Spice DAO (Taylor’s Version)
What Taylor Swift can tell us about NFTs
A few weeks ago, social media exploded with discussion of a relationship Taylor Swift had more than a decade ago. The renewed interest in her bad blood came about because she had just re-recorded an old album, Red (Taylor’s Version) which once chronicled that relationship.
Her re-recording is the consequence of a quirk of copyright law. When an artist writes and performs a song, the performance has two separate copyrights. The first is to the lyrics and the music. The second is to the performance itself. The first is an intangible concept, the ownership of words or notes. The second is a very tangible concept, a single performance that happened and was recorded. When Swift first recorded Red, her contract with her studio assigned the ownership of the masters (the performance) to the studio, while she retained the copyright to the song itself.
The result is that if a person wishes to use the recording of a song from Red, they pay licensing fees to the studio. If a person wishes to cover the song, they pay licensing fees to Swift. Usually, the money is in the masters. When we stream the song, payments flow to the studio. When the song is used in an ad or a movie, the studio makes money. Song masters are the core of an IP investment. Laywers and financiers focus on this split and how to manage the cashflows.
What changed for Swift was something the lawyers and financiers don’t usually think about. For Swift it was the decision by Scooter Braun (who, among other things, is known for launching Justin Bieber’s career) to buy the studio. Swift did not appreciate this. The purchase by Braun was personal: “Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it”, someone who was the source of “incessant, manipulative bullying”, as a central figure in Kanye West’s conflict with Swift.
Taylor’s Versions are her attempt to circumvent what Braun owns. As long as fans follow her and buy or stream only the new versions, Braun loses his revenue stream. Even though she already owned the copyright to the original songs, and still kept a cut from the masters, the personal attachment she had to ownership of the masters mattered enough that she was ready to devote her time to re-recording everything and convincing fans to join her. It’s not just about the money.
The Story of Us Buying a Book
This week, social media exploded with the news of Spice DAO and its journey to own a book. Spice DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) spent €2.66 million on the purchase of a rare book, one of only a handful of copies of the notes and concept artwork for a failed plan to make an epic film adaptation of Dune.
The plan, as announced this week, was to make its contents public, produce an animated series, and then license it out for other derivative works. As the internet gleefully pointed out, none of this is possible, because they bought the wrong thing. In the popular internet story, Spice DAO is Scooter Braun (without the bullying or controversy), buying the tangible thing, but not the underlying copyright. Owning the book gives the rights only to that copy of the book, which can’t be licensed out. So the ownership was doomed to be pointless. At best, they could offer people a chance to see the book in person.
And so the joke for this week has been about how stupid these people are.
Picture to Burn
But the internet misunderstood. Spice DAO’s goal was not to transform the book into a series, but to use the book as inspiration and as a marketing splash around producing its own new content inspired by the book:
While we do not own the IP to Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, we are uniquely positioned with the opportunity to create our own addition to the genre as an homage to the giants who came before us.
Indeed, the creator of Spice DAO, Soban Saqib, saw ownership of physical object as what really mattered, not ownership of the underlying IP. It was personal:
“It’s almost like a jailbreak kind of situation,” Saqib said. One idea is to make an animated film inspired by the volume. Another is to hold frequent IRL viewings where enthusiasts can see it for themselves.
The idea then is, yes, to let people see the book in person. But it’s also to use the book as the starting point for new works of art, in the same way that Dune has inspired other art over the years. The lawyers and the financiers aren’t always paying attention to what really matters.
It remains to be seen if Spice DAO can pull any of this off. For the most part, this looks to be a bit of a crazy experiment — the capital raised is certainly not enough to produce an animated series — but it’s a personal experiment. And so are NFTs, a personal experiment in the emotional value of owning part of a thing, even if that part isn’t the copyright. Is it worth it? Ask Taylor Swift. Or Soban Saqib. They know all too well.
Though maybe we could maintain that ownership without using so much electricity…
