What is The Park? Not the type where you lay back and see the stars, the music collective. The Park is a group of creatives, musicians, song writers, audio and computer engineers, producers, storytellers, all who speak the universal language of music. Individually, members of The Park are highly regarded in their respective fields, with credits ranging from working with major artists like Ariana Grande, Banks, Logic, Rhye, and more, to performing at prestigious venues and festivals worldwide.
For the past two years, after the pandemic affected the way live music was performed and recorded, The Park started meeting every Friday to create together. This was the inception of Fridays At The Park. Given the nature of its crypto-curious and Web3 native members, The Park started to mint onchain what was created at the studio every Friday. For the last two years, this has been the tradition, an artifact is minted every Friday.
As the word started spreading, and people became more interested in finding a way to contribute to Fridays at The Park, member DerekGTaylor (a.k.a @thepark) took the lead in officially putting the project onchain using the Nouns Builder protocol. With the guidance of Chris Carella, who was the first to create a Nouns Builder DAO (Purple DAO), Derek brought The Park onchain, and The Park DAO was formed. Since its inception on November 10, 2022, The Park has garnered token holders from around the world. The most fun story comes via token holder Davin from Uganda. Shortly after becoming a Park DAO member, Davin put together a proposal for 1 ETH to fund a musical collaboration with The Park founding members and Shwento, a musical group from Uganda. From this proposal, the song “Becky v2” was born which has 17,581 mints and earned 7.8 ETH to date. All earnings have been split among all the contributors, changing the lives of Shwento collaborators. This proved that The Park can be a global collective, and since, has collaborated with musicians in Honduras, and plans to do the same in Tokyo later this month.
The experience of attending Fridays at The Park IRL is truly magical. Not many people fully understand what it takes to create a song, from nothing, at a music studio, with a group of people. So much goes into the process. This inspired The Park to start filming their sessions. To be in a professional music studio, to play and create without the pressure of making a “hit,” or having to finish a song for a specific album, creates a space where artists can relax, create without expectation, and have fun. The Happy Friday! mantra is created here. The mantra that we should create and live every day like it’s Friday. The filming of the Friday sessions has also garnered success. Season 2 episode 1 of Fridays at The Park has almost 43,000 mints and has earned 19 ETH. All earnings get split among the contributors. It has enabled this group of talented artists to continue to create from their hearts in a professional setting, while sharing their fruits with the world.
From the many DAOs in Web3, The Park has resonated the most with The Nouns DAO. The Park and Nouns share similar core values– funding great ideas, having fun, and celebrating creativity. Most recently, The Park agreed to make the investment to acquire a Noun (Noun 1124) to be able to actively participate in community governance. Since its inception, two years ago, The Park has been repping nouns, using noggles in their content, and most importantly, educating the Web3 curious about Nouns, and successfully onboarding people. Most recently, The Park put a proposal onchain that I sponsored. The proposal, Prop 573, seeked funding to bring Nouns to FWB Fest 2024 to represent Nouns in the way The Park knows how to do it best, by bringing creatives together to make something great. It succeeded, the process was a learning experience that left me feeling more inspired to continue to create within the Nouns ecosystem. I learned that overall, people are kind, mean well, and want the DAO to succeed. It is truly special to be part of a community where a contributor that votes against your proposal, feels comfortable to have a 1:1 conversation to share their reason for their no vote and genuinely still high five each other after the conversation. Overall, I feel very thankful to all that participated.
Making music is a special process. One of my favorite parts is seeing the sparkle in peoples' eyes when they enter a music studio for the fist time and witness a song being created. I know that at FWB Fest there will be many of these moments when people walk into Nouns Studios by The Park. I hope from the experience at Fest, every time people think about how music is made, it reminds them of that sparkle. Let's all sing Happy Friday on a Tuesday!
If you have any questions about Nouns, The Park, or anything I've shared above, lets continue the conversation @valgtaylor on warpcast.
Thank you for reading!
With love,
~From Val
