Bridging The Gap Between Spotify and Web3 for Greta Van Fleet
Which Element of The Ether are you?
Reposted from my dev blog: leemartin.com/element-of-the-ether
I haven’t thought much about Web3 since 2021. Well, if you don’t count the FTX saga… From the beginning, I felt a responsibility to shield artists and their fans from grifty schemes. It all felt like a casino to me and rather than take advantage of fans and their money, I was more interested in directing it towards traditional outlets like streams, vinyl, and tickets. Artists work hard to create meaningful (and profitable) relationships with fans but that relationship is precarious and must be respected. It can be dangerous to use the goodwill of a hard-earned fan relationship to endorse potentially problematic technology and bad actors. That being said, I am a technologist and will always be keen to understand and utilize new technology, particularly when I have a fanbase who is actually interested in participating and a good partner who has a fan’s best interest in mind.
Greta Van Fleet was one of the first artists to embrace a Web3 powered fan community (Electric Tomb) and they partnered with Medallion to do so. I wouldn’t say “all” GVF fans were excited to see this move by the band but that is the product of public sentiment about Web3 — a lot of which is warranted. However, Medallion is not some random Web3 company. It was founded and is run by real music people, including a lot of my old coworkers and IRL friends from Songkick. For those fans who are interested in this type of offering, Greta Van Fleet would be hard-pressed to find a better partner than Medallion to help them realize it.
In support of their new record, Starcatcher, Jacob Lawrence and I put together a Spotify app which can determine which “Element of the Ether” you are based on your listening history. The element takes the form of a unique visual crafted by the band’s creative team. In addition to simply being able to share your result socially, you can also save it as a Medallion (NFT) to your Electric Tomb wallet. This is a nice UX compromise. You do not need an Electric Tomb account to receive your result but have the option of claiming your result if you do. This allows the band to offer fans a unique Spotify experience and enhance their Web3 community for those who participate.
Spotify Integration
So, how does one turn a user’s Spotify listening history into an Element of The Ether? What properties of a user’s taste might make them a Fire elemental? Which songs might make them a Light elemental? This isn’t the first time I’ve attempted to take an abstract category and associate it to a user’s listening habits. In order to achieve this with the Spotify Platform, we must lean on the audio features associated with all tracks on Spotify and correlate these features with each of the elements. I allow the client to participate in this exercise by providing a spreadsheet of elements and audio features and requesting that they give each a low (0.0), neutral (0.5), or high (1.0) score. You can see the result of that exercise below.
With this correlation in place, we can then iterate through all of the tracks from a fan’s recent streaming history and score each of the elements based on that track’s audio features. For example, if a user’s track had a high acousticness, the elements of Water and Earth would gain a point because those elements are associated with high acousticness. Fire, on the other hand, would lose a point because it is associated with low acousticness. We continue this process for all 50 of the user’s top tracks until we can determine which element is most closely related to the type of music they listen to. Again, this isn’t perfect but audio features on Spotify allow us to attempt to connect the abstract with the concrete and it’s close enough for rock n roll.
Medallion Integration
While I can’t share the specifics of our Medallion integration because their API is not publicly available yet, I can share abstractly how our integration works. Medallion structures their data as proofs and collections. In our case, the proof is this element campaign opportunity and the collection represents each unique element available to the user to claim on their wallet. By passing the associated collection id and a unique seed for the user (in our case the user’s Spotify email address,) we can generate a unique claim code which can be used to assemble a claim url. This url is then provided to the user so they have claim their unique medallion. All the user needs to do is click, login to their Electric Tomb account, and claim the offering. All of this tech lives on a simple Netlify function.
I quite like how simple and elegant this flow is and must give Medallion props on how they are building out their API.
Acknowledgements
Thanks again to Jacob Lawrence and his team at Republic Records for the opportunity to work with Greta Van Fleet again. I believe that is three projects together now. Special thanks to Joe Pitts, Stephen Vallimarescu, and Mark McIntyre at Medallion for their assistance in pulling this application together.
