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Claude VonStroke Of DirtyBird On Musical Flight Club NFTs With Real-World Utility, Plus: Tom Brady's NFT Venture, Solana's MonkeyBall $3Mil Raise, And More...
Music and NFTs intersect in a variety of fun and innovative ways. Dirtybird Flight Club is a unique generative NFT project that is reaching new heights and redefining what the music industry means in our day and age. In this episode, our hosts are joined by Claude VonStroke, the dreamer, disrupter, and doer behind Dirtybird Records. Join in to find out how Claude’s rebel mindset and love for the grind makes him a perfect fit for trailblazing in NFTs. Plus, in our hot topics, find out how NFT Genius is continuing to change the NFT game with Rebel Rabbits and the Gaia Marketplace.
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Listen to the podcast here
Claude VonStroke Of DirtyBird On Musical Flight Club NFTs With Real-World Utility, Plus: Tom Brady’s NFT Venture, Solana’s MonkeyBall $3Mil Raise, And More…
All you NFT curious readers, check out this episode for the scoop on how the Dirtybird Flight Club music NFT project is reaching new heights.
What vinyl record our guest had the foresight to purchase at eleven years old.
How NFT Genius is continuing to change the NFT game with Rebel Rabbits and Gaia Marketplace. All this and more on this episode. Enjoy.
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This episode’s dreamer, disrupter and doer on this sponsored spotlight episode is Claude VonStroke, Founder of Dirtybird Records, an independent electronic music record label, festival producer and collective based out of the West Coast. Claude is a renowned DJ, producer and innovator who launched Dirtybird Flight Club, a unique generative NFT project that we will know all about on this episode. Welcome, Claude.
Thank you for having me.
We’re all huge consumers and in some cases, producers of music. This is one of those ones that when it hit the calendar, we’re super excited about it. We love talking to any and everything music here. Music and NFTs started to intersect in all these crazy ways.
We’ve had many shows on the power of event ticketing. We had YellowHeart on talking about all the challenges in the ticketing industry. You have the experience. You’ve been doing your festival for so long. You put all this together and said, “Let’s disrupt things.”
We know and we’ve heard the intersection of visual art and music has always been a part of Dirtybird but now we got Dirtybird Flight Club. How did the origins of Dirtybird and also your relationship with Birdcap influenced this project?
I have been hiring a semi-famous or famous muralist or painter every year for many years to do all the album cover art for our label. I hire them for one year and they do anywhere between 12 to 25 covers. Those are all the music releases on our label. I always buy paintings from them. My house is full with all this wacky artwork that I like. I like a very certain thing. I found all these artists in reading Hi-Fructose, Juxtapoz, IG or going to art galleries or Thinkspace.
I also collect comic books from the ’80s, like old Marvel X-Men. I’ve been running this record label for many years. All these things came together and I decided that the best person to do a generative NFT would be Birdcap, who did our art in 2020 because he is very quick and great at characters. It looked like it was going to work. He was amazing on this project. He did a great job.
You’re saying that he operates pretty quickly. What was it like from inception to you getting into that spot where you’re ready to share it with the world?
This is how you do a project and sometimes you’re banging your head against the wall and you can’t get anything to work out. It’s like, “I could maybe force this project to happen.” It’s brutal. I had that experience the first time I tried to break into NFTs but then this time, I said, “Darn it.” I came back six months later and I’m like, “I want to get into this space. The generative thing seems like a good thing.” All the stuff came together so serendipitously.
I was at our festival and the woman that does all of my creative direction on my weird stages and stuff was like, “My boyfriend programmed this whole NFT.” He ended up being the guy that did Robotos. He hired him to do it. I called Birdcap. He was shopping for Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtle statues in the comic book store. I was like, “You’re the exact right guy for this.”
He was like, “I’ll do it if you explain to me what you’re talking about. How do you get your caveman money into the internet? I don’t get it.” All these people started coming in from all these different places. The two people that run our Discord, I met backstage because they won a giveaway to come see me and Green Velvet play in the Brooklyn Mirage. They were super into NFTs and I started talking to them backstage. It was crazy.
