Most people heard noise. Steve Aoki heard music.
It was just, in his words, “intentionally abrasive” music.
What’s the difference between noise and intentionally abrasive? This was back in the 1990s, when Steve Aoki was a kid growing up in the California punk and hardcore music scene. Bands were playing loud, cacophonous stuff. His parents called it “devil’s music.” But Aoki was intrigued, because although this music turned most people off, it also drew a community together. It wasn’t just garbage; it was a barrier to entry, and an appealing puzzle. “It didn’t fit with the world, and that was what spoke to me,” Aoki says. “You have to climb through the noise to find the gem.”
In one way or another, that mindset has guided Aoki through a singular career. He is ever curious about the opportunity that others are overlooking, because it might seem too small or weird or noisy. Then, he says, he “brings that noise out from the corner and into the masses, and builds a community around it.”
He is, for example, among the world’s most famous DJs—the rare artist to transcend the club scene and achieve mainstream awareness. But he’s also a savvy entrepreneur who absorbed brand-building lessons from his father, the founder of the successful restaurant chain Benihana. Aoki is a celebrated music producer, creator of the record label Dim Mak, as well as a clothing line called Dim Mak Collection that has partnered with the likes of Adult Swim and DC Comics—and he was recently named the “chief music officer” of Orangetheory Fitness (which means he sets the tone for the company’s workout classes worldwide).
Lately, he has also thrown himself headfirst into the world of Web3, and has become one of its most vocal, prominent, and successful advocates. Because these days, if you want to talk about the future of business and technology, there is no better synopsis of Web3 than “you have to climb through the noise to find the gem.”
Surely you’ve heard of Web3—but it is so new, and often so abstract, that the average entrepreneur may puzzle over how (or if) it’s actually going to be useful. So let’s back up to explain.
The current internet is known as “Web2,”, you can buy a weapon for your character in the game, but you only “own” that weapon inside the game’s universe. It cannot be moved somewhere else, and Epic, the maker of , could make it disappear at any time. Web3 promises something different: A universe where everyone who surfs the web can own their digital assets, where individuals (and companies) can easily connect and exchange things with each other without intermediaries, and where every transaction is trackable.
