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NFTs Are Changing the Music Manufacture Right Before Our Eyes

Audio NFTs, Tokenized Communities and The Unstoppable Power of web3

Michael Caloca / ONE37pm

Special thanks to Cooper Turley of Audius and Jeremy Stern of Catalog for feedback.

An NFT by electronic musician Jacques Greene recently sold on Foundation for 13ETH — over $23,000 US.

The audio-visual prune teases out a few seconds of an unreleased vocal of his called 'Hope'.

Foundation

Just this purchase is for more than just the artwork itself. As Jacques writes, "this NFT represents non only a 1of1 AV but the publishing rights to the song upon its release, in perpetuity."

Now this, to me, is an incredibly exciting thing to see. And not merely because Jacques and I are both musicians and both from Montreal.

But because this is one more early on example that nudges the states e'er closer to the following hypothesis: That we are at the commencement of a massive overhaul of this matter nosotros've collectively decided to telephone call the "music manufacture". And that every facet of said manufacture will feel the aftershocks of this tectonic shift.

Welcome to the Stone Historic period

I recently wrote a beginner'due south guide to NFTs and spoke of how they are about to change pretty much everything. This commodity both zooms out of NFTs and into the wider edges of what nosotros can call the web3 revolution, and it zooms in on where these changes meet music.

To create a succinct story effectually what this future of music will look like would be a fool's errand. We are just beginning to affect these new tools for the first time. It'south similar we're in the Early Stone Age, and we just accidentally made the kickoff hammers ever. We've just picked them up, and we're feeling their weight; we're hitting them against things and seeing if something goes blast.

So instead of speculating on exactly where this all goes, this commodity walks through 5 examples of people, projects, and platforms that are giving these make new hammers a adept smacking.

This is in no way an exhaustive listing. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of experiments underway.

My hope is that these examples begin to outline for yous the possibilities of what's to come. I encourage you to use the infinite mural of your imagination to color in the rest.

Alright, back to Jacques Greene

In his tweet thread announcing the 'Promise' NFT driblet, Jacques Greene said that he recently "got out of a long, pretty bad publishing bargain." Now that he'due south an contained songwriter, he's elected to sell the publishing rights to this vocal to whoever wins the sale.

That could theoretically exist anyone. It could be a fan, a friend, another publisher who feels they could do meliorate with his music. Maybe a music supervisor who already has some placement ideas for 'Promise' and wants more skin in the game.

By creating an NFT around these rights, they become not just verifiably ownable simply besides tradeable. Once the song is released, the demand for these rights may go up equally the vocal grows in popularity. Maybe the NFT changes owners. Possibly it changes owners a hundred times.

The NFT could as well theoretically exist fractionalized, meaning it could be cut up into smaller pieces and sold to multiple owners. Maybe a fungible token is created that represents fractional ownership of the NFT, enabling hundreds, thousands, millions of people to participate in the publishing rights of this ane song.

Of course, these different scenarios might exist discussed and decided upon in a separate agreement between Jacques Greene and the chief buyer. While the proof of ownership of this NFT volition exist stored on the Ethereum blockchain, the actual flow of rights and royalties is not baked into the smart contract.

But you can begin to meet a hereafter where they are baked in. What happens when agreements that were once newspaper contracts plough to code? All of a sudden the flow of rights and royalties becomes fashion more agile, flexible, malleable. Of a sudden the options a creator has with the ownership and therefore incentives tied to the success of their work approach well-nigh infinity.

A custom built NFT Shop past 3LAU

We just saw how your superfan could, in theory, get your publisher. Clearly, the roles and relationships betwixt creative person, core squad, and fan are beginning to blur.

Another creative person is committed to the continual blurring of these lines in 3LAU.

The electronic artist has been immersed in the crypto scene for many years and has been essentially carving the path for musicians into the realm of NFTs.

After a number of successful NFT drops, 3LAU — along with the team at Original Protocol — has now built his own custom NFT auction and marketplace. On Th, February 25th, the bidding will open for 33 rare Vinyl NFTs that represent his best-selling anthology Ultraviolet.

The winner of these NFTs will also receive access to unreleased music, limited edition physical vinyl, and the top bidder will win the opportunity to create a custom song with 3LAU himself. Talk about an intimate connexion with the artist.

3LUA

In a recent Clubhouse room announcing the project, 3LAU shared his vision of creating a long-term, close-knit human relationship with his collectors. He plans for these NFTs to have ongoing utility, providing access to futurity exclusive content and closer admission to him and his work.

Because he's built a custom marketplace, 3LAU truly gets to create whatever he wants. The fine art of the projection extends past the actual music and into open questions like "how tin can I provide more value and admission for fans, and how practise I want to monetize that value?"