Isn’t that reflective of the entire world of NFTs ultimately? Everything we’re experiencing in this ecosystem is so collaborative, serendipitous and free-flowing in different ways. Crap gets done without some crazy project plans or weird Gantt chart. Time and again we talk to people that have launched projects and we get a similar story to what you conveyed to us. It’s amazing.
0N1 Force** came on the show and was talking about how they casually all got together. It’s momentum. Is that similar or different than how some of your music production has gone in the past?**
My music production is different because this is like making a film almost. This is a group effort and my music is much more of a me-effort in my studio but the releasing of music is a massive group effort. In some ways, it’s very similar. The record label and the marketing team are all similar to this. I did have a lot of experience but I’ll also tell you that the first time I tried to do this, it didn’t work. I was trying to get on that first Nifty Gateway 101 thing, make my stuff too perfect and get everyone to come. I still have these. I’m going to eventually release all these amazing funds but no one responds.
You can’t get anyone at those companies to respond because everyone is hitting them up. Right away, I didn’t like it because we’re used to bootstrapping, going renegade and rocking it. Having these crazy gatekeepers is so annoying. At Nifty and SuperRare, you can’t even get anyone on the phone. It was so gatekeeper-y that it was a big mess for me. It didn’t work. I didn’t get it out. I was like, “Crap NFTs.” I kept watching it and I was like, “I love NFTs.” I can’t say, “Crap NFTs.”
We’ve got our first drop coming out soon. It was one of those things where it was like, “How much polish do we add? How do we do this?” We’re methodical entrepreneurs that even if we’re agile, you’ve got to hit the gas and go. One of the things we love about them and I’m sure you can relate to is that there are little packages of surprises. You’re able to do cool things for your fans that support you in a direct way. We hear there’s some exciting news that you’re airdropping some unreleased music to folks that have a bird.
We did it. At our festival campout, we had a special secret party for bird holders. The whole collection came out five days before our festival, which is insane on our part workload-wise. We flew Birdcap to campout and secretly surprised made a party that I DJed at in a different area. Bird holders came and they got to screen-print this one-on-one artwork that he made just for that party. They had screen-printed it at the party. They were hanging them up and drying on clothespins like they’re drying their underwear. While I played a hip-hop set, they were finishing a huge mural in real-time this whole time. It was cool.
I was curious. What other utility comes with being a member of the Flight Club?
The music release came out a few days after we got back. We airdropped everyone a version of that screen-print. It’s a little bit edited to be more towards the music release. There were 5 or 6 tracks that did not come out anywhere else that were unlockable for that airdrop. Only the bird holders got that music release. We’re going to be doing a bunch of that stuff. I’m going to be deejaying in New York at NFT.NYC.
We have 150 spaces for wallet holders. We’re having a mint sellout party that we promised. We would have them in LA on November 6th, 2021. That’s for bird holders. That’s at the outside part of the academy. I don’t know if anybody lives in LA but that is also happening. Even though we’re doing a lot of IRL, I do want to try to get it into the metaverse a little bit more because IRL is hard. We will integrate this into the things that we’re already doing but making parties for this is difficult.
We’ll connect you with our boy Eric that did Rita own his metaverse concert. He has done a lot of metaverse concerts. That’s a great utility to add as well. You’ve got fans all over the country that can’t always make it to a campout.
That’s the number one complaint about doing an IRL. Nobody can go from India.
We have the ability to rent out your NFT for an event that’s coming out. Those folks can still benefit in some way.
That’s a cool idea. I need to get into that more like, “I can rent out or sell someone my pass for a day or something.” That’s interesting. I did it in the Tie Dye Ninjas dojo two days after our mint and that was fun. One thing I know that we’re going to be able to do this is because during COVID, Dirtybird created eleven shows. It was 29 hours a week of Twitch DJ live-streaming. I learned OBS from top to bottom and I know everything about streaming. We’re going to get into that.
