Are Duetti, Bluesky, and Nostr the Future of Music and Social?

Welcome to my latest newsletter What ladidai Has to Say, where I discuss tunes, tech, and trends that interest me. I’m ladi and I’m happy to have you! Today’s fourth edition is all about Duetti leading the charge in independent catalog acquisition and Bluesky and Nostr beefing for the decentralized social crown.

Let’s get into it.

Duetti: Catalog Acquisition for Independent Artists

The same way major label artists like Bruce Springsteen and Justin Bieber can have their catalogs acquired by the likes of Hipgnosis, independent artists can too, as facilitated by Duetti.

And they don’t even have to sell their entire catalog to do so.

What is Duetti?

Duetti is a fintech startup that helps independent artists monetize their catalogs via partial or full song acquisitions.

Who founded it?

Duetti was founded by former TIDAL and Apple Music executives Lior Tibon and Christopher Nolte. They recently closed a $32 million funding round, backed by the likes of Roc Nation and other investors.

Who is eligible?

Any independent artist that has 2 million or more streams on a single song on Spotify is eligible to be considered.

How does it work?

Duetti is able to assess the valuation of eligible records upon analyzing streaming data and trends as well as statements. Only records that have been released for two or more years are eligible for consideration. From there, firm offers can be provided. Artists can sell anywhere between 50 and 100% of any eligible records and be paid accordingly.

Does Duetti take any publishing?

No. Duetti only takes whatever share of the master that is agreed upon.

Do I have to pay the money back?

No. This is not an advance. Once you receive payment, you are able to do with it as you please, whether that’s paying bills or marketing your music.

How does Duetti make money?

By working the records. Whether through playlisting, sync, or TikTok, Duetti actively pushes all records acquired. This is why Duetti views each acquisition as a partnership because ensuring the contined success of the songs is beneficial for all parties involved.

Why is this important?

To date, Duetti has partnered with about 60 artists who have received up to $400,000 per deal. I am proud to say that I was familiar with Duetti while they were still in stealth mode, and I have been connecting whichever friends meet their eligibility requirements with their team to potentially be considered for said acquisition and funding opportunities.

Duetti is ushering in a new era of song and catalog acquisition. By investing in independent catalogs, Duetti is directly nurturing new talent and contributing to the growth and evolution of the music industry as a whole. The market share of independent artists continues to increase by the year, making up 25% of the market share of Spotify while global market share sits at around 6%.

Advances are cool, acquisitions could be better. Current indie favorites like beatBread that offer recoupable advances might start feeling the heat in a quarter or two. Ultimately, it all depends on the needs of the artist at every stage of their journey.

Independent artists have more funding options now than ever before and Duetti is proud to be one of them.

How do I get in touch?

If you or any independent artists you know have any songs that have a few million streams as of late, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m more than happy to make any introductions and see what offers with Duetti are possible.

(Full disclosure, I’m not an employee. I work with them on a contract basis.)

Bluesky & Nostr: From Platforms to Protocols

The future of social media is open source and decentralized. Now, this sounds nice and all, but what does this mean? How is it implemented? And why does this matter?

Let’s talk open source decentralized social media protocols.

(For the sake of not having to write out the very long phrase “open source decentralized social media protocol”, I will be using the abbreviation OSDSMP.)

Freedom & Privacy

Ok, this sounds very ‘Murica, but it’s true. Hear me out. By default, OSDSMPs promote freedom of expression and protect users’ privacy by giving them control over their data. Unlike centralized social media platforms (aka the Twitters and Metas of the world), which often collect and sell users’ personal data, decentralized social media platforms allow users to store their data on their own devices or on a decentralized network, ensuring that their data is secure and not accessible to third parties.

Anti-Censorship

OSDSMPs are important for promoting diversity of thought and preventing censorship. Centralized social media platforms often have strict content moderation policies, which can limit the types of ideas and opinions that are allowed to be expressed on the platform. Decentralized social media platforms, on the other hand, allow for a wider range of viewpoints to be expressed, and prevent any one entity from having too much control over what is allowed on the platform.

