Being a band these days what is it
Why we are moving most things to Discord and other 2022 thoughts
2020 and 2021 changed a lot of things for a lot of people, including our band. Although not quite as dire and extreme as the HBO show Station Eleven depicts, there’s a definite sense of before and after. And sometimes it really does feel like the motto in the series: “there is no before”.
Without banging on about all the normalcies we seem to have (permanently?) lost, let’s jump right to how we see things going in the future and what we’re doing to try to adapt… as band, a family and as individuals.
Discord
During the beginning of the pandemic, with shows, tours and travel cancelled, we started doing live streams on our Patreon. A lot of cool stuff and ideas came out of the process, but ultimately the platform became tedious, finicky and in many ways limiting. So we started a Discord Server, just passively letting it grow with a few hardcore fans joining and keeping the conversation going without us have to do much actively. We started to notice people were getting to know each other and even become friends, with the band and our music really serving as an ice breaker more than anything else. Since then we’ve started to become a lot more active in the server and are really seeing the potential of building a self-contained little world… a “place” to use Discord’s term, where everyone meets, each for slightly different reasons maybe, but a place that is starting to feel like a seedling of a Balaji Srinivasan style network state.
What’s on there?
If you’re not familiar with Discord, start here. The way we’re using it is changing and embellishing everyday, especially as they continue to add new cool features and tools like Discord Stages. There are band updates, topic-specific chatrooms, social media updates, all the usual text-image based stuff you see from bands, but we’re also starting to do regular live podcasts, video chats, sneak peaks of songs and forgotten demos, audio Q&A’s with fans, community members, guest artists, and of course… memes.
Suffice to say
If you’re into KONGOS in any way shape or form, we strongly encourage you to join, say hi, have a look around — band members are in there a lot and the regulars are super-welcoming.
Crypto, NFT, Web3 and the Music Business
Needless to say the pandemic has been shit for business. We were never a band where the bulk of our income was from touring, but nevertheless it’s been hurt. Without getting into too many details, we’ve had to sell parts of our publishing to tide us over and continue the nearly 20 year dream of being “professional” musicians and artists. This is not a boohoo for us statement, but the moment has sparked an increased interest in the wide open, Wild Wild West vibes of Crypto, NFTs and Web3. We’re acutely aware of the opposing sides on this topic and the hesitance, to put it lightly, especially in the Discord community at large. No doubt there is a preponderance of cash-grabs, ponzis and money washing going on, but we’ve studied it enough to know that a decentralized, tokenized, web3-ified, financialized future is coming at us fast. Perhaps a dedicated post on this subject is needed, but we welcome readers and fans who have an interest in these topics to engage in our community as we’d like to position ourselves to participate in this new world and not get left behind. In the mean time, here are some projects to check out that we’re looking at and evaluating as possible ways to bring what we do to that world:
Royal.io, Audius, sound.xyz, Moda DAO and many more — suggestions welcome.
So anyways
Thanks for reading, if you’re on Medium, subscribe/follow for future posts, otherwise, if you were to choose one place to follow us, make it Discord.
