Over the past year, several platforms have revised their agreements with creators. Twitch slashed its streamers’ revenue share from 70% to 50%. Substack canceled creator health-insurance stipends while lowering guaranteed payment amounts. Meta got rid of its creator bonus program for Reels altogether.

Chronicling it all is Avi Gandhi. A longtime digital media talent agent and former head of creator partnerships at Patreon, Avi now consults for companies that want to form lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with creators. He also writes his own newsletter, “Creator Logic,” about how the top names in the industry choose platforms, organize their operations, and maximize monetization.

In this episode, we talk about what platforms need to understand about how creators make decisions, what Silicon Valley gets wrong when investing in creator platforms and tools, and how creators should protect themselves in a shifting platform landscape.

(00:00) Episode Preview

(02:09) Avi's background in the creator economy: WME, Wheelhouse, and Patreon

(06:42) The knowledge vacuum around creators and their stacks

(09:58) The path forward for the creator economy

(18:32) Building for creators: opportunities and innovations

(23:47) Building a creator partnerships function

(35:23) Can a creator middle class ever exist?

(44:54) Tensions between creators and existing platforms

(47:14) Creator economics and audiences

(57:49) AI creators vs. human creators

(61:45) Avi's recommended resources

Last month, in April 2023, a song that used the AI-generated voices of Drake and The Weeknd went wildly viral across social media before being taken down from streaming services for breaching copyright. Shortly after, Grimes took a more permissive approach, launching a platform to help fans create derivative music using her AI voice model, called Elf.Tech.

In the midst of these developments in AI music, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst stand out as veterans who have have been on the forefront of the intersection of music, community, technology, and AI for many years. In 2021, they released a DAO-governed AI voice twin of Holly’s, called Holly+, and their more recent project, Spawning, offers tools for creators to manage their AI identities. In this conversation, we’re also joined by Jesse Walden, who originally got his start in crypto through music, by being a music manager before co-founding Mediachain, a startup which sought to attribute every piece of media on the internet using blockchains. We weave through the economics of AI music and derivative creation, the impact AI will have on the distribution of creator success, how hyper-personalization maps to listener behavior, industry regulation, impacts for record labels, and more.

Jesse and Li are cofounders and General Partners at Variant, an early-stage web3 venture firm. Learn more at https://variant.fund/

Links:
https://spawning.ai/
https://holly.plus/

Timestamps:
• (00:00) Episode preview
• (02:27) Spawning a baby and a startup
• (04:07) Holly+ & AI-driven content creation
• (07:02) Community participation & creation using Holly+
• (11:16) Grimes & the economics of derivative works
• (17:32) Crypto in the evolution of AI music
• (21:03) Jesse Walden’s journey from music to crypto
• (25:41) How AI impacts the power law of music success
• (36:53) Music consumption modes: passive vs. active
• (39:47) Hyper-personalization of music
• (47:45) Updates on Spawning: AI tools for artists
• (50:19) AI, data, and creator consent
• (53:14) Regulation & adaptation for record labels
• (58:59) Worldcoin, voice models, and digital identity
• (01:03:31) Prediction for the future of music: what will stay the same?

Two years ago, it was predicted that every creator would have a social token, which would enable fans to bet on that creator and invest in their success. That clearly hasn’t panned out, and in their place, NFTs have become much more popular as a mechanism for creator monetization. We discuss why that is (psychological ownership!) with Matt Alston, the co-founder and CEO of Bonfire, a no-code website builder for web3 creators, brands, and communities. Bonfire enables creators to build web3-enabled spaces to host their community for drops, exclusive content, and token-gated events and experiences. Before Bonfire, Matt was a product manager at Uber focused on Rider Loyalty & Rewards, where he helped launch Uber’s loyalty program Uber Rewards, which has since been merged with their subscription offering to create Uber One. We discuss the lessons learned from Uber’s rewards program as it pertains to airdrops and using tokens as an incentive in web3.