Tools for MGMT: Episode 201

Season two began when the green envelopes hit 🔋

A warm winter’s welcome back to me in your inboxes… thank you.

My name is Ethan. I manage Alex Russell, Zack Fox, and Cam Hicks. I started this newsletter to regularly send out a few links and musings that I hope other managers will find interesting. Thanks for reading this first edition of season two.

Ethan’s Activity Log (working title)
A few things I did this week that I didn’t do last week

• Spent ~30 mins each AM reading the #nft-chat channel of the FWB Discord

• Figured out the SAM.gov system for 2x businesses (very tedious… loved it)

• Discovered Matto Espresso where the coffees are only $2.50 🤯

• Started to look at new apartments on StreetEasy because the ceiling is leaking (but for now, the drips are soothing)

• Got denied for a Coinbase Institutional account (BlockFi accepted, Gemini pending)… now I’m boycotting their IPO

• Learned that Apple Pay works without a data connection and bought Sea Salt & Vinegar Kettle Chips at Duane Reade using my watch

• Incorporated a new company using firstbase.io (my review so far: 8/10)

• Had my tarot cards read… and suffice it to say, things are looking up 🙏🔮📈

WGA Victorious
As soon as I saw this headline back in November, I knew this one was a wrap. I mean, was anyone at WME or Silver Lake Partners willing to risk it all just to preserve a majority stake in Endeavor Content?

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Congrats to the writers. Solidarity forever 🎵

Also – congrats to The Guild on nominating DAVE for best new series… excellent work all around.

The World of NFTs
NFT this… NFT that. This week we welcomed The Hundreds, Lindsay Lohan, Chief Keef, Mike Shinoda, and Vérité to the party. Zora is the flavor of the month (please DM me if you want an invite). There is still time to snag zora.co/yourfirstname

One THING I learned about NFTs… When you buy an NFT, you don’t own the actual digitally represented THING (art, music, animation, etc)… you know what I’m saying? The NFT itself is the THING… that you own.

That was a pretty useless explanation, but the truth finally sunk in for me after reading this guide (highly recommended) under the “understanding ownership” section.

Implications: a musician could release a song as an NFT and sell the NFT to someone else (for more than they’d make in a year from Spotify)… but then later release that same song on DSPs whereas the new NFT owner could not… because the song itself wasn’t actually sold.

Mr. Shinoda also makes this abundantly clear with his own Zora pieces, stating what you can and more importantly what you can’t do with your newly purchased NFT:

1 of 1 piece. No other replications or color variations will be made. You can: resell this original NFT, re-create for academic study. You can't: reproduce for profit (including apparel, print, video, any other for-profit product / media, etc.).

To quote my old pal Ryan: “we get it dude, you’re in linkin park”

Crowdfunding via $ESSAY
I’m really trying my best to not turn this into a crypto Substack (bang bang) but here’s another interesting experiment I clocked from John Palmer… who crowdfunded an essay by pre-selling $ESSAY tokens.

Why is this interesting? Because we’re probably a few weeks away from someone doing something similar with their spec screenplay or pilot and easily raising more than the WGA minimum… while retaining all of their rights to shop it. Maybe I need to create the $SPEC token.

The essay is out now (free for everyone to read!). It’s worth noting the value created on a few different levels:

1. John presold 10 ETH worth (~$18k USD) of newly created $ESSAY tokens before the essay was even published

2. A liquidity pool emerged on Uniswap for $ESSAY tokens, allowing me to buy in after I missed the release… which then gave me access to the ESSAY Chat Discord

3. The essay itself is now being sold as an NFT on Zora, with a current high bid at 3.14 ETH. Once a bid is accepted and the NFT is sold, 10% of the sale will be distributed to $ESSAY holders

4. Mini-arbitrage: holders of 10 $ESSAY tokens (~$140) can now get access to (part of) the FWB Discord which currently costs, like, ~$800

5. The essay itself is… kinda fire 🔥

Truthfully I understand maybe 40% of what’s going on… but check this thread for more. I’m also scheming on how I can get a Mirror invite to crowdfund my own seminal essay… but that’ll have to wait for a future edition. Speaking of invites, who has one for Dispo

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Update on my IMDB STARmeter ⭐️
Which also conveniently tracks my sense of self-worth…

And finally, a tweet that ~*~resonated~*~:

Gerard Dawson @GerardDawson3

Maybe an unpopular take on the “creator economy” ... it has to develop the self awareness to avoid the MLM-like vibe that permeates a lot of the “internet marketing” world The “creators creating content to empower creators to create content about content” vibe is growing fast

Ok, I’m off – but here are a few more reads for your weekend ahead:

• A Field Guide to Music’s Potential Crypto Boom (multiple readers quoted, love it)

• The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram

• Why the Future of Startups are Studios

• Creeping as a Service (CraaS) (Spoonbill having a moment)

• I Swapped My iPhone for an Apple Watch and Here’s What Happened (trying this rn)

• How a Few Great Hip-Hop Journalists Won in Hollywood

1. Yes, I know there were other issues at hand.

2. WTT: Clubhouse/Zora for Dispo/Mirror…