When Do Music NFTs Begin to Matter?

I heard the entirety of Web3 gasp from my basement studio when they read that headline. Those of us that work and invest in web3, NFTs, and crypto are confident that music NFTs already matter! We’re confident that this technology is here to stay and that it will ultimately underline everything we all do day-to-day. Visual artists and illustrators have already seen their space hit scale with auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie's both launching tons of web3 projects and their own curated drops. Music NFTs, on the other hand, are just starting to bubble and they haven’t seen quite the same meteoric rise.

Platforms like Let The Music Pay (d/b/a RCRDSHP) , Royal.io , Arpeggi Labs, and soundxyz , all have a unique take on what a Music NFT might look like in the future. While RCRDSHP allows creators to mint their songs to a digital collectible along with videos, stems, and unique artwork, Royal sells fractionalized shares of songs that already exist on streaming platforms like Spotify and 苹果 Music with proven income that is then allocated to the collector via a NFT (non-fungible token.) Arpeggi makes the case that the creators of samples should be compensated for their work, rather than the royalty free sample bank system that currently exists. In every use-case, the respective platforms are solving inherent problems that exist in the traditional release strategy and music business model, however, it’s still hard to say when any of them will hit scale and really become adopted on a meaningful global scale.Similar to the visual art space really hitting a tipping point when bigger brands came in AND came from within (Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, the list goes on…), I see a similar path as the yellow brick road for music.

One of the ways I anticipate artists will accelerate this “music NFT” moment is by meeting their fans where they live and showing them a path to becoming collectors. Artists can’t expect fans to come into web3 and become collectors without any sort of context, value proposition, and education. With my artist group Disco Fries, we have aimed to start bridging the gap between traditional fans or “web2 users” and the web3 collectors, landing at web2.5. Web2.5 is the cross-section between where our fans currently live on Spotify, Instagram, and traditional means of discovery, and Web3. How do we do this? We make it easy for them to get involved. We collaborate with them on everything from songs to the concept of our album artwork and they have a say in all of these standard day-to-day decisions via ownership of certain digital collectibles. I’ll leave the finer detail of all of this for another article, noting the point that this will rest on the artists shoulders to do. It is difficult for the artist and tiem consuming. With the burden of “wearing all of the hats” in the creator economy, I find this will likely be the smallest data point in music NFTs having their break-out moment.

Brands from within breaking is crucial for the culture. Artists like Daniel Allan and Spottie WiFi have both made their respective marks in music NFTs and begun to crossover into greater music landscape. Spottie most notably sold out his music NFT project in under one minute for $190K and had a co-sign from Snoop Dog, while Daniel Allan recently was featured in Billboard and is making waves as a “breakout act”. The more of these stories we hear about new artists getting notable press in a traditional sense, the closer we are to mass adoption. Artists can make quick decisions and move fast, however, getting artists on-boarded into the space still remains a bit of a hurdle. Most artists say “I just figured out how to TikTok … now I have to do this?!”. That said, I think this also will be a small percentage of what contributes to the space hitting its tipping point.

So what will it take? In my opinion (which is frankly very unpopular for many web3 purists) is that it will take Apple Music, Spotify, Beatport and others integrating Music NFTs into their infrastructure. While Spotify recently added Shopify integration, it is still somewhat limiting for an artist to dive deeper with their super-fans. Unless a super-fan takes steps to purchase a piece of merch, the analytics on who that person is, what makes them tick, and what their interests are specific to that artist, are all relatively limited to social demographics visible in the Spotify for Artists backend. With Music NFTs, artists would be able to issue these directly to the people listening to them, stay in touch, and reward their most loyal fans. If you clicked on “The Weeknd” 1,000 times over the last 60 days, it would be fantastic if The Weeknd could reward you for that with a Music NFT that has utility for access to his next virtual concert or in-real-life (IRL) event. Are you a collector of Disco Fries Music NFTs and subscribe to Apple Music? Awesome, you’ll be making a track with them next week via Discord, and your Apple account will connect with Instagram to allow you to flex your participation and exclusively use the song in stories & reels before anyone else.

The opportunities are endless for collaboration, activation, and mass adoption once larger digital service provider’s (DSPs) are on board, but it will take a push from the culture of web3 and credible artists in the space to make those entities pay attention, find value in all of it and ultimately add this functionality. I’m hopeful and very optimistic for the future of music and more excited than ever to help craft it.