Episode 33
Stop Losing Rights, Own Your IP: Music RWAs, AI, x402 on Base | Jason Colapietro
Topics: Music IP as a real-world asset, Music royalties and the Vault, Rights registry and provenance, Token launches and tokenomics, AI and the music industry
Guest appearance, hosted by matthewjmalek. All appearances.
Episode show notes
Jason Colapietro (founder, Suede Labs) sits down with @matthewjmalek to talk about why the music industry's IP layer is structurally broken — and how an artist-owned, on-chain stack actually pays the people doing the work.
We get into:
- Why songwriters and producers lose rights & revenue at every layer of the stack
- Music IP as a real-world asset (RWA): tokenizing rights so creators own and earn from their catalog
- Suede Labs' tooling — built so musicians keep ownership and get paid for what they make
- How x402 + the Model-Pay-Per-Call (MPP) primitive change who gets paid every time AI uses someone's work
- AI as a creator-side tool, not a replacement — agents that work for artists, not around them
- Why Base is the right home for the music stack
- The Vault: DeFi for music royalties — liquidity now, royalty yield for supporters
- Building on Arena, prediction markets, and what crypto-native distribution unlocks for independent creators
🔗 Suede Labs → https://suedeai.ai
🐦 Johnny Suede → https://x.com/johnnysuede
🎙️ Hosted by → https://x.com/matthewjmalek
Episode chapters
- 0:00 Cold open — LA stories, sleep schedules
- 5:00 Crypto origin — $3k cost-basis Bitcoin, the fiancée intervention
- 15:00 Rove on Solana, $2M raise, FTX collapsing 7 days before Clerks 3
- 23:00 CZ vs Hyperliquid, Binance Labs funding DEXs
- 26:00 The Suede Labs pitch — the ownership problem (DVD vs Netflix)
- 30:00 Vatican, Vermeer & how an art-history obsession led to building Suede
- 35:00 Why blockchain belongs in music — "I mailed cassette tapes to myself"
- 36:00 AI music as the biggest shield AND biggest earning potential for artists
- 40:00 Multi-chain swap, LayerZero, 40+ chains
- 43:00 Avalanche, Build Games denial story
- 46:00 App Store war — Rove was the first blockchain app approved (+ the burn-address gaffe)
- 50:00 Live tour: Suede AI's "Create with rights" feature
- 55:00 The on-chain registry — court-enforceable proof of authorship
- 58:00 Why every celebrity-token cycle ends the same way (Iggy, Soldier Boy, Derulo)
- 59:00 The launchpad fix: tax tokens that pay artists in SOL/USDC, not their own token
- 1:02:00 Suede Social — gear forums reborn with shareable rig DNA
- 1:05:00 "Programmable artistic matter" — beyond music to all IP
- 1:08:00 Cognitive Architecture test — the founder profile (Conductor / Future Scribe / Hunter)
- 1:55:00 Suede Studio: 197 pedals, polyphonic tuner, Dr. Johnny
- 2:00:00 DSP libraries, neural amp modeler, app-store live
- 2:15:00 THE VAULT — DeFi for music royalties (the killer feature)
- 2:18:00 Wrap-up + community duck race
#MusicRWA #SuedeLabs #x402 #Base #ArtistRights #MusicIP #CreatorEconomy #OnChainMusic
Suede AI products in this episode
- Suede AI IP Registry. The ID and trust layer for music: one verifiable public ID per work, with a wallet-signed creator claim, contributors, timestamp, and derivative links on Base and Avalanche.
- Suede Social. Ask guitar gear questions, discuss pedalboards and amps, troubleshoot your signal chain, and share your rig on the Suede Social guitar forum.