It’s a little bit intimidating at first. Congratulations on that. Streaming is weird when you first get into it because you’re like, “I got to put this there, the passwords and keys.”
This guy, Subset Mark is the best at streaming ever. If anyone needs help in streaming, hit up Subset. He walked me through the whole thing from day one.
I have to give a shout-out here. Speaking of serendipity too, Josh and I have a mutual friend named James Mandell. He is the guy who sang the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ theme song. Somebody had to sing it.
Birdcap is obsessed with The Turtles. He has 250 statues in his house.
Dirtybird NFT: Birdcap is obsessed with The Turtles. He has 250 statues in his house.
We’ll have to hook him up with James. Maybe he will get a signed item or something like that. I wanted to ask you about the 9,090 NFTs from Dirtybird. They sold out in three minutes. It’s an important success for the project. Congratulations. How do you plan on continuing to grow your community of collectors and fans? How can we get our trees to sell out in three minutes? The first question is the question there.
The second question is important because, in music, I’m always doing it myself and relying on my own little mind but in this world, I don’t think that would have worked if we hadn’t teamed up with Tie Dye, Space Punks and Wicked Cranium. We befriended all of these other teams. They were giving us advice and sending their people to our mint.
If you can get anything like 3 or 4 other projects to be like, “Check out this project,” it creates that whole little thing that you need, which is that little FOMO buzz for the twenty minutes that your time is up. If you can get that little bump of buzz, I feel like it will work. Who knows? I feel like there are going to be 50 projects a day in 2022 and that might not work in 6 months.
That was something fun we noted about Frogland who came on the show. Wicked Cranium is one of their partners as well as the Gutter Cats and the Gutter Rats. Those projects have a lot of foundations. They decided to make a little metaverse called New Pangea, where all of these different NFTs can play and have land.
Wicked Cranium was my first NFT. This guy, Jack, who is advising us works at Wicked Cranium and I bought one. I ended up deejaying at one of their parties too in a room next to Canter’s Deli with 50 people. I went over it. I was like, “Give me a Wicked Cranium set and I’ll play the set. It will be fun.”
The first part of my question there is the ways that you plan on continuing to engage with fans and holders. What do you got in the works? What thoughts do you have on that?
You have to have a roadmap to get anybody to even look at your project. We’re about 2/3 or 3/4 away through our roadmap. We’re developing our 2.0. Our 1.0, when I look at it, it’s a standard roadmap that everyone did. We donated to charity and dropped rare birds to people. We’re doing a merch drop and all the stuff that you would expect.
That’s one thing that you can’t do like Josh was talking about. We do a lot of ticket giveaways to the events that we have. We gave away campout tickets. We’re going to give away camping tickets. Camping is in Florida. That’s about to get announced. We have barbecues all spring. We’ll give away tickets to that.
In our 2.0 roadmap, we’re going to do something that everyone hates here when I talk about 2.0 stuff before we did it. I get myself in trouble all the time. Let’s say we have a highly-developed four-year-old subscription service that has a lot of features. Maybe these projects will be able to handshake down the line, which will make it automatically worth a whole bunch of money.
We have a subscription service called the Birdfeed. Inside the Birdfeed, you get a completely different release schedule that doesn’t even come out on Dirtybird. It’s completely exclusive. You get everything that comes out on Dirtybird. You get huge discounts on all the clothing. You get to buy tickets before they come out. People who want to go to Dirtybird Campout can get it the cheapest here. We do half the tickets in Birdfeed before they even go on sale. It’s the whitelist.
I forgot the name of the guy who wrote a couple of great books in entrepreneurship. There’s a good book that’s all about all the different types of subscription services that you can create, the boxes, recurring revenues and then all the fun things that people enjoy.
Imagine if you had a bird, maybe you could get into this without paying a fiat fee. Once you trade it, you wouldn’t be able to get it anymore but you could still get it with fiat.
The guy’s name is John Warrillow. He wrote Built to Sell but then he wrote this book that’s all about subscription services. It’s a very popular entrepreneurship book.
