostic for lack of a better term.
I just want to see you guys succeed because of all of these opportunities that you have out there.
But it is kind of funny for me, even though I'm only, you know, a year into this to continuously run into people who just bad mouth.
Ethereum or NFTs and things like that.
Whereas I can see in different segments of the economy that there's some, there's some legitimacy to them.
And, you know, from my day job last couple years, I've been in the finance industry and, and I can see where NFTs are going to have a serious positive implication on record only.
And I mean, like your driver's license or the title to your house or an insurance, you know, insurance policy, things like that because of the originality to them.
And so it always fascinates me when people kind of bash the blockchain or the NFTs and you can tell that it's primarily because they don't have the knowledge of understanding what's going on.
It's also technical still, you know, like the technical barrier is huge.
Like you can get scammed in no time, you know, anytime, like whenever you could click a bad link and lose everything, like that's a very real problem that UX and UI experience of pretty much every interface that we have available is still not very user friendly, you know, for the general public.
And so I see it like where the very early days of the internet, when computers were not user friendly and then one day we could be using the blockchain without even knowing that they're using the blockchain, you know.
Yeah, I completely agree. My wife and I met at a dot com in 1999.
No way.
Yeah, way back when.
Back in the old days when we all had, we all had dial up.
That's crazy.
You know, so like to her and to she and I as we're talking about this and learning and discovering and and you know, and teaching our daughter about it and trying to protect her sovereignty and all the rights and everything like.
We continuously compared this to what we experienced in the late 90s with with net scape and a well and dial up modems and all that kind of stuff like you keep running into that type of stuff.
But I think that that's a good segue into ordinals here on the Bitcoin side. So tell it because I again, I saw you let last time I saw you, I think there was a conversation going on a Bitcoin park about ordinals.
So what where, where are you in that process and what is your passion or you know, or concerns about Bitcoin ordinals and music.
I'm so excited about being able to put music on chain like directly on chain because we have to also acknowledge the fact that when you mint an NFT on Ethereum.
So 99% of the times the content like the actual data of your NFT is not going to be on chain. But it's going to live on IPFS or air wave and these are decentralized file storage servers that are very safe, very solid and secure.
But the token itself only displays the metadata embedded in a link that points to IPFS. So the content itself, if I meant a song on Ethereum, the song is not living on Ethereum.
It's living on IPFS, but this token points to the IPFS storage.
So putting data on chain on Ethereum is really expensive and the file size limitations are very, very significant.
And with inscriptions, so basically ordinals, ordinals is not really inscriptions, ordinals is like an inscription is simply putting your data on chain.
And you could do that as well before ordinals came out. But the ordinals theory is really a way to make satoshies non-fungible.
So the creator of ordinal numbered satoshies with ordinal numbers. And so they have provenance and they have rarity.
Obviously the earlier ones have more value. You can track the ones that came from satoshineckimotos wallet. And those have a special value because they're very unique.
There's different rarity within the sat. So what is exciting to me is that I can use the native properties of Bitcoin to enhance my art by picking a specific sat that comes from a time.
Maybe where something special happened to me or has special properties to it and link connect a song that has that meaning to that specific sat and have it live immutably on chain.
Because I can put a full song on it and it's going to cost me less than on a theory. And I put it on a canvas that has a meaning. Because in fts, you can just create a token out of the blue.
And it doesn't necessarily have any provenance itself except the one you give to this token.
On ordinal you're just linking things to satoshies that would exist anyway. So the value proposition is like I have my song attached to a piece of Bitcoin.
And that's pretty cool. Like having something engraved on a coin, right. It's never going to disappear. So I think that's pretty exciting.
I'm going to be fascinated to see where that goes because right now as I'm sure you know like so many people some of these songs that are popping up on on wave leg or Ellen beads or on the you know the different podcast that we do.
They're all they're all sitting in RS in RSS feeds. Right.
So I'm curious if there's going to be an intersection on that. Do you know anything about that or do you have any insight into it? I don't know very much.
You know, I don't know a lot about that, but I do know that putting a song like inscribing a song on chain on Bitcoin is a little bit difficult.
And that's kind of the complexity I was touching on earlier. Although the concept itself is easier to grasp because you're just like, yeah, I'm just putting it on chain connected to a specific set. That's it. You know, there's no code really.
There's no smart contract that's complicated need to be coded also from the security standpoint.
There's no smart contract that can be buggy or malicious, right. But it's you're just putting a song on chain.
You have file size limitations. Obviously per blog it's four megabytes, right. And the tools that yeah, with the tools that we have, you can only really inscribe up to 400 kilobytes.
