Written by Katie Chiou

IN CONVERSATION WITH is a series from Archetype where we interview artists in/at the edges of crypto across music, visual art, design, curation, and more.

Mike Pollard is the CEO and Co-founder of Nina Protocol, alongside Eric Farber and Jack Callahan. Mike is also a musician and has released his own music under the projects Treetops and Pale Blue Sky. Before starting Nina in 2021, Mike started and ran the music label Arbor in 2004 which has released music from artists including Oneohtrix Point Never, Horse Head, Emeralds, and more. Mike is also a member of the art group FPBJPC and former Director at Svetlana Gallery.

Nina Protocol is a platform and toolkit designed to give artists total freedom and ownership of their work. Nina’s vision is to empower musicians, labels and archives to connect directly with their fans, establish new communities, and create context-rich experiences with unparalleled depth.

Over a video call, I asked Pollard a series of questions ranging from his experience starting and running a music label, music journalism and media, tapping into the music community in New York, and more.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Katie Chiou: Long before you started Nina, you started and ran a music label called Arbor. Can you tell us more about the inspiration for starting a label?

Mike Pollard: I started Arbor in 2004 which was 20 years ago, so starting a label probably means something different today than what it meant back then. But at the time I was 14, and I was getting deep into music because of the internet. I had an older cousin who showed me Napster and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and it was this interest in peer-to-peer internet technologies that got me into music. I started by trying to download music from skateboard videos I’d find on IRC and got into all these other IRC music sharing communities. I would burn CDs of my own collected versions of soundtracks to different skating or snowboarding videos. That was my first journey into searching for music, finding all these different niche music communities online.

I then found my way into following these smaller music labels that had websites where you could email the people who ran them, or you could even email the artists directly to buy a tape or CD that they had self-produced. I started buying CDs and tapes from these small labels and artists and then I realized that I could just ask them if I could release their next album. And in many cases, they said yes. I don’t think anybody realized I was 14 or 15, I would just be on these different message boards online like the Sonic Youth message board or the Animal Collective message board and labels would also gather there to advertise stuff. I would lurk and post and advertise Arbor releases.

KC: From a business perspective, what did running a label at that time look like?

MP: I know most about DIY labels of the previous decade. I’d reach out to an artist, and tell them that I wanted to do a tape with them. For bigger artists we would do 200 copies, for a middle artist we’d do 100, and for a small artist maybe we’d do 50. We’d go back and forth about the details of the release, and eventually I’d get a CDR mailed to me with the tracks, and I’d reproduce them. That could mean dubbing the tapes or burning the CDs at home, and I’d make all the packaging. For compensation, the artist would get 20% of the run. So, for example, if there were 50 tapes in a run, they would get 10. They’d usually sell them through their own website or while on tour. I would sell the remaining 80%. I would sell to distributors or directly to people. I had an email list where I would add everyone who ever bought something from Arbor, and I’d email them about new releases—there were usually 2-5 new releases a month. There were people who would buy every single release, and others that would pick and choose.

I think something interesting about labels is that a label is a kind of curator where if you can trust the label, you can probably guess that everything they release will be interesting to you. We’re also talking about the era of around 2004-2012, which is sort of pre-SoundCloud and pre-easy access to MP3s and sound samples. At that time, you basically had to make a bet based on the label or the press release or the cover.

KC: How do you think music discovery and curation have changed as sharing has gone from word of mouth to small internet forums to bigger platforms like SoundCloud?

MP: The pre-internet version would be things like fanzines and newsletters and magazines basically. If you look at music magazines from the 90s, like Forced Exposure, which was run by a distributor, it would be full of "send a self-addressed envelope to this address to get stickers" and "this label's available catalog." It was like a network about knowing the trusted nodes and who were the good sellers or labels. It was probably just a lot slower than it is now.

The Web 1.0 era was putting those newsletters and catalogs online and then having some forum-based conversation. I think what always matters is taste. There are probably good labels that make bad business decisions. People are sad when they shut down, but the mark a label leaves is whether they can make something coherent or intriguing by bringing together a body of artists. You see that through all eras of independent music. It's a little different when talking about a giant label, but with independent record labels, it's all about taste and trust. If you work with artists who then escalate in their career and move beyond the independent label, then that's probably a big sign that something was chosen correctly early on.

