By now, you would be forgiven for being skeptical of, if not outright exhausted by, the entire concept of NFTs, the cryptocurrency-adjacent digital vouchers that took over the art world last year and quickly infiltrated the music industry. In March 2021, the album heralded as the first to be released as a non-fungible token was Kings of Leon’s barrel-scraping When You See Yourself—and people who bought the shiny new digital widget got their actual copies of the record as, guess what, old-fashioned MP3s and vinyl records. Snoop Dogg announced that his newly acquired Death Row Records, a hip-hop brand venerable enough for the Super Bowl halftime show, would become the first NFT label. Ozzy Ozbourne fans bought CryptoBatz NFTs, only for hackers to take a bite out of them; Mr. Baby Got Back himself, Sir Mix-A-Lot, even released a series of Bit Butts NFTs, to benefit—no kidding—colorectal cancer awareness.
For the most part, these were business endeavors by artists with vast experience in branding, household names simply lending their imprimatur to NFTs the same way they might license songs for car commercials. Meanwhile, everyone from predictable venture capitalists to respected multimedia artists has argued that the technology had the potential to save independent music, too. But for all of the endless talk about how NFTs might someday revolutionize the music business, let alone the world, nothing that their most equipped proponents have done with them so far feels very revolutionary.
Still, corporate America has been betting on NFTs the way regular people buy lottery tickets, and the music industry has been feeling particularly lucky. Despite high-profile debacles like the website HitPiece, which appeared to sell unauthorized NFTs of musicians’ album artwork, others, like the community around Los Angeles boutique label Leaving Records, argue that technology similar to NFTs can be harnessed for public betterment. Holding back our skepticism for a minute, let’s consider a future in which NFTs are a normalized way of releasing music, no different from uploading your songs to Spotify or selling a record on Bandcamp. What effect might that have on the actual music itself? And what might it mean for artists looking to sustain their work?
Format has long had an impact on the sound of recorded music. A 45 RPM 7" single could hold about three to five minutes of music, so that became the normal length of a pop song in the 1950s, allowing for singles artists and novelty tracks. Music videos had to compete with boredom and the remote, which benefited artists with more extravagant looks in the ’80s. LPs and CDs lent themselves to medium-paced, dozen-song albums, which gave rise to “album-oriented rock.” MP3s were rough and free, so they encouraged lo-fi demos and eclectic tastes. With subscription streaming, every song is competing with 70 million other songs, so tracks with front-loaded hooks fare best—and since artists get paid a fraction of a penny for each song streamed, they have an incentive to crank out albums with a ton of songs. The frantic pace of TikTok has songwriters cutting still more precious seconds from their would-be hits.
NFTs are essentially digital collectibles. They’re called “non-fungible” because each token is theoretically unique, unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are meant to be as “fungible”—interchangeable—as dollar bills. Like cryptocurrencies, NFTs exist on a blockchain, which is essentially a decentralized ledger that keeps track of purchases without the need for a bank or other authority.
Music NFTs usually contain links to images, audio, or both. They can be sold as one-of-one editions, where you can be the sole owner of a particular Whitney Houston NFT, or in editions of any size, which are usually limited with the hope that they’ll sell out. But even if you paid $162,000 for an NFT of Kings of Leon’s latest album, anyone can listen to it on Spotify now.
Looking past the blockchain aspect, the files that music NFTs represent could be thought of as similar to a Bandcamp stream, where fans have the option to help fund an artist pretty directly, but anyone else can still listen to the artist’s stream. This is where the blockchain stuff is crucial for musicians: If an NFT owner decides to sell their NFT, the original artist is able to take a cut of resales, too, thanks to “smart contracts” encoded in the ledger.
So what flowers might bloom from this unwieldy and already-polarizing new format? An NFT music chart called Top of the Blocks, published weekly since March 2021, offers clues to what’s worked so far. The chart is based on sales volume, and the amounts required to crack the top 10 have soared over the last year, from the equivalent of $200 or $300 to $2,000 or $3,000 prior to cryptocurrency’s recent crash, says founder Robin Spottiswoode. Though electronic music dominated the chart in the early days, successful NFTs currently span from hip-hop to rock to classical. “From being personally involved in the music NFT space for a year now, I’ve seen that it’s life-changing for a lot of people,” Spottiswoode says.
