Music To My Ears, More Like NFTs To My Ears
Since learning about NFTs, I have been excited about the use-case for musicians and the music industry. Music NFTs could provide a significant opportunity for artists and fans to shake up the music industry, give the power to artists and fans, cut out middle players like labels, distributors and agents, and reduce the control that huge power players like Spotify and Apple Music currently have. The NFT space, with all its optimism, hopes to give artists and musicians a new empowered sense of ownership and hope of new revenue streams. So, why isn’t this happening at scale (yet)?
The top selling NFT collection classified as Music, at over 2k ETH Volume on Opensea, is EulerBeats Genesis, a project combining generative art and music. A quick search on Opensea for top selling projects of all-time shows that EulerBeats doesn’t even crack the top 500 projects. This is strange to me given the tremendous size of the opportunity.
While Opensea is a great barometer for getting a read on the NFT space as a whole, it isn’t the only game in town, particularly for music. However, it doesn’t appear that platforms that focus on the NFT music use-case are gaining the same traction that collections that focus on gaming and/or Metaverse integration are getting (as an example). There’s no doubt the Web3 space/NFT space is still in its infancy, and there are some really exciting music concepts and platforms out there.
For example, Yellowheart (https://yh.io/) is a platform that focuses on the ticketing use-case, which is logical considering its funding by LiveNation. NFT’s representing tickets to events and fan perks/benefits is a straightforward and exciting utility for live music fans. Yellowheart also sells digital albums and merch that are linked to NFT ownership. Royal (https://royal.io/) and Decent (https://beta.decent.xyz/) allow artists to sell future streaming royalties in exchange for an NFT. This is a very cool business use-case for music and blockchain. If you want to dive a bit deeper, check out the streaming rights contract between 3Lau and Token holders of the NFT, sold on the Royal platform. 3Lau Streaming Rights.pdf Sound (https://www.sound.xyz/) is creating a community around fans and artists in a very innovative way. Not to mention Snoop Dogg, on the forefront of integrating NFT’s and music, selling his new Death Row album with a lot of success.
Do you think it’s because the NFT space at its current form constitutes buyers that are mostly focused on speculating and flipping? I can attest that this describes most of my past buying behavior. Since I didn’t see music NFTs catching on at the time of tracking the market, I wasn’t keen to buy into early music NFT mints at the time.
It would be fascinating to understand what percentage of the market buys with the intention to flip. It would probably be shockingly high. What percentage of buyers care about “floor price,” a toxic metric creating unnecessary speculation? Just check any Discord, and you’ll see nervous buyers complaining about how the floor price fell by .000001 ETH.
Maybe because we are in the very early days of this space, that the people consistently interacting with Web3 tend to be a select group of early adopters, and music NFTs simply don’t resonate with them. In any case, I believe that music and Web3, in any form, will start to gain more traction, as a more diverse demographic becomes more comfortable engaging in this space.
Are music NFTs going to gain more traction in the market? What would help the music use-case gain more attention and visibility? Comment below!
