NFT's Are Turning The Music Industry On Its Head. But What The Fuck Are NFT's?

One37PM- An NFT by electronic musician Jacques Greene recently sold on Foundation for 13ETH — over $23,000 US. 

The audio-visual clip teases out a few seconds of an unreleased song of his called 'Promise’.

But this purchase is for more than just the artwork itself. As Jacques writes, “this NFT represents not only a 1of1 AV but the publishing rights to the song upon its release, in perpetuity.”

But because this is one more early example that nudges us ever closer to the following hypothesis: That we are at the beginning of a massive overhaul of this thing we’ve collectively decided to call the “music industry”. And that every facet of said industry will feel the aftershocks of this tectonic shift.

I recently wrote a beginner’s guide to NFTs and spoke of how they are about to change pretty much everything. This article both zooms out of NFTs and into the wider edges of what we can call the web3 revolution, and it zooms in on where these changes meet music. 

To create a succinct story around what this future of music will look like would be a fool’s errand. We are just beginning to touch these new tools for the first time. It’s like we’re in the Early Stone Age, and we just accidentally made the first hammers ever. We’ve just picked them up, and we’re feeling their weight; we’re hitting them against things and seeing if something goes boom. 

So instead of speculating on exactly where this all goes, this article walks through five examples of people, projects, and platforms that are giving these brand new hammers a good smacking. 

This is in no way an exhaustive list. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of experiments underway.

For starters, it's important to know that NFT's have the record labels and dinosaur music industry execs shook. 

And for good reason. 

Nate covered NFT's a couple weeks ago in regards to how they're changing the game in virtually everything, especially sports memorabilia. Hubbs was all over this way back in early February when he tipped everybody off that there was big money to be made in this thing on the NBA's Top Shots NFTs. 

This was all so over my head I felt really old and out of the loop. 

What the fuck does this mean exactly?

CoinDesk - Non-fungible tokens (NFT) are digital assets that represent a wide range of unique tangible and intangible items, from collectible sports cards to virtual real estate and even digital sneakers.

One of the main benefits of owning a digital collectible versus a physical collectible like a Pokemon card or rare minted coin is that each NFT contains distinguishing information that makes it both distinct from any other NFT and easily verifiable. This makes the creation and circulation of fake collectibles pointless because each item can be traced back to the original issuer.

So instead of an actual baseball card, I can have an image of a baseball card? 

"But it's on the blockchain so it's guaranteed authentic and can be traced to the original owner for verification purposes"

Ok so how am I supposed to look at it?

"On your phone, or on the web3"

Wait, what the fuck is web3?

web3. js is a collection of libraries that allow you to interact with a local or remote ethereum node using HTTP, IPC or WebSocket. The following documentation will guide you through installing and running web3. js as well as providing an API reference documentation with examples.

Yah. That's way above my pay grade. 

The NFT craze has extended from art, to sports collectibles, to highlights, to you name it. And although some of those might not make the most sense, its introduction to the music realm has made a ton. And made the bands and artists facilitating it buku bucks.

Last week, Kings of Leon became the first band to release a new album as an NFT reportedly grossing them more than $2 million in sales, with $600,000 of that going to Crew Nation (a relief fund set up to help touring industry vets out of work due to Covid). 

Right before Kings of Leon dropped When You See Yourself   Tory Lanez got in on the action by released two off his new album Playboy in advance of the album release. He partnered with a blockchain company called "Bondly" and created 450 song NFTs, which included meet and greet zooms with Tory. The NFTs sold out in two minutes and netted the artist $500,000.

Even before all that, Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda was way out in front of this whole thing. 

He dropped a new single, "Happy Endings" as an NFT where he acutioned off 10 tokens that included a song clip set to artwork done by Cain Caser. It's unclear how much Shinoda made off the release but the #1 token NFT went for almost 10 grand reportedly.

The thing that really confuses me on all of this is what is so enticing about owning a snippet of a song set to animated art? It's basically a tiktok. I know it's limited and "rare" but isn't the point of music to listen to it? It's sonic, not visual. At least I thought.

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Then last week friend of the program 3lau re-released his entire 2018 album Ultraviolet as an NFT package which included meet and greets, bonus songs, a custom song, and special edition vinyls. He put 33 NFTs up for auction which landed him $12 Million in 24 hours. 

I had an interview set up with Justin (3lau) in hopes he could break down this entire NFT thing for us commoners in English but his publicist canceled it because he's too busy. Hopefully, we get to soon because nobody's been at the forefront of crypto and the NFT movement like he has.

