BOTS AREN'T EVIL THEY'RE JUST INEFFICIENT
I am not a lawyer and my mother-in-law does my taxes.

There has been some chatter about the role of “bots” in NFT marketing “campaigns” particularly as it pertains to music NFTs. For the uninitiated, using ‘bots’ or ‘botting’ is shorthand for the use of tools like boost.xyz and layer3.xyz to incentivize volume on NFT mints. Essentially, these tools allow anyone to compensate users who take specific actions, usually ‘minting’ (or purchasing) an NFT, via an onchain bounty. Oftentimes this bounty exceeds the cost of the mint, meaning that users of these platforms are essentially paying for mint volume. This gives the appearance of interest or attention surrounding an NFT without necessarily surfacing that this interest is externally subsidized. Some users find this misleading while others think of it as a savvy technique for directing attention. Increased volume will cause the NFT to appear in more places like aggregators, wallets and algorithmically driven feeds. This will either lead to organic traffic or at least give the involved parties the feeling of meaningful distribution.

This technique is not really a break from traditional marketing tools. Labels have been using any tool at their disposal to push their artists up the charts since their inception. AOL distributed more than 1 billion free CDs with trial software between 1993 and 2006. In 1999 somebody from the Rawkus street team handed me a cassette single of Mos Def’s ‘Ms. Fat Booty’ that blew my mind and turned me onto music I might have never otherwise discovered. Giving away music as marketing is fine. Minting something because you think you might see financial upside from it is also fine.

Most artists would be doing themselves a serious disservice if they did not seriously consider all of their marketing options before releasing their work into the world. Good music goes unnoticed all the time. It is exceedingly rare for music to have a significant moment exclusively on its merits as music and rarer still without some magical synergy with the cultural zeitgeist. There is plenty of pretty good and ok music that is competing amongst itself on marketing, vibes and associations. There is even more music that no one will ever hear. Making, finding and nurturing exceptional music is very hard. It is so hard that most labels have essentially given up on trying to find talent before it has already broken to a large audience, preferring to throw capital at any artist with the right metric story. Looking at online metrics over quality is indeed how the traditional music industry is currently functioning but they usually have the savvy to filter out bots and incentivized actors when assessing these stories.

What bothers me about botting (paying for inorganic volume) is that this particular technique is extremely inefficient. Rather than activating bots (or humans incentivized to act as bots) around a mint, we should be targeting consumers with a sincere and demonstrated interest in the type of media we’re distributing. We might be distributing music to consumers but it’s almost certainly the wrong consumers. We should be developing mechanics that connect listeners with musicians they might care about. Our conversion metric should be fandom not a single transaction. Using these tools is both lazy and expensive. It’s a poor substitute for actual interest and meaningful attention.

Additionally, recent rulings from the FTC about “Misuse of Fake Indicators of Social Media Influence” imply that botting may easily be considered a deceptive marketing practice. We haven’t seen a test case that pertains to our space but it seems inevitable that this will eventually be litigated. This rule, “prohibits selling, purchasing, procuring, or distributing known or reasonably known “fake indicators of social media influence” that are used to deceive others about a business’s or individual’s importance for commercial gain. “Fake indicators of social media influence” are defined as those “generated by bots, purported individual accounts not associated with a real individual, accounts created with a real individual’s personal information without their consent, hijacked accounts, or accounts that otherwise do not reflect a real individual’s or entity’s activities, opinions, findings, or experiences.” I have serious doubts about how enforceable this rule will be when it comes to onchain bounties, but it is enough to give me pause about utilizing inorganic volume.

Advocates of using mint bounties often argue that their behavior is net positive for this corner of the space and has the potential to help reignite interest in the space at large. I don’t fully agree; incentivized volume feeds into very specific types of metric stories that don’t evenly benefit all the participants in the space. These tools have limited applications for individual artists looking to have their work acknowledged on its merits.

It is ironic that an individual used to be able to generate a metric story around a 1/1 NFT by purchasing it for the value they believed it to be worth at auction. Almost all of the revenue went directly to the artist and maybe, if the price point was significant or the token was novel, they would also receive both social and traditional media attention. The collector also stood to benefit from robust secondary markets and rampant speculation. Demand exceeded supply. Now platforms pay other platforms to pay bots to mint an artist’s low cost work at scale with only a fraction of that capital ever reaching the artist. An industry that prides itself on eliminating rent seeking middle men has expeditiously inserted a variety of rent seeking middle men into the supply chain. This is an outcome that platforms have pushed us towards with value propositions that champion onboarding new users over making quality work for existing users.

Web3 music suffers from a disproportionate amount of attention focused on distribution mechanics and an insufficient amount of attention focused on the production of undeniably good music. Making undeniable music is unbelievably hard. It requires a tremendous amount of work and a decent amount of luck. You have to try, with conviction, fail, and then repeatedly try again. This is where resources and capital should be focused. Investing in this sisyphean task with conviction is the brave thing we can do that record labels are no longer properly incentivized to do.