crypto remixing (and fred again)

November 2022

What do Fred again and NFTs have in common? They both encapsulate the art of remixing.

Eugene Wei wrote about the creativity unleashed by TikTok’s embrace of “infinite replication and remixability.” His piece reads as an NFT manifesto without mentioning them once. In his words: “native remixability feels like it will be table stakes in future creative networks.”

With crypto, culture is becoming a public good where anyone can permissionlessly create content and build on what’s already out there in a positive-sum game. Composable content will create a flywheel of creativity.

Remixing is core to digital culture, but in web2 there’s friction. Creator platforms are walled gardens so it’s hard to port data between them, there’s no reference library of content that records provenance and remixes, and there’s no good mechanism for value to flow back to creators.

Spend a few months with NFTs and it’s obvious that they’re the internet-native primitive for remixing content. Derivative works are rewarded, while preserving attribution and value for original creators through the magic of blockchains.

NFTs are a boon for content creation because they enable creators to easily monetise and have a direct connection with their fans without aggregators.

As Li Jin describes, in web2, creators had to hustle out free content to attract eyeballs, build an audience, monetise (through advertising, sponsorships, subscriptions, or merchandise), then try to build a sustainable business. Web3 creators can use NFTs to bootstrap an initial 100 true fans, get funding, then produce content, and repeat.

Naval put it eloquently as ever: “NFTs are monetised memes” - the bigger the meme, the more valuable the NFT. For the first time, fans have financial skin in the game from spreading the work of their favourite creators. This is juiced by permissive CC0 licensing, so holders can freely use and adapt content.

In web2, there’s no good way to trace a piece of content from inception through to being remixed by other creators. Paraphrasing Li again: creating content is often a collaborative endeavour but the economics skew to the creator who goes viral, and everyone else sees nothing. With NFTs, there’s a codified, immutable record of the provenance, and subsequent derivations can be tracked. All contributors get attribution and a revenue share through smart contract splits.

Tokenisation can happen right down to the atomic unit of content, so we’ll see whole pieces, as well as their individual components - like stems of songs, vocals, layers of images and videos, and quotes from writing - available for other creators to use as lego blocks.

Creators will also be able to capture value from derivative works by holding one of their own NFTs or through secondary sale royalties.

TikTok makes it easy to use elements of other videos to create duets, make reaction and crossover videos, provide commentary, and extend memes. Every new video propagates an “assisted evolutionary ecosystem.” Eugene says it best:

“Almost everything in the app is a replicable chunk of bits that you can combine into a larger configuration of bits, and the resulting creation becomes, itself, a chunk that anyone can take and splice or mutate or combine however they want.”

Fred again illustrates the beauty of composable content through his sampling of everyday sounds: voice notes of friends, videos of strangers, and clips from social media. Like he says: “now that increasingly everything is captured, you can literally make the song out of the thing.” It’s captivating because it’s authentic. It reminds us that every moment of life is a form of creative expression.

As NFTs make originality less of a requirement for being creative, we’re going to see an explosion of content. No more staring at a blank page (or whatever other medium) for hours on end. Just search out other content, get inspired, and remix it with some personal flair. Today, there’s a sliver of creators and a long tail of passive consumers. Over the next few years, we’ll see this flip.

More content will create more components for other creators to use, sowing the seeds for even more content. This will feed a creative network effect (to borrow Eugene’s turn of phrase), where each additional creator makes it easier for others to be creative by piggybacking off their content.

We see similar compounding within Fred again’s own canon. He samples the samples from one song in other songs to create samples of samples (“We gon’ make it through,” “I want you to see me Fred,” “Pull me out of this”). Remixes of the remix, if you will.

The future is remixing all the way down.