We’ve all seen our favorite artist dropping an occasional NFT, or buying the latest, in-trend NFT for millions of dollars. However, The era of the blockchain might be already replacing the music industry as we know it.
In the era of streaming, most musicians are finding it extremely difficult to make a living. Artists get paid fractions of a penny per stream, and many are having difficulty finding large audiences at all. According to data from 2019 and 2020, the top 1% of artists receive 90% of all streams. Even a somewhat successful artist like Daniel Allan, whose songs earned millions of plays in 2020, only made a few hundred dollars a month from streaming, forcing him to work odd jobs such as mixing and mastering other artists’ music to make ends meet.
However, in the last months of 2021, Allan has shifted to a new paradigm that gives him both financial and creative freedom: NFTs. While the epidemic kept Allan mostly at home and prevented him from performing live, he has been selling NFTs of digital copies of his electronic pop tunes.
So, are NFT’s the way to go for a struggling artist?
Hundreds of musicians have joined Allan in this adventure. On Catalog, 140 artists have together sold over 350 records worth over $1 million. Songcamp is a digital collective where dozens of musicians from all over the world form teams to create music and multimedia works. Overall, these NFT-based musicians want to push technological frontiers and carve out a life outside of the record label structure, which has controlled the music industry for decades.
Some artists are making record-breaking amounts of money from these wealthy fans: Chicago rapper Ibn Inglor, for example, raised $92,000 by selling NFTs for various options for fans, including royalties from his future album.
Steve Aoki was the latest to reveal his own journey with Non-fungible Tokens. In a recent Q&A at the Gala Music Event, Aoki revealed that he has made more money from NFT’s, than from 10 years of music advances. He believes that NFTs will completely change the music industry, which currently pays artists a pittance in royalties. He believes that one of the reasons NFTs are so interesting is their reliance on the communities that sprout up to support them. That’s fantastic news for Aoki because many musicians have devoted fans.
Aoki is both a maker and a collector. He not only owns a number of Non-fungible Tokens from Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) but he’s also worked on an NFT marketplace in Solana. He’s currently establishing Aokiverse, an NFT-based membership club that will “coexist with the real world.”
Music NFTs are either a result of a strong crypto market or a transformational force poised to upend the music industry, only time will tell. While optimists talk of a new “creative economy” and artistic sovereignty, skeptics worry about the value and whether the existing model of music NFTs can grow beyond a small group of musicians who are strongly involved in the crypto community.