How Are NFTs Changing the Music Industry? Also, What the Hell Is an NFT?

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Try­ing to under­stand cryp­tocur­ren­cy and non-fun­gi­ble tokens (NFTs) can be annoy­ing AF, but the amount of cash being made and spent in the cryp­to space can’t be ignored. Artists and musi­cians have been inde­pen­dent­ly mak­ing mil­lions of dol­lars by sell­ing dig­i­tal ver­sions of their art, music, video clips, pho­tos and pret­ty much any oth­er kind of dig­i­tal media they can think to throw up on the blockchain.

In Feb­ru­ary, DJ and music pro­duc­er 3LAU made $11.6 mil­lion sell­ing music NFTs in only 24 hours. Just a few days lat­er, Cana­di­an musi­cian Grimes made $5.8 mil­lion in 20 min­utes. DJ Steve Aoki made $4.2 mil­lion in the first week of March, while Post Mal­one auc­tioned off an NFT to play beer bong against him. Those types of pay­days might’ve nor­mal­ly tak­en the artists years to col­lect, but NFTs have cre­at­ed a new mod­el for artists to reach con­sumers by avoid­ing mid­dle­men in distribution. 

In the music world, an NFT could be defined as a rare col­lectible that is stored on a dig­i­tal ledger. Artists and musi­cians can cre­ate NFTs them­selves to auc­tion off var­i­ous forms of dig­i­tal media to their fans who pay using cryp­tocur­ren­cies like Bit­coin, Ethereum and oth­ers. They could add mul­ti­ple buy­ers to the NFT or make it so there is only one own­er. The artist can also receive roy­al­ties every time a buy­er of that dig­i­tal copy sells it to some­body else. This puts a lot of pow­er back in the hands of artists who now have anoth­er way to mon­e­tize their art or oth­er forms of dig­i­tal merchandise.

NFTs could have a huge effect on stream­ing plat­forms that sim­ply don’t earn artists enough. We could see an era when artists are able to do busi­ness direct­ly with music retail­ers and sell their NFTs like they used to with self-pro­duced CDs. Keite Young from Med­i­cine Man Revival says this is just the start of cryp­tocur­ren­cy and the con­cept of blockchain tech­nol­o­gy being uti­lized in the cre­ative space.

Young says he plans to release an NFT in the next 90 days, in a series called End of the Tunnel. 

“It’s a per­for­mance series that is curat­ed into an instal­la­tion,” Young says. “It hap­pens at dif­fer­ent venues and it’s not open to the public.” 

Fans will be able to pur­chase a dig­i­tal copy of the instal­la­tion as an NFT. (The dig­i­tal works sold as NFTs can still be copied and shared them­selves, but own­er­ship of a token is unique. Think of it as some­thing like a copy of a pop­u­lar book auto­graphed by the author; there are lots of copies of the book and more can eas­i­ly be made, but the NFT ver­sion is one of kind.)

Young says his com­pa­ny Cul­ture Fac­to­ry has been work­ing to help oth­ers build their own NFT plat­forms. Young says Cul­ture Fac­to­ry wants to be “the concierge” to the web 3.0 expe­ri­ence. He says he has the time, skillset and knowl­edge to engage the NFT com­mu­ni­ty and devel­op prod­uct-to-mar­ket strate­gies con­sis­tent with the val­ues of the community. 

“NFTs will give artists anoth­er out­let to cre­ate exclu­sive con­tent for fans in a more artis­tic fash­ion. In the future we’ll see the val­ue of songs appre­ci­ate, like Basquiat paint­ings.” – Dal­las rap­per Rakim-Al Jabbaar

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John Patil­lo, CEO of South­west Dig­i­tal, a Hous­ton-based music dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny, says they will add an NFT com­po­nent onto their plat­form. He rais­es the point that artists such as Snoop Dogg and Post Mal­one sell 6 to 7 fig­ures in dig­i­tal assets and believes that artists in the South­ern hip-hop mar­ket can see sim­i­lar finan­cial success.

“We are treat­ing our dis­tri­b­u­tion lay­out almost like a Wal­mart or Ama­zon in a dig­i­tal space,” Patil­lo says. “For exam­ple, we have NFTs com­ing from Nipsey Hus­sle, DJ Screw and NFTs from some of the icon­ic guys here in the South. And not only are we going to let them live on our NFT plat­form or col­lectible store­front but we also are going to cre­ate these NFT col­lectible galleries.” 

This will be a phys­i­cal place where fans could go see the dig­i­tal assets, lead­ing up to the final count­down of the auc­tion. Patil­lo says his com­pa­ny edu­cates artists on how they can nav­i­gate this new dig­i­tal space of cryp­to cur­ren­cy, NFTs and blockchain technology.

Every artist isn’t going to make $5 mil­lion in 20 min­utes, but inde­pen­dent artists could find cre­ative ways to use NFTs to con­nect more direct­ly with fans and dri­ve their careers for­ward. All it takes is one super-fan to com­plete­ly change an artist’s sit­u­a­tion. If some­body feels like dig­i­tal own­er­ship of your next project or back­stage expe­ri­ence is worth 20 to 50 thou­sand dol­lars, then let them buy it. Instead of just post­ing it on YouTube or Spo­ti­fy for a per­cent­age of what the artist might think their work is worth, they could see a size­able pay­day as peo­ple find greater val­ue in dig­i­tal assets. 

As the NFT wave gains momen­tum, we will see more cre­ative ways artists for artists to cap­i­tal­ize on NFTs.

Dal­las rap­per Rakim-Al Jab­baar says NFTs will change the rap game for­ev­er and he is work­ing on a spe­cial NFT release with his upcom­ing album.

“NFTs will give artists anoth­er out­let to cre­ate exclu­sive con­tent for fans in a more artis­tic fash­ion,” Al-Jab­baar says. “In the future we’ll see the val­ue of songs appre­ci­ate, like Basquiat paintings.” 



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