In a lot of means, this release format gives the all-time of both worlds to creators and collectors.

3LAU gets to own his platform and marketplace. But the actual NFTs live on the Ethereum blockchain, and therefore transcend the digital "walls" of his website. They can exist moved near the wider Ethereum network — showed off in a VR gallery-similar GeniusCorp's Cryptovoxels vinyl store, or bought and sold on Opensea or other marketplaces.

Information technology's like owning a game skin, but the game's environs is the entire (new) Net. The use cases are truly endless.

Itemize: The Bandcamp for NFTs

Not anybody is going to build their own NFT shop. Catalog gets this. So they are building out the Bandcamp for audio NFTs.

Catalog

Set to launch inside the next few weeks, Catalog allows artists to press one-of-1 digital records as NFTs. These NFTs do not represent the rights or royalties associated with the vocal (like nosotros saw with Jaques Greene'due south) but act more like a canonical representation of an artist's work on the blockchain. Equally the squad puts it,

"Catalog records represent the true original version of your work online. These are unique, one-of-one records that be on the internet forever, beyond the limits of our platform, and tin be traded in open markets."

This ways that fans can now ain the original pressing.

- McKenzie Wark

As we spoke near in the guide to NFTs, this is a bit of a mental leap for united states. We've learned to think of digital content in a certain way, merely the perception of stuff on the Internet as tactile, singled-out goods will increase as we venture deeper into the web3 renaissance. And with that, the verifiably original pressing of "Hotline Bling" for case volition hold tons of value.

The same way nosotros learned last week that the Nyan Cat meme is worth 300ETH to someone.

Another inherent aspect of Catalog NFTs (equally with all the NFTs we've discussed) is the artist or creator fee. This is a percentage that the creative person sets at the time of minting, which is paid to the artist every time that NFT sells on the secondary marketplace, in perpetuity.

This is some other huge shift for artists, assuasive them to capture the increasing value of their work overtime. An artist on Catalog volition be able to capture the cultural value of their art every bit it grows, over and above the traditional royalties earned.

Catalog intends to become a community-owned project, which means its artists and collectors will eventually control the majority of the network and its decisions. They are also building on top of the Zora Protocol, which has created a type of NFT structure (chosen a zNFT) that bakes the actual market place into the NFT itself. This ways that Catalog doesn't take any transaction fee, and as a zNFT moves near the Ethereum ecosystem, and so besides does its market.

This is truly "platformless media".

Audius: The web3 Steaming Model

Alright, then we've covered a bunch of NFT projects and technologies that are only bursting with potential.

Just what's most streaming music? Does that fit into all of this? Or are nosotros stuck with the same old "Spotify model" forever?

Streaming platform Audius intends to give that last question a resounding "no!"

Audius

Audius is building a decentralized streaming platform. What this means is that the actual content uploaded to the site doesn't exist on servers that are endemic and operated past Audius itself. Instead, distributed "operators" are incentivized to run nodes that store the content and metadata on the platform. This allows for a whole lot of fun stuff, which nosotros'll get into presently.

The beauty of Audius is that, while all this is running nether the hood, the boilerplate user has no thought. Using Audius feels similar using whatever other streaming platform you're accepted to. You lot just...play music. Make playlists. Do the things.

Considering of its ability to abstruse away all of the friction that usually comes along with a lot of early crypto tech, Audius has seen a huge moving ridge of early adoption — with over 2.vi million monthly active users. Every user on Audius has a crypto wallet, and most don't know information technology withal.

But the power of this decentralized library of content and code is immense. Get-go, the content transcends the platforms. Much like the "platformless media'' of NFTs, this means that the music and its streaming data are not beholden to the continued existence of Audius itself. If the website disappears tomorrow, the content is still there and so long as the nodes stay online. This content is also completely open and permissionless, meaning anyone can build anything that "hooks in" to it.

You and I can build another frontend website that takes withal content as Audius, but ours is meliorate because we really like the color pink, and our whole website is pink. (If you wanna do this, please DM me.)

Or, in a more impactful example, we can build out ways of monetizing this content in up-until-now completely unexplored ways.

And this is exactly what Audius itself is attempting to build. With the rollout of their native token $AUDIO, artists, curators and fans alike will be able to play in the experimental sandbox of earning and trading coins on the platform. Audius' vision is to have its platform and the eventual uses of $Sound be customs-led.

But brand no mistake, if we, the artists, don't like how things are going downward on Audius, we tin can build our own new frontend. That's the beauty of it! No siloed control ways more than liberty for artists and audiences alike.