KC: It’s interesting that you emphasize taste because doesn’t everyone think they have good taste? So it more so boils down to correctly identifying and connecting with the people who have the same taste as you. When tastes are local, it’s a lot easier because you have these geographical constraints. Even with social networks like MySpace, it's still based on a social graph. Now things have completely scaled where the likelihood of you finding someone who has the same taste as you is probably higher, but also the means of connecting with that person is much lower. That’s not really a concise question, but I want to poke at this.

MP: If you look at SoundCloud right now, I would say that the artists that have the most potential have probably somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. You can look through these smaller accounts, see who they follow, who's following them, and see that there's usually a tight network of shared interest or collaboration there.

That can get lost when an artist blows up. There's almost this sense where once you get a certain number of followers, then the game changes; your replies are less interesting or things get more combative. So, I think there's something interesting about the current era where people aren’t trying to blow up their networks. They want them to remain small, vital, and sustainable.

KC: How have all your observations from running a label and existing in niche music communities influenced your role as a Co-founder of a music tech platform?

MP: For the first year, Nina was invite-only, but we gave access to most people who asked for it. The original artists on Nina were basically seeded from people who were already friends and family of me, Eric, and Jack. It just naturally spread through our networks.

We still constantly get this question, "Is Nina a label? Can I put my music out on your label?" People say they like the curation of Nina, but Nina is actually a fully open thing that anyone can go onto and put their music on.

We’re always focused on "narrative capture," as we call it. We didn't try at first to get as many artists or tracks on the platform as possible because we wanted to make sure that there was a solid foundation of people who understand how independent music works. This means understanding how we do things, the importance of context, and that artists don't exist in a vacuum. So, we moved slowly at first to make sure that there wouldn't be something that would come onto the platform that would change the narrative. We wanted Nina to be about intentional context-building, supportive, real-life music scenes, rather than just like a new song website with an interesting financial model or something like that.

KC: You started Nina in 2021 and launched V2 in Fall 2023. What learnings did you take from V1 to V2?

MP: The biggest learning from V1 to V2 was that crypto UX is not ready for a mainstream audience. With V2, we added fiat on and off-ramps, email wallets, and the ability to publish music without needing any crypto to start with. It confirmed a lot of our assumptions that things like browser extension wallets will not be what bring the normal person into this world of peer-to-peer financial interactions and provenance.

With V2, we also introduced multi-track releases, which I would say account for like 90 to 95% of releases on Nina—EPs and albums. I'm a huge fan of albums and having an artist be able to tell a story across a few tracks. It was a feature that we always wanted, but the hardline crypto UX of V1 made album releases extremely difficult. Musicians think across multiple tracks, and I think the prevailing thoughts in the crypto music space are very track-based or a Rube Goldberg machine-like style method of thinking of ways to connect tracks across multiple tokens or something like that. I think that only appeals to a very initiated group of artists.

KC: Nina is quickly becoming a pillar of the underground music scene, both in media and IRL. You have cult-following music blogs like No Bells and First Floor writing columns for Nina Editorial, throw Nina Nights events at beloved venues like Nowadays, and have the 400 Floor podcast. How do these efforts tie into Nina’s core vision and strategy?

MP: On Nina Nights in particular, Jack, Eric and I—who all started Nina together—and other people on the Nina team have deep experience putting on shows, running labels, and being in bands, so it comes naturally to us. We thought live shows could be a place where people can come and we can talk to them about Nina. We can also elevate people who are friends of Nina or Nina-adjacent. The podcast is kind of similar. They're both about the wider context of music. Music isn't just a song online. The strongest interactions occur when you can meet someone and talk to them. It's definitely not scalable, but something nice about the Nina Nights is that they've all been different scenes. There's maybe a core group of 10 or 15 people who come to every event, but there’s also always new faces.

The goal of Nina Editorial is to highlight trends in different kinds of online music discourse and give them a place to hangout. It's not really about the columns in particular, First Floor and No Bells aren’t related to crypto. Both columns have premiered tracks and onboarded artists on the platform, but it's really about supporting their work.

KC: Do you have thoughts about all the recent events in music media, things like Bandcamp editorial shutting down to Pitchfork folding into GQ?

