Thoughts On NFTs and the Music Industry
NFT's are certainly making a splash these days in the music business. Grimes, Kings Of Leon, Shawn Mendes have all minted music-related NFT's and made headlines of The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and so on. I will assume you know what NFTs and minting is for this, but if you don't you should read Justin Cone's guide here: https://justincone.com/posts/nft-skeptics-guide/
The promise is a big one: cut out the middlemen and sell your digital art directly to your fans. While this seems like a natural development in the more conventional art world (digital paintings, photography, 3D) to prove authenticity and ownership of digital artwork, the jump to the music industry comes off as a little odd. Didn't we just use decades of criticizing copyright and arguing for the freedom to sample and interpret music? Aren't we trying to teach people to pay for music streaming subscriptions still?
But no.
Instead, now we're trying to make artificial scarcity of our digital music, to make sure that it is collectible, tradeable, and speculative. Honestly, it feels like an easy cash grab from artists that already have massive followings. And good on them, I have no problem with musicians earning a lot of money, we just shouldn't kid ourselves that this is democratizing anything. On the contrary, the barrier to success is going to be much harder.
And then back to the promise: cut out the middlemen and sell your digital art directly to your fans. Who is it that buys the digital tokens being minted by known bands? You guessed it! Not fans, but crypto speculators and investors. Portugal The Man said to Rolling Stone recently that "cryptocurrency is the new rock & roll" - it may be right that crypto is punk rock in its anarchistic nature, but the hype of music NFT's, the sellers, and the money involved seems very non-rock to me.
Sources:
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/why-do-nfts-matter-for-music/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/04/kings-of-leon-to-release-new-album-as-a-non-fungible-token
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/portugal-the-man-cryptocurrency-ptm-coin-1129477/
Really? Nobody ion the HIVE community reacted to your post, while you HIT the NAIL! NFT's is just another way to capitalise on whatever is NFTed. And this money is not coming from fans, or even given because the Art is so good, but all about how much it'll be valued by the market, pure speculators play indeed and nothing to do with the art itself. The copyright thingy is yet another topic that is I think controversial. Some artists may have double standards even: ie like to re-use material of others, but don't like others to re-use theirs. Recently I saw some YT video from a bunch of people who recorded all melodies through some algorithm they've created. They claim: because all melodies are recorded now, no melody can be claimed to be invented by some artist.
Right? It's a game for the 1% to get even richer. I certainly haven't heard any stories about talented new artists making money - but celebrities selling tweets for a fortune. Elon Musk could draw something up in MS Paint and sell it for a million in the same day. The hype right now seems to be reaching a high point though.
In the traditional art space (physical art) same counts. Karel Appel, a Dutch painter said so many times in interviews how amazed he was about the value people paid for his work, while he often spend very little time in painting his next painting. He did this in a factory beld style creating multiple paintings in a day and selling them almost immediately.
Literally the day after me making the Elon Musk comment, he auctioned that trance tweet and highest bid is now 1M$+
Democratising the music business they say? 😬
There is no such thing as democratising the music industry. This industry is very distributed by nature while the music fan wants convenience and simplicity. For that reason we have a few large music channels and services while the rest is not getting anywhere until they found some angle to attract the mass. The musician market can be seen as a gigantic pyramid of musicians in which the small top of the pyramid gives an artist enough money to live from, while the rest earn too little. To move up to this top, one needs to apply all sort of marketing and business tactics, establish and maintain networks and many more activities any business executes every single day. I can't see how these large channels (of which we will not have many in each kind of service) will ever become small and distributed, since this is not what the music fan is looking for. The music fan sticks to a few channels, driving musicians to publish their work in these channels, driving these channels to grow until they are either popular or not grow and eventually stop existing. I'm in the process of developing a concept where favouritism of any kind (paid or unpaid) is not and cannot be applied by any intermit party between musician and fan. I think I have the solution but didn't test the concept yet on flaws.
BTW, a few days ago, Aphex Twin sold an NFT for more then 100k$. Cool for him. Love his music. But again... NFTs are for the brands to earn a shitload of money, while the unknown artists have difficulties to get noticed. But that is how we build the world last century. Known brands, companies and people can monetise much easier than unknown brands, companies and people.
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