Right now, Audius is completely gratuitous, and artists are encouraged to upload content, build playlists, and plant their following. The longer-term vision is to scroll out monetizing products that allow artists to get really creative with their rollouts. And because the idea is to be a community-led initiative, it is the artists themselves who get to ideate and vote on what gets built.

How about an album that charges listeners a gear up amount once they've listened through the album twice? Or a song that changes endings when you tip the artist? How about a song where the kickoff 100 listeners get a pct of futurity earnings? Or, a favorite example of mine from a podcast with the Audius founders, what about a gated album that can only be streamed at a certain altitude? Mile high gild merely got a whole new meaning.

Up until now, we've been given very few options in how to distribute and monetize music. Highly centralized and opaque systems like Spotify and Apple Music get to essentially dictate what a song is worth. But this is a rather flat and tedious way of doing things. The world of music is diverse. An artist'south catalog itself is filled with all sorts of dissimilar flavors and sounds. Why can't the distribution and monetization of that music be just as eclectic?

Tokenized Communities and $RAC

We've looked at a lot of the means that content online is changing, and we've begun to outline how the distribution of this content can create stronger ties between artist and fan.

At present let'southward dig a bit deeper into how online communities are about to take on a whole new level of meaning in our lives.

The grammy-award winning artist and remixer RAC has been dipping into the world of crypto for quite a while, leading highly successful initiatives with his audiovisual NFTs and redeemable token drop $TAPE.

In Oct of final twelvemonth, he announced the creation of his own artist token $RAC. He included an initial distribution plan of $RAC to his almost loyal audience — Patreon supporters, Twitch supporters, etc.

Zora

A social token like $RAC allows the artist to create strong ties with his customs that transcend any one platform. Up until now, we've been edifice our Instagram followers and our YouTube subscribers and the similar. But these relationships are truly owned by the platform itself and non the creators.

A community token allows you lot to aspect value to your online family unit and allow that value to catamenia through that family unit in whatever number of means. These are the building blocks for creators and communities to build their own online worlds.

One growingly common use-case for a social token is to deed every bit admission to a gated Discord customs. To access certain locked Discord channels, you lot'd need a sure amount of $RAC. Another popular community doing this is Friends With Benefits, which currently requires you to hold 55 $FWB in your crypto wallet to gain access.

But Discord entry is simply the showtime. This provides a customs with the power of its own economy. Every bit the community grows, so too does the value of its economy and, therefore its token. This value can so exist used to incentivize those within the customs and those who want in — in whatsoever mode of direction. The ways a social token tin be used are thus express only by the creativity of that creative person and customs.

The $RAC token is congenital on Zora's protocol. Platforms like Mintgate and Seed Club are a few others playing in this social token infinite.

We just covered a whoooole lot.

And nevertheless, we've barely begun. We didn't even bear upon on how this stuff leaks into live events and ticketing, PROs, information period, and tons more.

One could go through all of this and say, jeez, we are actually on our way to turning the arts into this hyper-financialized space that'southward all most money.

That'southward ane perspective. But this is how I see where nosotros are currently at...

The arts are now inbound the blockchain ecosystem, a space that has in a lot of means been shaped past those who got here first. The DeFi (decentralized finance) space exploded in 2020 and laid the cultural groundwork within this new world.

Only now artists are coming. And the culture is shifting — the words we use are irresolute, the means we design and build things are changing.

In a recent YouTube Alive, Jon-Kyle of Mirror said, "it'due south not 'let's make the world feel similar nosotros live in a banking company'... it's 'permit's make the residuum of the world feel broken'".

As y'all swoop deeper into these new technologies, the current online world does start to feel entirely broken. And boy, oh male child, does the music industry feel broken...

In Dec 2020, I — similar all artists on Spotify — received my 2020 Artist Wrapped analytics. The number that struck me nigh was that 170 listeners streamed my catalog more than any other artist on Spotify. I was blown away. Like, there are a lot of artists on Spotify. And you listened that much to Lil' ol' me?

Spotify

Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for the discovery tools that Spotify has built for artists like me to find fans. But don't you find it strange that I accept no thought who those 170 people are? That I have no way of finding them, reaching them, telling them "cheers, I dear y'all, permit'south be all-time friends"?

Doesn't that feel broken?

We are still in the Early Stone Ages of the Internet.

And we only made the first hammers ever. What will we build?

Bonus Round: EulerBeats

Getting into all this? Good. Here's a petty homework for ya if y'all want to get deeper…

Step 1 — Read this tweet:

Footstep two — Now read this tweet:

"DAO" stands for a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Nosotros'll get more into what those are in a futurity commodity.

Footstep three — Visit eulerbeats.com, and adept luck getting whatever other work done today.

EulerBeats

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Source: https://www.one37pm.com/nft/industry-audius-info

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