Across a 10-year career, Diaz Grimm has never profited from his music. He believes his new album could change that – and solve a music industry crisis.
Diaz Grimm is having hardware issues. “My car’s got a flat battery,” he emails before our interview. When the artist otherwise known as Cameron Clarke sits down at a Kingsland cafe an hour later, it’s still a surprise to see him in person. Grimm, a Cambridge musician with two albums and a handful of cryptocurrency to his name, has threatened to conduct press for his latest project in non-human form. “All interviews related to this project will be with the Diaz avatar in real time or pre-recorded,” a recent press release warned.
Even cyborg rappers need to promote themselves properly. Grimm’s agreed to an in-person chat to discuss Māui & the Sin, a NZ On Air-funded double-album and the third installation of what he hopes will become a series of “seven albums, seven books and seven films” over the next 25 years. It’s a huge James Cameron-sized swing from an artist still finding his way. Whether Grimm gets to achieve his goals depends entirely on how the next few months go. He’s trying something different, and he needs 100 fans to embrace his big plans and help him succeed.
Bear with me, because Grimm’s new playbook is a little complicated. Influenced by his enthusiasm for bitcoin, blockchains, Web3 and NFTs, Grimm is selling the rights to his new music, meaning fans can join his own personal community of financial investors. Using the Ethereum blockchain, they can buy one of 100 Album Ownership Tokens (AOTs) giving them them exclusive perks like vinyl records, free entry into shows, and access to the Grimmverse, an online world being built.
Potentially, it also could make them money: every buyer of a token will receive 0.65% worth of Grimm’s streaming royalties for the next 12 months. If his album takes off and Grimm’s musical stock rises, fans who invested early will be there right beside him, profiting too.
To do this, Grimm (Ngāwhā, Ngāpuhi) has embraced a new online persona. He is, his press release states, “the world’s first indigenous CGI avatar rapper”, a claim that’s difficult to fact check but probably true. The music video for the album’s first single, ‘WWĀD’, features him stomping around Auckland’s Sky Tower while rapping lines like: “All these haters didn’t listen / Now they’re at home wishing / They could taste these royalties off NFTs I baked in the kitchen.” At the end of the song, he implores listeners to “invest now”.
Why’s he doing this? Money. Grimm readily admits he’s struggling financially and actively looking for work. Despite racking up what seems like an impressive career – booking opening slots for Mac Miller, Chance the Rapper and a 10-date Six60 tour, as well as performances at Northern Bass and Rhythm & Vines – Grimm says he’s always found it hard to make ends meet as a musician. Record label deals don’t work for someone at his level. “I have never made money. I have scraped by surviving for 10 years,” he says. “It’s very difficult.”
Desperation is one of his inspirations, and it’s no surprise. Lately, things have only gotten harder for artists like Grimm. Only the top 0.8% of artists make any money from Spotify streaming. The rest fight for a pittance while trying to build up a fanbase that might buy merchandise or concert tickets. Making matters worse is Covid, which killed off touring income and is only now showing signs of recuperation. “As a completely independent artist, you probably want one million monthly listens on Spotify to be comfortably sustainable,” says Grimm. “I just hit 4,500.”
It wasn’t always this way. Three years ago, Grimm was “balling”. Encouraged by a friend, he’d moved to Toronto and set himself up in a sparse studio apartment. Working 20 hours a week at a local restaurant, his combined salary and tips earned him $2,000 a week. Free to focus on his music, Grimm returned to the musical grind, making friends and connections while building a studio and finishing an EP, the follow-up to his 2015 album Osiris, and 2016’s 2077.
He even locked a Canadian tour in. “It was a really good life. I’d found my crew, found my scene,” he says. “Little by little, I was building a life.” When Covid lockdowns began in March, 2020, Grimm was in Aotearoa, having briefly returned to attend his brother’s wedding. With closed borders and stay-at-home orders issued, the wedding was cancelled, his tour was off and Grimm was stuck. He had $4,000 in his pocket, enough to see him through what he thought would be about a month of lockdowns.
But the borders stayed shut. By December, 2020, Grimm realised: “I think I’m fucked. I think I’m here. I think I’m not getting back to Canada anytime soon.” That’s when he started getting interested in the blockchain. He was an early adopter of Ethereum, seen as the main rival to Bitcoin – his earnings weren’t life-changing, but enough to give him a good chunk of “pocket money”. Like many cryptocurrency investors, he believes it’s the future of money. “The traditional money system doesn’t work,” he says. “I think it’s going to burn and crumble to the point we can’t use it any more.”
While recording his new album, he began thinking about how he could map what he’d learned from his cryptocurrency investments to his new music. On Spotify, he needs one million monthly listeners to survive. With his AOTs, Grimm only needs 100 fans to believe in him. So, leading up to the November 28 release of Māui & the Sin, he’s selling 100 tokens to his music, as well as smaller $20 investments for fans who can’t afford them. (He’s already given away 18 of his 100 AOTs to the album’s contributors, costing him 0.4 ETH (about $NZ1045) each – the equivalent of nearly $19,000.)
He believes this could be the best thing to happen for artists at his level. “If I sell 100 vinyls, I don’t know where they are. I don’t know who purchased them. Spotify won’t let me see who my followers are,” he says. Now, he can offer fans a piece of his pie. “If someone purchases one of my AOTs I know where they are. It’s a community and I know who’s in it. I know how to contact them.” Will it work? Only time will tell. Matt Miller, the album’s producer, believes Grimm’s onto something. “Diaz is committed to achieving what all artists ultimately want – to make a living from their art while also retaining autonomy over their narrative,” he says. “He’s changing the trajectory.”
Still, his potential industry revolution is a big sell. Grimm knows his ideas are out of left-field. Tying his career to an NFT-style project could easily go wrong, especially after the recent drop in value. “It’s not for everyone,” he admits. As for his goal of seven books and films, he hasn’t written them or found funding. Recently diagnosed with ADHD, Grimm admits he struggles to switch his brain off. But you can’t deny that he’s put a huge amount of thought into the project. “I’ve spent a year building this recipe,” he says. “I feel like it’s a really good recipe for people to look at.”
His best case scenario is that he’ll “never be broke again”. He doesn’t yet have a plan B. “I’ve spent my entire life doing this,” he says. “What am I going to do?” Most of his friends have kids and mortgages, and Grimm dreams of doing the same thing. “I’m still at a point where if a friend’s having a birthday dinner at a nice restaurant, I have to say no sometimes.”
But someone’s got to take a shot at making this work, because the alternative – a music industry that doesn’t have room for artists like Grimm – is unthinkable. “Someone’s got to test the waters. Someone’s gotta take the bullets,” he says as we’re walking back to his car. He also admits: “Someone’s got to fail.”
Māui & the Sin is out on November 28.