Elon's baby momma Grimes also got in on the action,  

RS- Within minutes of her auction opening, the price on one piece of audiovisual artwork called “Death of the Old” — containing a demo of unreleased song “Anhedonia” — surpassed a value of $100,000. According to Insider, the whole collection earned close to six million dollars in 20 minutes — and “Death of the Old” finally sold for around $400,000 by the auction’s end.

Now you've got Shawn Mendes selling "wearable accessories" for 3d avatars people create of themselves through a company called "Genies". Not joking. Mendes announced he'd be donating all proceeds to his charity and is said to have raised more than a million dollars so far.

The Genies representative says the drop announcement lead to the “highest amount of traffic OpenSea [the largest NFT marketplace] has ever experienced,” adding that transactions are already happening on the secondary market “where people are selling the Genie Moments/digital goods for $6-8k when they bought for hundreds of dollars.”

Steve Aoki joined in the fun (of course he did) by commissioning 11 original pieces from a "digital artist" named Antoni Tudisco. He sold these NFTs anywhere from $2,000 - $889,000. He made of $4.2 Million off these.

It doesn't take a genius to see where this is all going. 

First the internet allowed artists the freedom to not depend on music labels to get their music heard. As a result, the music industry pivoted and strangled and monopolized the streaming platforms and ways music could be heard through acquisitions, lawsuits, and royalty agreements. 

This NFT movement isn't going to be so easy for them to get their tentacles around. 

“DAO” stands for a Decentralized Autonomous Organization

There is really nothing stopping an individual and/or artist (of any kind, music, painting, drawing, photography, etc) from creating a "Non-fungible token" and selling it direct to their super fans who will gladly pay wild amounts. If there's a demand for it, there will be a market. (Adam Smith 101)

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So how are we, the average music fan and consumer supposed to listen to this stuff in the future? There's a company called Audius who has been pioneering a decentralized streaming platform for a few years already.

What this means is that the actual content uploaded to the site doesn’t exist on servers that are owned and operated by Audius itself. Instead, distributed “operators” are incentivized to run nodes that store the content and metadata on the platform. This allows for a whole lot of fun stuff, which we’ll get into shortly. 

The beauty of Audius is that, while all this is running under the hood, the average user has no idea. Using Audius feels like using any other streaming platform you’re accustomed to. You just…play music. Make playlists. Do the things. 

Because of its ability to abstract away all of the friction that usually comes along with a lot of early crypto tech, Audius has seen a huge wave of early adoption — with over 2.6 million monthly active users. Every user on Audius has a crypto wallet, and most don’t know it yet.

But the power of this decentralized library of content and code is immense. First, the content transcends the platforms. Much like the “platformless media'' of NFTs, this means that the music and its streaming data are not beholden to the continued existence of Audius itself. If the website disappears tomorrow, the content is still there so long as the nodes stay online. This content is also completely open and permissionless, meaning anyone can build anything that “hooks in” to it.

Does that mean this shit makes ANY sense whatsoever? Nope. Not one iota. And it doesn't have to. 

What's crazy is how quickly some corporations are beginning to mobilize in order to capitalize on this. 

Rolling Stone - Quavo, Lil Baby, 2 Chainz, and Jack Harlow collaborated with Bleacher Report on an NFT collection on OpenSea. (Kings of Leon and Mendes also used OpenSea for their NFT drops.) “The 3D digital models will feature four custom-designed basketballs that mix music, culture and sport with innovation,” a representative explained to Rolling Stone via email on Friday, March 5th. In this case, there were two tiers: gold and silver. Each artist got their own silver-edition NFT, of which 150 were minted. Those were sold for a flat price of .4 ETH, which is worth about $715 USD at press time. The artists also each got their own gold-edition NFTs, presented as “10 of 10” and put up for auction.

When Bleacher Report‘s gold auction closed, those tokens had collectively sold for more than $591k. Together, gold and silver tokens generated around $903,000 over the weekend. As of press time, 2 Chainz had the highest-priced sale with his gold “#1 of 10” going for 38 ETH ($68,030 USD). A representative from Bleacher Report points out that crypto users traded 503.15 ETH (more than $900,000) in the All Star Weekend collection’s first 24 hours.

If Bleacher Report is capable of doing this with artists that have for sure never even heard of Bleacher Report, then hats off to them. But even more amazing is the potential that Barstool has to do something like this with its network and fanbase. 

I guess it's time to learn about this shit and link with Nate and Hubbs to spearhead the BSNFT division.

p.s. - Now I think I know how our parents felt when MP3s became a thing