The Nu-Normal #12: Let's Talk About HitPiece
How the maligned "digital goods" marketplace inevitably shot their shot.
Your favourite monthly music column is back, baby! Now with even less editorial oversight! (Note: it’s hard to have less than zero, but someone has to do it.)
Last week, the HitPiece fiasco was doing the rounds in various music press outlets and it’s now crossed over into ‘serious’ mainstream coverage. So, we’re going to dig into it some more, as I think there’s an interesting angle or two that’s been missed here (intentionally or otherwise).
Content warning ahead for cryptocurrency, NFTs, mindless music copyright minutiae, and hating on capitalism and the pointless commodification of art to an unhealthy degree. Enjoy!
The Set-Up
According to their website (which has since been stripped away to a blank placeholder landing page), HitPiece was conceived as a “music” (air quotes mine here; more on that later on) auction NFT marketplace, with the platform launching its beta period at the tail end of 2021. Through the magic of the Wayback Machine, here’s the original pitch as they conceived it:
“HitPiece lets fans collect NFTs of your favorite songs. Each HitPiece NFT is a One of One NFT for each unique song recording. Members build their Hitlist of their favorite songs, get on leaderboards, and receive in real life value such as access and experiences with Artists… One NFT is available for auction from each artist initially.
The auction commences when the first bid is placed and lasts seven days. When the auction has been won, the NFT is minted and delivered to the winner’s custodial wallet. The next NFT from the artist becomes available. The winner of the auction reveals the next NFT from the artist. The winner receives the newly minted NFT to their custodial wallet on HitPiece.com and can show it off in their Hitlist or sell the NFT at anytime.”
Now, if you’re not familiar with the ongoing NFT debate, or simply don’t care for the grievances of people who spend far too much time online, I wrote about the phenomenon back in April:
If that’s TL;WR for you, here’s the basic gist of it all as a quick primer:
“NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Fungibility of a good or asset is the ability to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type. Essentially, they can be used as an item of 1-to-1 exchange or trade... Fungibility just makes things easy by equalising the inherent value of certain assets… Now, as you might have guessed, if something is non-fungible then it cannot have equivalent value with another asset. This makes it a unique asset with unique value that cannot be exchanged 1-for-1—it’s essentially a one-off, a rarity.
NFTs currently exist on the Ethereum blockchain as individual tokens with additional information stored in them. This allows an NFT to take the form of art, music, video, etc., in the form of JPGs, MP3s, videos, GIFs, and more. This storage of information is what generates market demand for NFTs by essentially locking in fixed value that can then be traded as a rarity: owning an NFT means that you hold the individual digital record on the blockchain for that unique piece of art, music, video, etc.”
Get it? Good. And if you don’t, well, Dan Olson of Folding Ideas went really long on the whole NFT shebang and all its inherent problems in a brilliant and scathing video essay that clocks in at over two hours and has racked up nearly five million views in two weeks. So, you’ll probably need snacks for this one, but I promise that it’s well worth a watch to really take in the scope of this emerging digital dumpster fire.
Entry & Exit Wounds
So, what’s the deal with this shitshow anyway? Well, as best I can tell, the HitPiece platform launched in December with little to no pushback, quietly plugging along behind the scenes, getting things up and running.
Then, last week, I started to see a number of enraged tweets from musicians, indie record labels, and other industry types blasting HitPiece with all the fury of a pissed-off, “what the fuck is going here?” screed.
As it turns out, many—if not all—of the artists who had their artistic content listed on the marketplace said that they’d never authorized their music to appear on the platform, expressed incredulity at the fact this could happen and be monetized for sale without their approval—let alone some kind of formal ‘heads up’ notification or opt-out mechanism—and were demanding immediate removal.
Obviously, this is not a good look and after some initially evasive “Hey guys, we don’t see what the big deal is...” tweets in response to the furore, the organizers behind HitPiece took the site down. You can read their half-baked Notes App Apology in full below (which was summarily ratio'd into oblivion):
And here are some of my favourite responses:
Post Mortem
How did things go wrong? Well, for a start, the main issue here is copyright. HitPiece were obviously skirting a number of copyright protocols surrounding music licensing, artist protections, royalties, and publishing rights. Not to mention that the whole business model seems shady as shit, considering HitPiece didn’t even approach most of these artists directly—some big, others small—or their labels to ask for permission to do this in the first place.