Innovation & Collaboration

OSDSMPs promotes innovation and collaboration. By allowing anyone to contribute to the development of the platform, decentralized social media platforms can benefit from the collective wisdom and creativity of a global community of developers and users. This can lead to the creation of new features and functionalities that are not possible on centralized platforms, and can help to push the boundaries of what is possible in social media, as well as beyond it.

Ok now that we have the basics down, let’s get into specifics. Here are some real-world examples.

Bluesky

Bluesky is supposed to rescue us from Twitter.

Now, no one on the founding team has necessarily said that, but that seems to be the general consensus across both apps.

What is it?

At this point, Bluesky is an invite-only Twitter-esque app, with most of the capabilities (begging for video and gif upload though) and very little of the drama (though it has its own niche issues like nudes, hellthreads, and nude hellthreads, which may be no problem at all depending on what kind of person you are). Nonetheless, for an app in private beta with tens of thousands of users, I think Jay and her team are doing a great job.

Who owns it?

According to Jack, the people.

Contrary to popular belief, he is not the CEO. He’s on the board and he backed Bluesky early.

And no, Twitter doesn’t own it. And never will. (Everybody say, “thank you, Jay.”)

Jack was inactive on Bluesky for quite some time until users put him in the hot seat not too long ago about his perceived mishandling of selling Twitter.

Who’s on the team?

Bluesky is led by Jay Graber. I took a liking to her before I ever joined the app, because she exudes a certain brilliance and optimism on Twitter. And when I did join the app, I appreciated her thoughtfulness, thoroughness, transparency, and tact. She seems to have all the makings of a great leader and I’m confident Bluesky will be a success under her leadership.

Alongside her, the most active team members I’ve encountered are Paul Frazee, a developer who responds to every grievance; Why, a technical advisor; Rose, who’s responsible for strategy; and Emily, who’s a dev also responsible for community. Overall, the team seems chill and they all have good vibes. They provide updates regularly and respond to feedback.

What are the vibes?

Overall, it’s chill. I’ve only had pleasant encounters personally. I consider most users to be smart and conscientious. My favs AOC and Quinta Brunson are on there, which is a plus. Not as scandalous or exciting as Clubhouse in beta, but it’s growing by the day. I think it’ll be better once the algorithm is sorted out, because discoverability isn’t where it needs to be yet. You mainly only see who’s trending or who’s in your network at a maximum of two degrees of separation.

The majority of people seem to either be in tech or in the arts. It has a strong left-wing presence, with most users being very vocal about not tolerating racism, sexism, transphobia, or any other bigoted behavior of any kind. This is expected, given that most folks that flock to Bluesky are those who felt silenced or victimized on Twitter during Elon’s Twitter or even before that during the Trump Administration. If you consider yourself a conservative, you will likely not enjoy it. If you’re a right-wing public figure, prepare to be mass blocked. Despite the inclusive efforts, some on the outside have concerns that the demographic is lacking racial diversity.

Oh and, posts are called skeets. I’d like to think I contributed to making that a thing. There are no hashtags by the way. I’m determined to make hashtags #fetch.

How do I join?

Invite codes. No, I don’t have any and though it’s been over a month, I have never had one, but hopefully that’ll change soon (please @pfrazee.com). They used to have a system where two invites were disseminated to users on a biweekly basis but due to folks trying to sell them on eBay, those invite codes became invalidated and the team became more strict with handing them out. And then there’s the Queen of Community, Aveta, Bluesky’s self proclaimed “Sky Mama”, who’s had upwards of 700 invites.

If you are on the platform and you invite someone onto the platform that is deemed "disruptive" you can be penalized. Now how you'll be penalized, I don't know, maybe shadow banned or something (if that’s a thing). But nonetheless, invite codes are given to those who have good vibes, per the team’s discretion.

Is it built on blockchain?

So what makes it decentralized and open source?

