Bands, Genres, Musical Skill Requirements & Substitute Skills
The time is soon here for individual Blockstars to band together — the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts — all in pursuit of making great music in 96 different sub-genres!
In order to allow players to make the best possible decisions, even before the feature is released, we wanted to add more details around a number of critical areas:
- Bands
- Genres
- Musical skill requirements
- Substitute skills
A lot to cover, so let’s get started!
What Is a Band?
Bands are formed by combining a group of Blockstars with the right set of complementary musical skills. Each band is associated with a genre (and a sub-genre) of music, and will compete in both that genre’s singles and album charts, as well as the overall singles and album charts.
As soon as Blockstars are added to a band, and the prerequisite musical skills of that band are met, the band becomes actively managed by the player, and the Blockstars (and the band) become entitled to their minimum wage and / or their % cut of earnings for all the actions that they take.
Bands can range from just a single member (for example, just a DJ in the Ambient Dance sub-genre) to a maximum of 8 members (for example, a Classical Orchestra requiring Violin, Viola, Cello, Flute, Oboe, French Horn, Timpani and Cymbal).
Players can only have 1 band in a given top-level genre (e.g. Dance, or Jazz) per wallet at any given time, and players can only manage 5 total bands per wallet at any given time. With the release of record labels, and other features in the future, this number can be increased.
Genres
There are 12 musical genres, each with 8 sub-genres, for a total of 96 unique band types, each with its own musical skill requirements.
Each sub-genre of music is modeled on a specific archetype, for added realism. For example, the Indie Pop sub-genre is modeled on Billie Eilish. The Funk sub-genre is modeled on Sly and the Family Stone. The Modern Jazz sub-genre is modeled on Bud Powell.
Genre Realism
Each and every single one of the 96 sub-genres represented at launch has been extensively researched to ensure that the archetypes and the musical skill requirements are as close to a realistic portrayal of what that music might sound like IRL as possible. And why have we spent so much energy on trying to model realism? Because in the future, when your bands are creating songs, they will actually be producing real music!
AI-Generated Music
We intend to algorithmically generate songs, matching the sub-genre of music (and the archetype) that they belong to, so that you can actually listen to them. While still imperfect, the technology already exists to do this — for example, OpenAI’s Jukebox project is able to generate music “in the style of’ a particular artist. We expect the technology to improve rapidly, to the point where very soon AI will be able to generate music that sounds “good” to the human ear.
Once the musical quality bar is reached (with Jukebox, or any other similar product), Blockstars will be one of the first to adopt this technology, and incorporate real, algorithmically-generated music into the game.
And who knows — maybe the songs will at that point become NFTs that players can trade, and put their strong Blockstar songwriters to work creating hit singles intended for sale to other players… 👀
In the real world, the songwriter with the third most #1 hit singles (25) of all time (after Paul McCartney (32) and John Lennon (26)) is a Swedish songwriter called Max Martin who writes hit singles for other musicians — including megastars like Katy Perry, the Backstreet Boys, Maroon 5, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd and even Celine Dion. In the future, we envision roles for Blockstars that go beyond playing music in bands — extending to other critical jobs that need to get done in the music industry.
Musical Skill Requirements
Each sub-genre has its own musical skill requirements.
Each band has a minimum number of members it *must* have, and a maximum number of members it *can* have. Each band member, as long as it has the prerequisite musical skills, can fulfill multiple musical skill requirements in the band. Furthermore, as long as the musical skill requirements are met and the maximum band member requirement has not been exceeded, a band can have members that don’t have any of the required musical skills, but are instead a part of the band due to their other, non-musical, abilities.
For example, the Dubstep sub-genre of Dance music requires 3 musical skills: DJ, Vocals and Drums. The minimum band member requirement is 2, the maximum is 3. So if one Blockstar has 2 musical skills, for example, DJ and Vocals, then a second Blockstar would only have to fulfill the Drums musical skill requirement, and the band would be complete with just 2 members. Alternatively, a player may choose to use 3 separate Blockstars, each specializing in one of the required musical skills. And finally, a player may choose to fulfill the 3 required musical skills with just 2 Blockstars, or even 1 multi-talented Blockstar, and then add a second and third Blockstar to the band with (for example) high songwriting and promoting skills to crank out hit singles and push them up the charts. So many ways to play!