So imagine having a full song that's only 400 kilobytes like that's so small, right. Maybe you want to put art to it as well. It's so small.
So you have to work with compression. It's very, very like it can be complicated. And yeah, they're my I mean, you might technically you might lose some audio quality or, you know, yeah, you have to be very smart.
How you do it. I managed to do it because I'm an acoustic singer songwriter. So and I'm sorry, my phone fell.
So like I have this, you know, my genre is a little bit retro as well. So we were able to embrace the low five and almost like purposely do it low five in a way that would fit under 400 kilobytes with artwork attached as well.
But I don't know if that would work with every artist, you could use recursion, which is, you know, making different inscriptions and then recombining them through code like very complicated.
But not every artist would want to get into all the technicalities yet, you know what I mean.
Do you plan on putting your music up into the Bitcoin space, you know, like, like wave, leg or Ellen beads or self hosting on the RSS side, because there's an instantaneous payment, you know, like, you know, we're going to, you know, we started off the show with one of your songs.
And as people are listening to the interview or listening to the songs, they can send you right away, be a be a lightning, you know, a payment. Do you foresee incorporating that into your business model at all or anytime soon.
So I've looked at it and I think it's a great, you know, it's, I've looked at wave, like, especially. I think it's a great way for people to tip, you know, and support artists that they appreciate.
But I'm almost like, I don't, I'm very much about ownership, you know, I'm very much about like reeducation of people and taking the artists taking control over how much they get for their songs, you know what I mean. And further art.
So with things like wave, like, it's still like, I'm going to put up my song, you know, for free. And then it's up to the other person to choose if they want to tip me. You know what I mean.
Whereas I'm very much about, this is my price. You want it? This is, this is what you're going to have to pay.
Yeah, which is like something that artists are not really able to do on Spotify, right? Spotify decides for us how much we get paid on wave, like, which is, you know, so much better than Spotify because you leave it up to the consumer, which is already a big step forward.
But it's still up to the consumer, right? Whereas I feel like artists have power to say, this is my price. And if you want to buy it, this is going to be the price and succeed.
I believe that, you know, well, fair, fair. And you're proving that it that it works because you're doing this full time and you're traveling all over the world.
And basically what you're talking about in the Bitcoin space or in the wavelength space or RSS fees, whatever you want to call it is you're talking about, you know, two key philosophies there one is value for value, which Adam Curry really has been preaching for 16 years, which is, you know, if you, if you ask people for donation, you know, you just got to, you got to put the ask out.
And it should come back in many respects, you know, it's like if, if they see you playing on the, you know, on the plaza there.
And, and they throw, you know, a couple of euros, a couple of bucks in your, in your guitar case, it's the same theory. Or, you know, if I ask for a donation to this show, you know, value for value, it's, it's the same theory.
And it's that giving economy. And then the other part of it is the mindset of 1000 true fans, which I think you really have embraced, like you don't need as, as wonderful as it would be to travel the world and play stadiums and play arenas.
The reality is you don't really need that like you can have 1000 true fans who are buying into your Ethereum or 1000 true fans who are buying into your Bitcoin or, or, you know, some of the other social media, the word escapes me.
Yeah, you don't need tens of thousands of fans to have a great career in this. It's, you know, it's wonderful in that regard.
Oh, yeah, I mean, actually, I think it's, it's, you know, not every artist wants to have that stadium career or not every artist wants to put up with what it takes to get to that point.
But they still have the right to be heard and to have an opportunity. So what I'm trying to do is to establish a recognized alternative route for an artist that wants to make music, but doesn't fit in with the traditional ways of doing things and another thing is, you know, we all love, you know, decentralization, especially in the Bitcoin space and in the Web 3 blockchain space in general,
and here to peer is a big thing, right? Like, being transactions, trustless transactions between peers is a pillar of our ethos in Web 3. And so another thing about, you know, I want to be able to be the one who people come to to listen to my music.
And so I want people to go to a third party platform to access me, you know what I mean? So that's another reason why I'm not on other platforms, even Web 3 streaming because it's a third party facilitate is like using in exchange, you know, keeping your Bitcoin in exchange instead of your own world.
So, you know what I mean? It's that kind of so, which is fine for some, it's fine for some of course, but for me, I believe in that peer to peer, like directness, not using middlemen, so to speak, or middle tools.
Yeah, fair. And you have standards and you are living by them and you are succeeding by them. So kudos, I think that's, I think that's admirable.
Thank you.
