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In 2015 Wu Tang Clan pressed their seventh studio album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and limited it to a single copy to protest against streaming services. Once Upon a Time… recently sold for $4 million as an NFT, making it the most expensive album sale of all time, doubling the previous record also set by the same album. Today, NFTs and other blockchain technologies present a burgeoning opportunity for artists to disrupt the same streaming services that disrupted them 20 years ago.
Compared to the music industry, blockchain technology has been around for a bare blip, and yet its impacts have already reverberated through the sector, with numerous artists this year and last minting NFTs for a growing group of blockchain savvy fans. During an exclusive panel at GeckoCon 2021 – NFTs Gone Wild, Artemis Music’s Kristopher Houck, Emanate’s Jimi Frew, and Metarupa’s Ruanth Chrisley Thyssen sat down with Benzinga’s Logan Ross to discuss how NFTs are changing the way musicians think about their art in the web 3.0 age.
According to Houck, NFTs have changed the way he views his art and its place in the digital realm.
“As an artist, I would say that blockchain definitely enables us to integrate our music with almost any digital creative imaginable. It allows our music to be expressed as immersive multimedia experiences.”
Underpinned by the blockchain to protect artists’ ownership and rights, Artemis’ work extends, in a bold and future-forward way, to space. The Artemis Space Network is a space-based, globally accessible commercial platform for music and entertainment media.
“The Artemis Space Network offers the average person access to the space industry in the form of NFTs”, said Houck.
“We sent the very first music to the International Space Station in July this year; we chose Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy, which also was sent up with a music video.”
For Frew, the blockchain is fuelling a very different venture. Emanate is a platform for connecting artists with each other and their listeners and reclaiming ownership of their intellectual property. The platform allows fans to earn alongside their creators, a symbiosis not seen in the music sector before.
Emanate’s smart contract and payment engine is built on the EOSIO blockchain, meaning artists can share and monetize their music and get paid in real-time, but the platform also fuels a decentralized form of collaboration as well. No matter where artists meet online (many collaborations are birthed on Twitch and Discord, for example), they can sign collaboration agreements that allow them to split shares and publish their work on the platform.
Platforms like Emanate allow emerging artists to leapfrog the walled gardens of Apple Music and Spotify and connect directly with fans and each other, something that feels immeasurably more democratic and fairer to artists and consumers alike.
“I’m seeing people that are earning decent cash, or feeling validated (as artists) more importantly, and having the purpose of getting music. So that’s so fulfilling to see.”
As an Oscar-nominated sound artist, Thyssen sees NFTs as a new frontier for music and art more broadly, providing the type of ownership fans and collectors crave while also giving artists the opportunity to bundle their music with other things fans will find valuable, like music videos, album artwork, and tickets to live shows.
“As we’ve seen, there are so many new utilities. If you buy this, you get the music and you get a ticket. And that cuts out so many people in the middle who issue tickets to all these people and keep track of who’s got tickets”, he said.
“You can have a lifelong ticket membership for your band or as long as your band doesn’t split up, you can always attend the shows. And whoever has the token can see the show.”
Hearing the music industry’s innovators talk about the power of the blockchain to bring musicians and music lovers closer together, we get the sense that a web3 world will have a cracking soundtrack.
