The market for NFTs (non-fungible tokens) is vast. Its value is estimated to be between $45 and $50 billion, and its popularity has skyrocketed in recent years. You may be wondering, what exactly is an NFT?
NFTs can be anything digital, like digital arts, music, jpegs, gifs or your brain being downloaded and turned into an AI), but the current buzz is focused on using the technology to sell digital art.
More artists want to sell their work using NFTs, but it can be a complicated world to navigate.
If you are a music artist, NFTs can be a brilliant way to sell your music. In the future I believe NFTs will take over streaming platforms. NFTs contain several immutable pieces of information, including the date of creation, the number of editions, and the author’s wallet. The metadata are the properties of the NFTs: the author’s name, the title of the work, the link to the content. This metadata could be mutable or not.
NFTs have the potential to restore music’s collectability. NFTs can be issued by artists and record labels for each copy of an album. Each NFT allows users to listen to the album it represents as many times as they want. It may also include lyrics, images, and other media that are not available on subscription or advertising-supported platforms and add value to the album’s ownership.
If a user decides they no longer like a particular band, they can resell its albums, granting the new owner the right to stream each album. They may even find that if they buy a band’s first album before it becomes popular, they can sell it for a profit.
Songs and albums can also be linked to the artists’ concerts, meet-and-greets, and fan clubs, and may even grant the owner exclusive rights to the song. This means that a music NFT can give fans a sense of social status as well as exclusive access to their favourite performers.
The advantages of NFTs can extend far beyond the songs themselves, bringing fan loyalty to a whole new level.
Artists are making millions by selling their music as NFTs. Tory Lanez surprised himself and everyone else by selling his NFT album. E-NFT, a new streaming platform, released one million copies of the album. But no one expected them to sell out in 57 seconds. Tory Lanez has made over $400,000 in initial gross sales and resales through NFTs. More than 300 fans collected the tokens, each of whom purchased artwork paired with one of three tracks.
Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park sold a digital piece of art for $30,000 and explained on Twitter, “Even if I upload the full version of the contained song to DSPs worldwide (which I can still do), I would never get even close to $10k, after fees by DSPs, label, marketing, and so on.”
Nowadays, songwriters can record and release albums without ever signing with a label. NFTs merely facilitate this. In any case, a lifetime of work can apparently be completed in 57 seconds! Thanks to NFT.
Three Major Music NFT Platforms
Culture Beyond the Mainstream 