To paraphrase the great film hunk Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in the ‘90s genre classic Jurassic Park:
“Your [crypto boys and capitalist shills] were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
With the knowledge of the what, when and how surrounding this epic failure, the next question is likely the most important one: Why? If your first guess was money, then you’d be 90% correct. However, I also suspect that there’s a little bit more to it than that. As Ryan Broderick speculated in his excellent breakdown on the incident over at Garbage Day (one of my favourite fellow newsletterazzi):
“Why try and set up an NFT marketplace for the most legally-guarded type of content on the web — music. Well, seeing as how all four men behind HitPiece are hardcore NFT evangelists and at least one of them is following far-right extremists on Twitter, I think this was meant to cause this exact reaction. NFT investors know that NFTs will only reach mass acceptance if everyone agrees they’re valuable. Many of these people are also convinced an NFT is the new domain name. So what better way to spook record labels into proactively making NFTs of their own songs than transforming all of Spotify into a crypto marketplace?”
To support this admittedly plausible theory, Broderick links to a LinkedIn post indicating that one of the HitPiece organizers wrote a lengthy post detailing ways to “win” the music industry of the next decade through data mining and algorithmic shenanigans. Look, it’s not quite the supervillain plot we might expect, but it’s definitely something. And yet, is there another answer?
The Gartner Hype Cycle
Without getting too technical on this, there’s an existing model that I think helps to explain the behaviour we’re seeing with groups like HitPiece, whoever buys those ugly ass Bored Ape things, that one dude who wants to own colours, and NFTs more generally.
Developed by American IT firm Gartner in response to the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies, the Gartner hype cycle provides a graphical representation of the response to emerging tech through five distinct phases:
Applying this model to NFTs, it’s fairly easy to argue that we’ve already hit the first two. The Technology Trigger was late 2020, with the multi-million dollar sale of visual artist Mike (@Beeple) Winkelmann’s “Everydays” collection by the famed Christie’s auction house. And now we’re likely reaching the Peak of Inflated Expectations, where stuff like HitPiece is blowing up for being dumb, super illegal and ill-thought-out, and the Bored Ape Yacht Club is being dunked on for being ugly, stupid, and a scam driven by inflated scarcity.
If this is the case, then what awaits us over the next three phases?
Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail.
Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers.
Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology's broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.
We saw the same rough trajectory with the Internet, file sharing, smartphones, social media, and even cryptocurrency itself.
Now, to be fair, this model isn’t backed up by statistical data, and there are plenty of criticisms of the model from people who are smarter and more up to date on media trends than I am. But… I do think it fits with the media circus surrounding NFTs, and it also goes a long way to explaining their sudden ubiquity, along with the influx of scammers and bad actors.
What HitPiece ultimately represents is a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology behind blockchains and NFTs—or at least the appearance of misunderstanding, as shameless profit motives tend to have a curious blinder effect. *cough capitalism sucks cough*
Scraping album artwork and song titles from Spotify’s RSS feed and calling it a “One of One NFT for each unique song recording” is just patently false. That NFT represents nothing more than a ledger entry on the Ethereum blockchain, essentially a cell on a giant digital spreadsheet.
There isn’t any actual “music” or media intrinsic to a HitPiece NFT in-of-itself. More so, it’s not one-for-one of anything, considering that the song in question is likely available on countless other streaming platforms and physical media, along with publishing rights already owned by the artist, their label or a third party.
What the user is buying though is the “right” (i.e. a transparent digital record or receipt) to that cell, on that specific blockchain, visually represented by that specific platform (i.e. HitPiece). It’s a scam from the bottom-up, without even entering into the legality of music copyright.
Now, this isn’t to say that music NFTs or NFTs within the music industry won’t be a viable thing—they absolutely will be. Back in April, I detailed how Bluebox, a blockchain-powered platform owned by Ditto Music, had already sold split music copyright as a digital NFT sale for multiple clients. There are also numerous applications with things like exclusive ticket sales, VIP collectables, album artwork, and much more.
HitPiece as a business model was always doomed from the start, and it was highly amusing to watch the whole thing go down in flames in real-time. As of writing, the RIAA is now taking legal action on behalf of major labels, so yeah, that’s going to be an interesting development.
Mark my words, folks, this is not the last time you’ll read about music NFTs. So, until next time…