Many teams would be envious of this built-in community that you’ve built for years. It’s already into gritty creative stuff. You have the perfect community to experiment with and keep doing cool crap over time. NFTs give you the toolset that probably didn’t exist before this.
One of our other main objectives when we minted is maybe 0.001% of Dirtybird fans had even had a wallet. Our main objective was onboarding. In the entire six weeks that we went into it, all we did was try to onboard people. We didn’t even do any marketing. It was relentless onboarding of Dirtybird fans. I still think we only probably got 5% or 7% of Dirtybird fans in. That is a big thing still for us, the onboarding program, getting people into it. It’s a long-term project.
Even Gary Vee spent a lot of time doing that with his VeeFriends project. It’s on a roadmap.
That’s where we got the idea. Somebody said, “Do you know what Gary Vee did? He onboarded all of his friends.” I was like, “That’s what we should be doing. We should onboard all these fans and that’s it. That’s all we should do.”
One of the other things about a community is a shared set of beliefs. There’s a vibe that happens within communities and it develops over time. It was cool to see that one of the things on your roadmap was to give back. There’s a music-related charity called Notes for Notes where you guys are going to be donating $25,000. Can you give us a little more detail on that?
We had the community vote. Internally, we picked out about twelve charities that all had something to do with music but could accept Ethereum. We whittled it down to three. We had the bird holders vote on which one they thought was the best and Notes for Notes was the winner. We’re happy. They sent us the nicest email I’ve ever had from a company ever in my life. They were so happy to receive the money and a bunch of kids will be able to learn how to make music. It’s a great thing all around. We didn’t choose it. Our people chose charity, which is even cooler.
One of those things that always gets lost in education is arts and music. One thing that’s so essential about it beyond having the cultural benefits, musicians can develop their math skills by developing their music skills. Also with underprivileged youth, people are going through difficult times. Music is such a wonderful way to process difficult things, express those things and move through them. That’s awesome that you guys are facilitating this for younger people.
I was always terrible at math but I see that the correlation is there. Arranging and moving stuff around is very mathematical. Somehow maybe I am good at math.
To highlight it too, I was looking at Notes for Notes, recording studio environments across 23 different studios in 11 states and 14 cities. They also have an online component. That is an impactful organization and an amazing resource.
If we saw all of a sudden that we get a ton of aftermarket stuff, we will probably donate again.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. You talked a little bit about your passion for NFTs as a whole. I’m curious. What else are you inspired by in the world of NFTs? Are there any particular projects or ideas that get you pumped?
I don’t know about you guys but I watch YouTube videos every night. I know that we’re not going to become a DAO because we’re not a financial NFT. That’s not our thing. I know that everyone is like, “Maybe we should start staking.” One thing I have learned in life is to stay in your lane and do what you do well. Eventually, everything will work out. I am obsessed with that whole CyberKongz model. I managed to get into Kaiju King, Head DAO and some of these little ones that are the copies of the CyberKongz. I’m like, “How many days until the government finds out about this because I need to know right before?”
Did you see the Gambling Apes too?
No. Is that a new one?
No. These guys have been around a little while too but maybe launched around the same time. You got these Gambling Apes. They’re going to be running a casino in Decentraland and the profits of the casino get dripped into each ape holder. If we want to take this to the Dirtybird situation, you got these metaverse concerts that are produced where you could drip in a little bit of the ticket revenue to the Dirtybird holders and then you have 10,000 ticket promoters for you.
That’s interesting. You had a great idea. That’s not outside of our wheelhouse but it still has value to everyone.
Have you also followed some of the other music projects like OneOf, Opulous and Mandolin and what they’re trying to do in terms of creating a stronger connection between the fan and their favorite talent?
I haven’t looked at those in-depth but I am studying how to put out music where the fans are the owners of half or all of the record because it’s very complicated. I’ll put it to you this way. If I release a record on Dirtybird, Dirtybird collects all the money that that record makes. They have to collect it from Beatport, Traxsource, Spotify and Apple. If I do a record and let’s say I sell the rights to NFTBoy1328 or whatever, I can’t write the Ethereum contract so that all that money goes to him.