There's a lot of, yeah, of course, and, you know, there's a lot of conversations on the backend right now, because when you, when you post your music into this, into these RSS feeds or, or, you know, wave lake or things like that, like that, there's a lot, there's a, there's a community of app developers and
engineers and everybody's like, well, how much should we charge for hosting? You know, how much should we charge for metrics? How much is too much? We want to make sure that the artist gets the lion share of the, you know, the sats that are coming in.
And we do not want to present in any way, shape, or form, what the music industry has replicated, you know, for the past hundred years, going all the way back to the days of sheet music.
We don't want to replicate the way, you know, Spotify and iTunes and diesel and what that makes artists feel so there's a, there's, it is so fascinating and fun and rewarding to be seeing those conversations happen.
On the backend with respect to splits and, you know, and how much people are taking in, but you have gone a, a, not a different route, but maybe a more purest route, you know, in terms of, I'm sorry.
I want to show, I want to show all the possibilities, like we all know that we can use platforms and there's always going to be tech people and engineers and business entrepreneurs creating platforms for people to use, but I think the blockchain empowers individuals.
And I don't want, I don't want us to forget that, I don't want to forget that myself and I want to take full advantage and I want to show what is like the purest, you know, sort of like you said, the most purest way of doing it, and that's an option and you can.
And so you have options to choose from, you know, and it doesn't matter that you have to go one way or another or stick to one and never change.
You can swing left and right as much as you want, you're a free person, but I want to show what, what it looks like to do it fully, fully independently, you know, yeah.
I have it in addition to really enjoying your music and I can't remember if I said it during the show or in the green room beforehand, but you know, you remind me of Katie Malua and Diana Crawl and I love your voice.
I love your guitar playing.
And I have a, I have a lot of respect for you for what you're doing and what you're going, what you're going through. Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, I've owned in addition to being a musician and having toured and things like that.
I've owned a couple of my own businesses in the white collar world and I always have a tremendous amount of respect for true entrepreneurs such as yourself who are like, you know, pocket, the hell or high water.
I am going to figure this out and I'm going to do it.
And for you to have gotten this far and to be living off of it, congratulations. I have a lot of respect for you. I think it's great.
Yeah, so tell me, all right. So like what one of my last questions here.
Where would, where should an artist start if they want to replicate what you're doing? If they've got a record, if they've got five songs and they're like, do you want to where the hell do I go? What do I do?
So I would really recommend, you know, I guess like obviously, ordinals is a very pure way of preserving your music because it's going to be immutable.
It's going to be on Bitcoin, which is, you know, a number one blockchain, the most solid ecosystem.
But I would say starting on other chains like ETH might be cheaper, you know, might be a little bit easier because there's more, there's more inspiration you can get from other people that are doing it.
So someone who has five songs like I did, I would say, follow me on Twitter, come to my spaces. I do music spaces every day, quite literally every day of EP. I've got one in a couple hours.
And I've helped a lot of artists just kind of get started and we have these conversations every day. And then yeah, I would just say do your research quite literally download a Metamask wallet or a Phantom wallet by a little bit of ETH, purchase one cheap NFT to see what it feels like.
And then literally hang around the community on Twitter because that's where we are tune into spaces, show us your music, you know, like the great thing is that yes, we're using a third party platform X Twitter, whatever, which is really buggy and we all hate it.
But it is the best platform to talk about this stuff, crypto and everything. We don't get banned or votted like we do on Twitter, right?
So I would say come on Twitter, hang out with us and participate, tell us who you are. Like people want to connect with you. That's the greatest thing about the Web 3 music system is that people want to know who you are.
And if they're going to buy your stuff, they may not even like your music, they might believe in you. They might like you. I've had people that literally bought, I don't know, dozens of my NFTs and told me to my face.
I would have never listened to your music. Your music is not my kind of music, but I believe in what you're doing. So I'll buy 30 of your NFTs. So that's another thing. Really put yourself out there.
I will say to anybody who's curious about these business ideas and these these income streams, you have to take two things into consideration. And if you do not take these into consideration, you're not going to succeed.
Number one, I don't care what platform you're on, what cryptocurrency you follow.
This really is the beginning stages and you're going to see websites come and go, you're going to see technology come and go. You're going to, you know, it's not going to be perfect everywhere, everywhere.
And you have to have patience for that. And that goes back to like what you and I were talking about about the dawn of the internet.
And that's why my wife and I are like, oh, this is easy. It just reminds us of, you know, I am calm in the late 90s.
So, so number one is have patience for the technology.
