How Significant was the Muse Drop?

On 9/8/22 I hosted a Twitter Spaces to speak about the historic Muse Drop.? I titled the space:?How Significant Was the Muse Drop??One team member from the Music NFT Marketplace Serenade saw that I was planning this and volunteered to join.?The conversation became an engaging live interview with some excellent audience questions.?Here I’ve compiled some of the key takeaways. Serenade Community Manager Josh Dalton joined us to fill in the blanks.

At 1am CET on the September 26th, the renowned rock band Muse released an album on?Serenade?as a "Digital Pressing" NFT release. They set a reasonable price and a thousand copies. For a band like Muse that was not a windfall; it was a move. The album shot to #1 on the UK Charts, the first Music NFT album to do so. Let's take a moment to reflect. How big was this for the music industry and for normalization of Web3 Music?

The Music NFT Marketplace Serenade was previously associated with collectibles in addition to music, including physical collectibles. They were looking to shift this more toward music itself.?They noticed a ‘real problem,’ that artists and their teams were having “choice paralysis” in terms of picking where to launch their Web3 projects.?Serenade introduced the concept of a “Digital Pressing,” a term that they developed to codify the meaning of an official NFT Launch.?A Digital Pressing is audio with artwork, and artists can offer rewards on Serenade, who hold a custodial wallet.?This makes it possible for anyone to buy Music NFTs, even without a crypto wallet filled with some cryptocurrency.

Muse Lead Singer/Guitarist Matt Bellamy was not new to Web3, and had even done a partnership with the formative NFT project CryptoKitties as far back as 2020. However, this project was not directed to the Web3 community- it was directed at their wider community of music fans.

The standard of Digital Pressing for Music NFTs was accepted by official music chart organizations in UK and Australia – hence Muse’s “Will of the People” Album was the first chart eligible NFT.?Serenade is now looking to expand the standard to other governing industry bodies.?The NFT sales are calculated amongst other chart sales, such as streams and physical sales, and is calculated into sales as an equivalent to album sales:

However, Josh Dalton concedes that users are expected to make use of Web2 tools to actually listen to music in the foreseeable future, and he’s ‘not sure if users will really change their behavior’ on this.?One of the most fascinating comments from Josh was on the notion of utility.?While there is much debate in the Music NFT space on the importance of utility and what should be included, if anything, with Music NFT drops, Josh noted that ‘artists are not being financially rewarded for just adding content.’?The Music NFT therefore is not meant to be a ‘token [which is to be] a key in perpetuity.’

Perhaps what is most notable about the Muse drop is for what it did not have.?No fancy movies, metaverse experiences, or promises to go backstage.?It was primarily just the music, with the capacity to download high quality audio files.?It sold out in about half an hour.

The drop was specifically not just for superfans, and not for the crypto-rich (although they could have easily profited more from this strategy.)?They set a reasonable price of about twenty dollars for the entire album, and put out a thousand copies.?Such modesty is revolutionary in the NFT space when it comes from a group of this stature, as revolutionary as their calls to topple the system in “Will of the People.”

There are some limits imposed on the NFT offering for chart accreditation.?For example, the NFT cannot bundle tickets into a Digital Pressing and still be considered.?Josh also noted that charting is only relevant to the ‘top one percent’ of artist who generally have significant label backing.?Still this move by Muse and Serenade signals a seismic shift in the music industry’s adoption of Web3 and deserves more than a passing glance.?

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