Harmonic Disruption: Innovating Music with Web3

When Nitish Chachra and Harshit Chachra think of the most exciting aspect of web3, they think back to their years of growing up in a joint family of 16 members in Jamshedpur, a small industrial town in Eastern India. 

“We grew up in a family…bringing people together. But now we see family in people with the same vision,” they say, talking about how web3 creates communities around shared objectives and causes. 

“It is the set of values, determination, and boldness with which [people in web3] want to drive an impact in this world and make people’s lives better around them, that we really find inspirational. And we see ourselves in them, trying to do the same.” 

The two brothers are DJs and music producers, and share their work with the web3 community across various decentralized social media platforms and marketplaces. They also educate their peers in the Indian music ecosystem about web3 initiatives and are dabbling with an on-chain digital audio workstation to create music.

Nitish’s introduction to blockchain was quite eventful. A friend of Nitish’s operated a Bitcoin mining rig that caught fire in 2017 and he helped put it out. Harshit’s journey into blockchain was more straightforward. He was working with a technology company in the same year, and was introduced to blockchain during an internal training session. A conversation with one of his mentors led him to Ethereum, and he eventually started educating himself about the multiple ecosystems that were evolving at that time. 

However, what really got the brothers hooked into web3 was the rise of music NFTs in 2021. They started delving deeper into NFTs and began attending community mixer events in Bengaluru, India’s tech hub where the brothers now live. This was where they were “introduced to many cool people who were working towards the same vision of bringing decentralization into various industries that needed disruption.”

The distribution and revenue models in the music industry today are highly centralized, where the gains for institutions controlling production and distribution far outweigh those of the artists who actually produce the music. Web3 is disrupting this model by shifting control of the art and its returns to the artists themselves. 

Web3 allows artists to establish direct relationships with their fans through web3-native platforms. Comparing this to traditional web2 platforms, the Chachra brothers say, “Musicians spend years building a following on centralized social media platforms, which can vanish in a moment if [the centralized institutions] choose to pull the plug or change their policies.”  Web3 gives more control to independent artists by bringing “a fresh wave of disruption techniques to help musicians grow their fan bases beyond these traditional platforms.” 

Today, both Nitesh and Harshit create music using on-chain digital audio workstations, and drop music NFTs on decentralized social media platforms. This has allowed them to establish a set of fans that they never could interact with on traditional music-streaming platforms. 

Finding community in web3 has allowed the Chachra brothers to share more electronic music. They recall performing at an event in December 2022, after a year and a half of Covid-imposed hiatus: the appreciation they received for their music curation gave them hope that they would thrive in this space with the music skills they possessed. 

Bringing new music and music-related experiences to people brings both Nitish and Harshit a lot of joy. They call it life-transforming and compare this experience to that of group therapy: “From our craft of curating music with so much love over these years and bringing those influences together, and when we deliver that in an experience in about two hours to people around us, it is therapy for them and for us.”