Bluesky is the first app built on the AT Protocol (sometimes referred to as “atproto”). It’s a federated social network. So instead of one central site running things, multiple sites communicate with each other on the social graph. This is cool because nobody owns your online identity but you, so you control which provider you use, your algorithm, and other factors. Think of if the followers and content you had on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube could come with you everywhere as opposed to being platform dependent.

Nostr

Nostr is truly one of a kind. I’m a nerd and a social media fiend, so I had to tap in.

What is it?

I was 2 weeks ago-ish years old when I learned that Nostr actually stands for something lol. NOSTR (which I prefer to stylize as nostr) stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. Nostr, similarly to atproto, is an open source decentralized social media protocol. Different apps (iOS, Android, web) are built on top of it.

Who owns it?

No one, which is the point. It was founded by fiatjaf, who’s a pseudonymous Bitcoin dev.

Who’s on the team?

This is tough to answer because each app (called a client) has different builders, so founding teams vary. A lot of the times it will be just a single person or two. They are very dedicated and work hard to ship updates regularly as far as I can tell.

Again, Jack is not any sort of founder or founding team member.

Besides being an investor (not sure if this is the case in the traditional sense—it was all in Bitcoin), he’s a major hype man and the most notable Nostr influencer (in the most complimentary way possible) besides Snowden.

It’s because of his tweets that I even found out about it.

Jack is surprisingly active on Nostr. He may not post daily, but he’ll respond to at least one user a day, generally with the hug emoji (🫂) as a welcome or with some phrase ending in b, and of course share what hip-hop record he’s listening to. His bio says “bitcoin and chill” so if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know, nothing will.

What are the vibes?

Interesting. If I’m being frank, in its current state, it does not appeal to the average social media user. (For what it’s worth, I was the first person in the entirety of the protocol to hashtag Beyoncé lol.) A vast majority of the user base is vehemently anti-fiat and pro-Bitcoin (Bitcoin maxis aka like very pro-Bitcoin). I’ve been into Bitcoin for some time and I’ve been stacking sats (a very popular Nostr sentiment) for a while thanks to Cashapp, so I don’t really mind it, but I can imagine the average person will be put off by Bitcoin maxi energy. Any note can be monetized which I think is cool and something glaringly missing from traditional social media platforms. You can really make a living off quality content. I have only made the equivalent of $38 via zaps, but I’ve seen folks make thousands on a single post.

Though the content tends to be Bitcoin-centered, there is an active effort to change that. Any time anything non-Bitcoin related is discussed, users are encouraged to hashtag #grownostr to make it easier for folks to find regular content. (Might I add it’s impossible to search without hashtags or @’s—hope that changes). Overall, Nostr is interesting and has its quirks. Users are called Nostriches which is cute and a purple ostrich is the mascot. I’ve enjoyed some meaningful and eye-opening conversations both on Damus (iOS text/image app) and Nostr Nest (voice web app); most people are certainly intellectuals. It serves a rather niche demo, sure, but I imagine it will diversify in time.

Oh, there’s also a good number of Christians and avid fans of the carnivore diet.

How do I join?

Just sign up on any client. Anyone can join and no identifying information is required. This is easier said than done, as there’s a learning curve. You need to have basic knowledge of self custody and the lightning network to comfortably navigate.

I went with Damus because I’m an iPhone user and used Wallet of Satoshi because it was the simplest to set up. I watched a few YouTube videos and used the #asknostr and #nostrnewb hashtags for assistance too.

Is it built on blockchain?

No. I initially thought it was built on Bitcoin (Nostriches are not fans of Ordinals aka Bitcoin NFTs by the way), but it’s not.

So what makes it decentralized and open source?

Nostr operates on relays instead of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Each user maintains control over their own data and can choose to share it with others on the network. The source code of the platform is freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. This allows for a community of developers to contribute to the platform's development and ensure that it remains transparent and secure.

Open Source Beef & Decentralized Drama

Now, you would think in the land of all things decentralized and open source, things would be cool and copasetic, given that there’s arguably room for everyone. But because humans will human, this is not the case.