Patients also really work hard work a lot. Yeah.
And number two would be engage in the community. I mean, I am amazed at the people that I have run into in the Bitcoin space and the music space with respect to wave lake and all the podcasts and all of the other podcast host and everybody like that.
Like this, it's so new to everybody. It's such a ground floor for everyone that everybody is so excited and they're so willing to help each other out and ask questions.
And and people, I believe maybe maybe this is just the old musical hippie in me.
But people are inherently good. People want to help. People want to, you know, they, they understand the value in helping other people and they feel and they feel good when they help other people.
So, you know, ask for help, ask questions, get engaged. And that's the second point. The first point being it's technologies buggy. Get over it. It'll get better.
Because it's buggy people will be very willing to help because they know it's not silly to ask for help. I would also add if you're a new musician coming in or anyone really looking into blockchain.
Do not click any links because they're 90. I would say like, I want to scare people about this because I've witnessed people lose tens of thousands.
Tens of thousands of dollars because they've clicked something that was bad and they thought it was good without verifying.
So just pretend that every link that is sent to you is a scam and it's going to drain your wallet. That's what I like to say because there's never too much security.
You know, there's never too much attention and the moment you really learn, it's because you've gotten scammed. My kid is unlost about 100 of my moonshot and FTS the other day because someone acts as their wallet.
So, yeah, don't click links. They're going to steal your stuff and there's no way to recover it. That's another thing about the blockchain. There's no way to recover it.
Well, Villa, thank you so much for coming. Thank you. We did this.
Yeah, so this is going to go up on Monday. This will be the business hour and you're going to send me a couple of songs that we can book in the show with.
And I would love to, I mean, I'm sure I'll bump into it around town here pretty soon, but I would love to follow up with you.
Maybe we do this again like in about six or seven months and kind of check in and see what's up and see where you've been meeting your fans around the world.
And I know you said you got, you're going to Europe coming up here in a couple weeks. What, what you got going on over there? Are you doing some shows?
Yeah, so I'm, I'm going to an FTP Paris.
Yeah, there's a conference there and I'm sponsored by Polygon, the Polygon blockchain.
Yeah, if you're inside chain, they're flying me out to do a show for them. And then I'm going to Italy to see my family a little bit.
I might head over to the UK as well. And then I have, I'm going to South by Southwest because I'm hosted.
Yeah, hosting a panel, an official Southwest Southwest panel on this like this exact conversation pretty much.
And then I have an FTP, NFT New York in April. There's just, yeah, there's just a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, last question.
Because if it's not barbecue in Nashville, it is hard to find decent food.
You coming from the beautiful country of Italy, I'm sure you have found a better than average Italian restaurant in Nashville.
It is hard to find decent food in Nashville.
Wow. Right. Now you know, like, and I know I've been in Italy.
I love it over there. The food does not compare. Like you can't even American, the American version of Italian food doesn't even come close to like.
Hang it out in Como or hang it out in Milan. Doesn't even come close.
But I need a good recommendation from you for the best Italian restaurant in Nashville.
Yeah, I have to say Nashville is pretty well supplied with good Italian.
And yes, 100% great pizza like amazing pizza.
I can be, I mean anybody can do pizza.
You would be surprised. You would be like, I swear, the way they make pizza abroad sometimes is better than the pizza I would find in my hometown.
Because I'm from like a northern town in Italy and pizzas from Naples is from the south.
So like they slack when they make pizza. They slack. Weird.
And the people that make pizza abroad, I lived in Germany. I found the best pizza of my life. And in Nashville, you have people from Naples because Americans like, you know, if they're going to charge, you know, a pizza is like $20.
You know, a pizza in Italy is like five.
So you're going to charge. You better be good. So I would recommend Bella Napoli at Edge Hill.
I'm writing this down as you can see. Bella Napoli is great. And I believe their other Italian stuff is great. And they're really Italian, they're authentic. And then it's for no wedge wood Houston, Il for no, I L
or.
Or, yeah, that's good.
And then just for pizza, Dessano is also good in German town. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, I've heard of that one too.
Yeah, so you got plenty of options. And yeah, I'm still looking for somebody in this town who can make a decent eggplant parmesan and it's a goddamn crime that I am.
And what it might be me to be out.
Okay, fair enough. All right. Well, the family is coming over for dinner.
All right. We'll see you in the hours. There you go.
Thank you so much again for coming on the show. This will go up on Monday and we'll take it out with one of your songs and stick around for a second in the in on the back end green room and what wrap it up.
Cool. Awesome. Perfect. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you.
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