MP: It's definitely scary. Before Pitchfork was bought by Condé Nast, there were all these blogs in the MySpace era and then you had a sort of consolidation and corporatization of all of those bloggers. They were all hired by different companies—whether it was Vice or Pitchfork or somewhere else—and then all those companies said, "Okay, this no longer works." Then all those people who had been corporatized got pushed back out at no fault of their own. It’s brutal.

But you need vital writing, you need scene reporting. Pitchfork and publications like it are good for distribution and having this shared idea as to what the most important stuff happening in independent music is. But does that match the experience being on the ground with up-and-coming bands? I think that people just need more direct ways of supporting artists and critics and scenes. There are very dedicated people, and I think that the dedicated people will continue to be dedicated.

KC: How do you think about Nina being a bridge from crypto to the mainstream? Does that cross your mind at all?

MP: Spotify, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp all started over a decade ago, and I think they've all shown signs of weakness in recent years. Bandcamp has been sold twice in the last few years. Spotify has demonetized 85% of artists on the platform with less than 1,000 streams a year. SoundCloud is constantly being put up for sale.

There is value in permissionless cultural tools. That's what we are dedicated to thinking about at Nina: a platform that could exist independent of a solo operator. A platform where you can avoid things like MySpace's servers going down and 15 years of music getting deleted, where you can have peer-to-peer artist interactions, whether it's financial or communicative. That's the thing that we're trying to build with Nina.

I think that the mainstream crypto discourse currently is very speculation and degenerate-oriented, and crypto culture can be off-putting to anyone not involved in it. So, I definitely understand where people's apprehensions come from because we largely share them. But I also think that there are benefits to thinking about how culture could exist on the internet. We’re thinking about peer-to-peer music online from the perspective of the experiences that we've received from the past decade of music tech. People are exhausted with change and the ever-increasing intensity of the firehose of content and roles that you have to play.

KC: You’re a big music collector and think about archiving and provenance a lot. Can you tell us more about that personal philosophy?

MP: At the speed at which culture currently moves online, it's super easy for things that don't have the right rollout plan or PR strategy or just engine behind it to launch and then immediately fade out forever. But I think that these forgotten things always come back and end up being the inspirations for future generations. There's a real value to not letting the things that are loudest in their infancy be the only things we remember. There should be an archive to dig through for people who are interested—to follow the traces back from the things that they know to the things that they don't yet know. This is how we keep culture lively, rather than letting whatever an algorithm wants to show you push you based on whatever reasons it has.

KC: In the context of Nina, what does building a “context-rich” platform or experience look like?

MP: I would say that it's a North Star, we don't have it yet. Discogs is a good example of cataloging the cultural history of recorded music. Think of archive.org. The important thing is having open access to the interconnectedness of things. So, if one label puts out music by 10 artists and those 10 artists are also put out by 4 labels each or something, then you have this network of nodes that you travel through and follow your interests. There’s value to archiving the past in order to preserve the future. If you don't have a past, then you just have a perpetual present.

KC: What would you like Nina to look like 1, 2, 5 years from now?

MP: Something I really like about SoundCloud is how well it facilitates the move from being someone who listens to music to becoming someone who makes music, which I think is a pretty natural progression for a larger subset of people than you would think.

In general, I don't think that much about Spotify. I don't think that Spotify is where music is born. I think a lot more about where music is born, I guess. So I'd like to see Nina facilitating that role. I'd like to see us find more ways to make context-rich experiences happen there where people can actually dig through the history of a scene or a style. I think that we're at the beginning of a Nina-specific sound developing. I won't say more, but there are groups of artists from all around the world who share something that brings them to Nina.

I'd also like to see us make better tools to be the backend for artists' personal sites. Having a personal page is a good way to say, "This is where I live, this is my context." In light of platform fatigue and streaming fatigue, I would like to see Nina be a sort of Discogs or dictionary of everything that's happening in independent music. Whether it’s Nina or not, I’d like to see a place for artists to have their own place to live. Things like Linktree are a start and maybe a sign that things could go one step further––I'd like to see that step beyond.

Disclaimer:

This post is for general information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any investment and should not be used in the evaluation of the merits of making any investment decision. It should not be relied upon for accounting, legal or tax advice or investment recommendations. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax, and other related matters concerning any investment or legal matters. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Archetype. This post reflects the current opinions of the authors and is not made on behalf of Archetype or its affiliates and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Archetype, its affiliates or individuals associated with Archetype. The opinions reflected herein are subject to change without being updated.