During my first few weeks of using Nostr, I realized there was a bit of an air of arrogance regarding Bluesky. This is mainly due to the assumption that Bluesky is not truly decentralized or open source. Beyond this, Bluesky has taken various efforts to maintain a temperate environment by exercising gradual onboarding as well as various moderation tactics, to many Nostriches’ dismay. They align the aforementioned practices with liberal behavior and “woke” ideology.

Most recently, Jack posted a note without context on Nostr of a video entitled “Is Bluesky a Scam?”

Surely, he doesn’t actually think so (again, he has backed Bluesky and is active on the platform) and if you know anything about Jack's posting style, he tends to just post links or phrases that provoke conversation with little to no context, goes about his day, and returns to engage with comments whenever he feels like it. Rinse and repeat.

Anyway, what prompted that note was fiatjaf writing an inflammatory piece entitled Bluesky is a Scam about Bluesky not actually being that they say they are.

Naturally, Paul Frazee had some words.

There are like 15 more screenshots where that came from. The thread is long. But TLDR, according to Team Bsky, being an open source decentralized social media protocol, isn’t just about the tech. It’s about the experience. And that’s what Bluesky is prioritizing.

Now, what I find most fascinating about any debate surrounding Twitter, Nostr, and Bluesky is that many users believe Jack is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of what happens on any of these platforms and protocols. Newsflash: he does not own any of them. He may have varying degrees of influence, but at the end of the day, the teams and end users have the majority of the power. And who knows what he’s telling Elon, fiatjaf, or Jay on Signal? (Allegedly, Jack does not use email or iMessage).

TLDR: The beef is so immature and useless. Just build what you want and go where you want, bffr. Nonetheless, discourse is good so carry on I guess?

Other Social Protocols

Prior to even hearing about Nostr and Bluesky, I have used Lens Protocol pretty regularly. Lens is a subsidiary of AAVE, built on the Polygon blockchain. This was my introduction to open source decentralized social media protocols. They’re in closed beta and invite only. I like it on there and the team is great, but anything blockchain related already creates a barrier to entry for the average person. And of course, Bitcoin maxis would never touch it.

I’ve also tried out Farcaster. Was a little boring to me if I’m being honest, but I might circle back. It’s also onchain and has several apps on it, though I’ve never used anything but Warpcast. Also invite only. Lastly, there’s Mastodon, which I never signed up for because the server situation was confusing to me. Apparently the vibes are bad there lol. Jack agrees.

Instagram

A few days ago, Business Insider reported that Instagram (Meta) was going to try their hand at building a “Twitter competitor”, but in reality it’s more of a Bluesky copycat. I don’t see it competing with Bluesky in terms of quality (it’s v v centralized), but Instagram obviously already has a legacy, the user base, and billions of dollars on deck so they win in terms of quantity. We’ll just have to see.

The Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri is leading this. I like him and I believe he’s proven himself to be both traditionally and emotionally intelligent, so I’m optimistic he’ll put his best foot forward. Of course, I want to be one of the first people to try it out when it’s in beta.

The Fate of Twitter

So will Twitter copycats X out Twitter?

As far as I’m concerned, until Bluesky, Nostr, or whichever other entity surpasses the relevancy of Twitter, it ain’t happening.

There have been numerous complaints and concerns regarding the bird app since The Reign of Elon, and understandably so. However, unless you’ve been permanently suspended or subjected to unprecedented levels of harassment, most changes he’s made have been slightly amusing at best and inconvenient at worst. On Nostr, Jack Dorsey once said that Twitter would never have an adequate replacement given that it has the “zeitgeist” of the Internet age. I believe there’s a lot of truth to that, but like with all things, only time will tell.

All I have to say is, Elon, if you’re reading this, bring back Moments, abeg.

ladidai is a web2.5 music tech professional with a passion for music, emerging technology, pop culture, social media, and the creator economy. Learn more here. If you enjoyed, please share! Send all inquiries to [email protected]. And feel free to join in on the conversation by commenting below.