List of Sub-Genres
Note: While the below list should be considered representative of the final musical skill requirements by sub-genre, it is subject to change between now and the actual launch of the feature.
Substitute Skills
The eagle-eyed among you will by now already be shouting: “but look! there are only 2 bands in which I can use the mellophone, and both have a minimum of 4 members! I don’t want to have to be forced to acquire more Blockstars just so I can use my mellophone player!”
To those who say that, fear not!
In balancing the band musical skill requirements we tried to take into account a wide variety of factors, including the in-game rarity (e.g. there are deliberately a lot more Vocals compared to Mellophones), the balance of required band members across various genres, the real-world musical skills required by genre and sub-genre, the number of musical skills in a given instrument family… and the concept of substitute skills.
What Are Substitute Skills?
Very simply — substitute skills are musical skills from the same instrument family (e.g. Brass) that can (d’uh) substitute for another musical skill from the same instrument family.
For example, let’s take the mighty mellophone.
The mellophone, for the musicologists among you, has a conical bore, just like that of the euphonium and the flugelhorn. The mellophone is also used as the middle-voiced brass instrument in marching bands and drum and bugle corps in place of French horns, and can also be used to play French horn parts in concert bands and orchestras. Soooo… could the euphonium, flugelhorn and French horn potentially serve as substitutes for the mellophone? Might some of these substitute instruments actually work just as well as the mellophone? And conversely, might the mellophone be a good substitute for the euphonium, flugelhorn and French horn?
Let’s hypothesize that the answer to those questions is “yes” — then that suddenly opens up the possibilities for that mellophone quite a bit! There are an additional 3 bands in which the French horn is required, another 3 in which the flugelhorn is required and 2 more in which the euphonium is required — and the minimum number of musical skills required for the Jazz-Funk sub-genre is just 3.
Furthermore, *any* Brass instrument can be used to substitute for another, meaning the mellophone can even be used in the Cool Jazz sub-genre, which requires just a single saxophone.
All Substitute Instruments Are Equal, But Some Substitute Instruments Are More Equal Than Others
Not every musical instrument in the same instrument family is going to be a 1-for-1 swap for another, however. The tuba, for example, while being a Brass instrument, is hardly going to be the perfect substitute for that saxophone in the Cool Jazz sub-genre — so even if you *can* use it as a substitute, it may not perform as well (hint: it won’t perform as well).
We will not be releasing any additional details on which instruments are 1-for-1 swaps, which are “close-enough” swaps and which ones are poor substitutes — that will be something players will need to figure out through gameplay! We’ve revealed enough as it is in this blog post, and if you have read this all the way through, you already have an edge…
Instrument Families
Even if a substitute musical skill suffers a penalty, remember that the overall musical skill of the Blockstar is going to have a huge influence on the quality of the music that the band creates. For example, a tuba substitute for a saxophone at musical skill level 90 will probably perform better than a saxophone musical skill at level 10!
The only musical skills that cannot be substituted for others, or by others, are Vocals and DJ — but since they are 2 of the most common skills, and 2 of the most commonly-required skills, players should have no trouble finding sub-genres and bands in need of their Blockstars with those skills!
That is a lot of alpha to drop in a single blog post! Phew! We have more info on Chemistry and Moods still to come as it relates to bands, but they’ll have to wait for a future post — this is too much information as it is!
How will this change your gameplay strategy? Are there any musical skills you value more now? Less now? Any instrument families that suddenly got a lot more interesting? Any genres or sub-genres that deserve more attention? We’re all ears!
Join us!
This is just a teaser of what we are up to! If you are intrigued by Blockstars, be sure to read much, much more about the game design, tokenomics and development roadmap in our whitepaper, come and chat with other community members in our Discord and follow us on Twitter. If you want to join the team, check out our job openings here. We will also be posting news about upcoming features, roadmap progress & important events regularly right here, on our blog.
Niko Vuori | @nikothefinn | Founder & CEO | Blockstars
