Jesse Walden
Originally published on Twitter on November 8, 2021
Music NFTs are where digital art was in 2020, and they’re about to redefine the value and 100x the business model of the medium forever.
NFTs make sense for artists
Music is the most criminally undervalued and under-monetized media type relative to its consumption. I am increasingly convinced that 1-of-1 song NFTs are the wedge that will catalyze a dramatic shift in how artists make money and fans value music.
NFTs thrive on reflexive markets. Imagine the Bloomberg headline on how much they paid for the Kanye song as an NFT (think Beeple). That headline only begets more artist and developer interest → market development → more supply → demand (?) → higher prices (?)
Song NFTs are the next generation of art collectables
Song NFTs are likely to succeed at reframing music as collectible art objects. Contrast that with songs as free commodities on Spotify, and it becomes clear. Song NFTs flip song copyright as the canonical representation—the one you want to own because it has more market value.
And collecting 1-of-1 song NFTs isn’t a game only elite collectors can play. An artist with even 100 true fans can sell songs to those 100 fans collectively via Koop or PartyBid. With a burgeoning market for 1-of-1 song NFTs, the mental models are laid to expand the wedge to adjacent opportunities, such as: vinyl, merchandise, fan club memberships, and other avenues for artist revenue.
All of this can be direct-to-fan artist monetization, which is what I set out to build with Cool Managers back in the day. Now we have the tools to do it, where artist attribution and monetization can happen independent of any label or single platform.
Want to talk about the future of music NFTs? Get in touch, I’d love to hear from you.
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