Want to See the Strokes and Deadmau5 Live? Try a Crypto Party

Crypto money is luring big-name musical acts to the stage, but first...

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•  is working on a subscription service for hardware
• Instacart is slashing its valuation by almost 40%
•  will list New York’s yellow taxis on its app

Live music brought to you by Bitcoin

Here’s a lineup of musical acts that sounds like a list of headliners for Coachella music festival in the early 2010s: the Strokes, Beck, Questlove, Deadmau5, Tiesto, Kings of Leon and Arcade Fire.

But those artists have all recently performed for a different kind of crowd: crypto enthusiasts. 

After a long pandemic stretch of canceled tours and shuttered music venues, musicians are finding that crypto companies, flush with hype-fueled funds, are eager to spice up their conferences and parties with live music. It’s a particular combination — arena-concert energy muddied with corporate sponsorship — that evokes an earlier era where tech giants like Google hired A-list acts for big-budget developer conferences.

In February at the ebullient ETHDenver crypto conference, attendees caught performances by Major Lazer, Tiesto, Deadmau5 and Tycho. And at SXSW last week, Diplo headlined a party for revelers who had spent around $25,000 for a Doodle nonfungible token. 

The size and scale of these parties has been growing alongside the skyrocketing value of digital currencies and the crypto ecosystem. One of the hottest tickets at a November NFT conference was to a at Brooklyn Steel for the Bored Ape Yacht Club, whose members are all owners of one of 10,000 NFTs featuring illustrations of disillusioned primates in various hats and outfits.

Inside, blown-up Bored Ape posters covered the walls, and on stage, celebrity after celebrity stepped into the spotlight. Beck played a set, introduced by Aziz Ansari. The Strokes also played, and were introduced by Chris Rock. Questlove DJed for a while. And Lil Baby stepped on stage around 1 a.m.

To the audience, the night was a way to celebrate the possibilities afforded them by this nascent industry. “The Strokes…brought to you by NFT money,” one attendee on Instagram, captioning a video of a stage lit up in electric green.

To the musicians, the purpose was less clear. “This is kind of about art, right?” Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas said on stage, according to a reporter from the Verge. “NFTs? I don’t know, what the hell. All I know is... a lot of dudes here tonight.” 

Plenty of other musicians have found themselves performing for similar audiences. In December, at a flashy Las Vegas conference held by blockchain-powered gaming company Gala Games, attendees danced to performances by Maroon 5, Kings of Leon, Steve Aoki and Stone Temple Pilots — plus a few more venerable acts like Alice Cooper and Billy Idol. Montreal-based indie favorites Arcade Fire played their first show since the beginning of the pandemic at the conference, which was called Into the Galaverse.

Snoop Dogg also performed at the Galaverse, possibly spurred by sincere enthusiasm for crypto. He recently splurged on a Bored Ape NFT that’s now his Twitter avatar. A few months earlier, Deadmau5 and 50 Cent performed at the Miami Bitcoin Conference, where Paris Hilton also did a DJ set. Hilton is a Bored Ape owner, too.

These mega-concerts are new to crypto, but not new to the tech industry. For years, tech behemoths added some dazzle to their conferences in the same way — hiring attention-grabbing musical acts to perform on stage after a long day of keynote addresses and developer kit unveilings. In the mid-2010s, Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference performers like Bruno Mars, the Foo Fighters and U2. Google’s annual conference already looked like a music festival at venues such as Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheater; headliners included LCD Soundsystem, Charli XCX and Kygo.

If it all seems a bit repetitive, though, don’t worry: There’s always a new, weird future where you can watch Justin Bieber perform in the metaverse.

If you read one thing

Amazon fired and disparaged him. Then he started a labor union. Bloomberg Amazon reporters tell the story of Christian Smalls, who won the right to hold union elections at two Amazon facilities in Staten Island. Now he just has to win. 

What else you need to know

SoftBank is seekingat least $60 billion in an IPO for chip business Arm.

The Justice Department indicted four Russians for a campaign of hundreds of hacks on energy companies, part of a broader DOJ effort to curb state-sponsored attacks. 

Google wants its search engine to be a gateway to help users book  doctors’ appointments, as it edges into health care. 

Two 20-year-old Los Angeles men were charged with defrauding investors by abandoning their Frosties NFT project after selling out of the tokens.

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