Not your keys, not your songs

651

Ulta removals

-9.2% MoM, 6/01/2026<br>The number of products dropped from Ulta in the last month.

12.1%

US dance inflation

9.7% MoM, 6/01/2026<br>The change in the three-month rolling average ticket price to American events listed on Resident Advisor compared to the same period last year.

7.2%

NYT holders

+1.0% QoQ, Q1 2026<br>The percentage of American instutitonal asset managers with at least $100 million under management disclosing The New York Times Company in their holdings.

$693

Beretta M9

+1.1% MoM, 5/1/2026<br>The average price of a Beretta M9 9mm sold by 31 dealers rounded to the nearest dollar.

26.0%

Loro Piana price gap

3.2% MoM, 6/1/2026<br>The difference between listed and final sale prices of second-hand Loro Piana products on Vestiaire Collective.

166

Superdonors

-51.0% PoP, 4/1/2026<br>The number of campaign donors who have maxed out their donations to at least five political candidates compared to the same period in the last election cycle.

2.5

AAA:indie ratio

-34.4% MoM, 4/01/2026<br>The ratio of the price of the average AAA studio game to the price of the average indie studio game on Steam.

Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d'un grand homme sourd (1897), Alphonse Allais

By

Chris Good

Summary<br>Nina Protocol, a VC-backed web3 music startup, promised to compensate artists, change music discovery, and make independent music hosting permanent and independent.<br>It’s understood that they failed on these counts, but the magnitude of that failure has been underestimated: only about $33,000 was spent on Nina throughout the platform's lifetime, with the vast majority of releases going uncollected.<br>Nina ultimately failed to articulate (or realize) an alternative to Bandcamp or Spotify. Others may manage.<br>No one had been anxiously anticipating the moment we’d finally be able to collect and sell digital music via decentralized ledgers. But for a moment in the 2020s, when VCs were throwing good money after bad in hopes of convincing us that we’d been waiting for web3 all along, the music platform Nina Protocol could make the case that cryptocurrency-powered music hosting would upend the economics of music streaming and lend the recordings themselves a permanence beyond corporate entities. Even if Nina died, the music would live on the blockchain forever.<br>Today, their site uses a few different euphemisms — it is an “offramp,” they are “winding down” — but what they really mean to tell you is that it's all over. Two days after Components started researching this piece, Nina Protocol’s web catalogue was shut down. Next Wednesday, the website will go offline. When that happens, it will be as if Nina never existed at all.<br>For the uninitiated, Nina was an online music marketplace founded in 2021 by a few indie lifers. This alone would put it in the company of about a dozen Bandcamp clones, but for one very special difference: Nina was built on the blockchain platform Solana, which meant that in the early 2020s web3 hype cycle, it could attract a round of seed funding from five co-investors and end up in the portfolio of Greenfield Capital, where it sat between world-beaters like “a liquidity aggregator connecting multiple decentralized exchanges” and “the company behind CryptoKitties.” PitchBook supplies no dollar figure, but given that they operated for nearly four years post-raise with a handful of full-time staff and no profits, it’s hard to imagine a number under seven figures.<br>In early interviews, Nina’s founders would set out their mission to “ascribe value to digital music in an entirely new way.” You could be forgiven for not seeing why cryptocurrency was an essential part of this formulation; if to sign with a label is to swim through a sixty-yard trench of shit, then the mechanics of on-chain listenership and distribution amounted to a backstroke in the opposite direction. All payments might go to the artist on Nina, but the artist would be saddled with publishing fees contingent on the vagaries of Solana’s market. Listeners would need to manage a Solana wallet and the accompanying microtransactions or, in the case of the “first collector,” cover upfront hosting costs in exchange for a cut of future fees.<br>Why bother? Greenfield's argument for web3 in music was essentially that it could function as a goodie bag delivery mechanism (complete with “token-gated digital experiences” and “tangible fan services, like exclusive Discord channels with artists or free NFT airdrops”). Nina itself pointed to more highminded ideals (democratization, decentralization). But beneath all this was a familiar promise, the same made by every other Bandcamp alternative: that Nina would bring about a new model for artist compensation, permanent music collection, and discovery sans algorithms: “music online as it should be.”<br>This was apparently a selling pointThis did not come to pass. Despite Nina's efforts to “release independent music from the grips of Big Streaming” and...