I still have to do all the work. There still has to be a record label element. Maybe down the line somebody is going to write a contract that is like a distribution contract that will suck everything in. You can sell a piece of music to someone and give them the whole thing but still then HBO will call and be like, “We want to put this in 30 seconds of a radio in the bathroom on succession.” That combo is not going in the Ethereum contract. It’s very difficult and tricky.
I wasn’t that clever at that age.
Stay in your lane and do what you do well. Eventually, everything will work out. Click To Tweet
Is he going to be in New York as well?
No, he is not.
Did they end up giving him a Bitcoin?
Absolutely.
Did you have a dice game involved with that?
**Let’s start with these **Rebel Rabbits
Thanks, guys.
Important Links:
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YellowHeart – Previous episode
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Discord – Dirtybird
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0N1 Force – Previous episode
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Festival Campout – Dirtybird Campout
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Eric Schwertzel – LinkedIn
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Frogland – Previous episode
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Chema Mendez – LinkedIn
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Matt Kalish – Previous episode
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Tom Brady’s NFT venture Autograph ropes in R&B sensation The Weeknd
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Jeremy Born – LinkedIn
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First Interview – Jeremy Born Previous Episode
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LinkedIn – Spottie WiFi
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Discord – Rebel Rabbits
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@GeniusNFT – Twitter
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@DirtybirdArt – Twitter
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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@EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
About Claude VonStroke
Claude VonStroke created a small underground record label called Dirtybird in 2005 and grew it into a full-fledged events, clothing and music brand over the last 16 years. During this time, he has also managed to release 6 albums and some of the most iconic house music tracks of the last two decades.
Most people know Claude VonStroke for his smiling DJ persona touring every major city,festival, and basement after-party around the world. But Claude has also influenced the very fabric of the dance community, A&Ring an impeccable roster of acts like Walker & Royce, Nala, Justin Martin, Fisher, Shiba San, Catz n Dogz, Steve Darko, Riva Starr, Cour T, Breach, Eats Everything, Shadow Child, and countless others. Today, his Dirtybird label continues to surprise and innovate in the underground dance scene, releasing an enigmatic combination of house, funk, dirty-bass, and electronica.
VonStroke has released four original artist albums, a remix album, and a live album recorded when he closed the famed Movement Festival in his original hometown of Detroit, Michigan. Some other music highlights include working on records with Bootsy Collins, Rihanna, Disclosure and Kevin Saunderson as well as a few #1 & #2 hits on Beatport. His partnership with Green Velvet as “GET REAL” has been one of the most rewarding friendships as Claude originally modeled his career after the quirky enigmatic style of his mentor and friend from Chicago.
In 2015 VonStroke brought his first festival to light called Dirtybird Campout, a unique camping experience based on the games and activities associated with American Summer camp mixed with the best underground house and bass music in the world. He continues to innovate and curate new events such as the Birdhouse Festival in Los Angeles and Chicago and the legendary Dirtybird BBQ day parties all across North America. He participates online as well bringing the Dirtybird LIVE twitch channel to life 7 nights a week, curating new and interesting shows including Dj sets, cooking, yoga and even comedy to the fans.
VonStroke also loves art, most notably pop surrealist artwork that he has commissioned for the last 8 years on Dirtybird for all of the releases. Each year he hires a new artist and has had the pleasure of working with renowned artists such as Jeremy Fish, Dulk, Graham Carter, Dan May, Charlie Immer, Raoul Deleo and Felicia Chiao. Walking through the Dirtybird HQ in Los Angeles is like walking through an art gallery in the Wynwood district of Miami.
A lot of his success can be attributed to a good attitude. Claude does not scowl and look mean while he DJs. He does not pretend to know everything and he truly loves his fans. He is grateful to be curating, creating and performing music for a living and he knows that the reason people go to parties is to shake their booty and have fun.