Leah Callon-Butler recently wrote that crypto’s rock-and-roll era is over, and she’s mostly right about the arc. But I was alive inside the music industry when rock and roll actually died, and there’s more to the story.
I was a product manager at Universal Music during the torrent era. I sat in the rooms where executives decided to sue grandmothers instead of building Spotify. I saw them spend more on lawyers than artists. And in the end I was fired for pointing out that we had already lost.
So when someone uses rock and roll as a metaphor for what’s happening in digital assets, I know what the metaphor actually contains.
This is what the end of the rock and roll era actually looked like from the inside. The loudest, most exciting part of the culture died, while the boring infrastructure beneath it quietly became what mattered. The rock stars disappeared. The streaming bosses took over. And the audience grew, even as the culture became less interesting.
Callon-Butler frames this as a kind of grief. The cypherpunk dream was diluted by ETFs and institutional guardianship. Laser eye meme worn by presidents. And yes, I understand the grief. I felt it when I saw Universal Music pivot from breaking artists to optimizing playlists.
But this is where the music industry parallel actually becomes useful, and no one talks about this part.
The labels survived. They wrapped up streaming and called it innovation. They went from fighting Napster to owning shares in Spotify. The same executives who wanted to destroy file sharing ended up taking advantage of the infrastructure file sharing was forced into existence. The establishment absorbed the revolution and renamed it.
This is what is happening right now with digital assets. JP Morgan is doing what Universal did with streaming. They package up what they fought for and call it a product. And just like with music, the audience will get bigger, the infrastructure will get better, and the culture will get less interesting. Callon-Butler nails that part.
But the part she misses is what happened next in music. Something the establishment could not absorb.
While Universal was busy becoming a streaming company, ten thousand teenagers with blogs and bedroom studios were building something that labels couldn’t package. The Swedish death metal boy. The Brazilian baile funk producer. The Detroit Technoarchaeologist. They didn’t know each other. They didn’t even know Universal mattered. They just wanted to document what they loved.
And collectively, without any coordination, they created something institutions could not replicate: infinite specificity. Every possible flavor has its own ecosystem. Each microgenre has its own distribution channel. The monoculture dissolved into something so granular that no corporate structure could reassemble it.
The rock and roll era is obviously over. The question is what is being built in the quiet spaces where the institutions are not looking.
Stablecoins move value across borders for people who have never heard of DeFi. Tokenized assets create markets in places where traditional finance never bothered to appear. Self-care tools are quietly getting better while everyone is distracted by ETF inflows. The boring infrastructure that makes the next wave possible.
I grew up in Argentina. I saw a government freeze bank accounts overnight and tell people their dollars were now worth a third of what they were yesterday. That experience teaches you something about money that stays with you forever. And it teaches you that the people who build plumbing in the quiet times are the ones who matter when things get loud again.
Callon-Butler asks if crypto will stay weird. I would rephrase the question. The music industry became strange. It just stopped being weird in the places the managers were looking at. The weird migrated to the fringes, to bedroom producers, niche communities and distribution channels that didn’t need permission.
The end of Crypto’s rock-and-roll era is the most bullish thing that can happen to the industry. It means that the adults showed up, and the adults bring capital that doesn’t disappear when the mood changes. Crypto needs boring institutional plumbing. And that is exactly what is being built right now.
But somewhere out there, a kid in Lagos or Buenos Aires or Beirut is building something on these rails that no one in a boardroom has yet imagined. They don’t even know the establishment exists. They just need the infrastructure to work.
That’s the beginning of the interesting part.