In the summer of 2021, Berlin-based singer-songwriter Violetta Zironi—a former X-Factor competitor who placed third in 2013 but didn’t find much industry success thereafter—vowed to give music her all for one more year. If it didn’t pan out, she would quit. “And then, when I went home for Christmas, my mom told me about NFTs,” she recalls. Zironi describes a hectic lifestyle of nonstop participation in NFT-centric Twitter Spaces and Discords, where she promotes her music to aficionados looking to invest, routinely staying up until 5 a.m. in order to engage with North American listeners. “This NFT world is just insane,” she admits. “You’re basically networking all day. You jump from panel to panel and party to party and meet people all the time. And you showcase your music.” Zironi figures that singer-songwriters especially have an advantage, because at any time they can perform their songs live in a Google Meet. “It really speaks to people. You’re singing just for them, through their phone, and that’s magical.” By February, she was earning thousands solely from her music NFTs.
Her first NFT collection, Handmade Music, compiled a set of unadorned acoustic songs recorded in one take. The collection’s video, for “A Little Rain Must Fall,” a smoky ballad that wouldn’t be out of place in a coffeehouse, was recorded in her living room. The NFT for “A Little Rain Must Fall,” issued in a one-of-one edition, sold on March 2 for what was then the Ethereum equivalent of roughly another $10,000. That was good enough to vault Zironi to No. 2 on the NFT music chart, in a top 10 that also found room for indie-pop mesmerist Kacy Hill and leftfield electronic producer Xyla. (At No. 1 was Snoop Dogg, whose Snoop’s Stash Box—an NFT for tracks from the rapper’s new album, Bacc on Death Row—generated around $121,000 in trading volume that week.) Her next NFT project, Moonshot, has moved about $40,000 since late April even in today’s lower crypto values. Spottiswoode now advises Zironi through a firm he co-founded, Nifty Music.
A lot of NFT-based music may not sound drastically different from what streaming has wrought—but could some characteristics of NFTs help music that’s a bit weirder? Some of the biggest nonmusical NFT projects have been released in mega-batches that include thousands of similar but distinct pieces of art, with repeating elements arranged in different configurations. For instance, CryptoPunks are a set of 10,000 algorithmically generated pixelated cartoon characters, some of which have rare lipstick or mohawks that somehow make them more valuable—and even the most ordinary CryptoPunk is still trading for about $100,000 these days.
Since today’s AI isn’t yet capable of algorithmically generating very good rock, pop, folk, or rap songs (a computerized Jay-Z once recited Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”), it seems natural that early musical extensions of this concept might be in electronic and ambient music. EulerBeats, a project that algorithmically generates audio tracks and visuals based on the work of Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, had the biggest-selling music NFT track of 2021; Top of the Blocks suggests that the two-minute instrumental “EulerBeats Genesis LP 15” totaled sales of more than $700,000. The original 27 EulerBeats NFTs reportedly generated cryptocurrency worth more than $1.1 million in their first week, thanks to separate NFT “prints” of them being created by fans such as billionaire Mark Cuban.
Solo instrumentalists who might be considered more “difficult” have also found a niche. Kieran Daly, a Chicago-based composer with a focus on formal improvisation, has sold NFTs in small batches, priced anywhere from $5 to $80 on the primary market. Daly’s music NFTs include a skronky jazz cover for solo guitar that he says took as long to upload as it took to record. “I’ve been using Bandcamp since 2013, and you’re used to not making the money that you ask for,” he says. “But this, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m actually gonna make the $5.’”
Milo Lombardi, an Italian jazz musician known as Nifty Sax, creates NFTs of tracks based only on his saxophone. Lombardi used to play corporate events and weddings, but during the pandemic he discovered NFTs—and, after releasing his first set of music NFTs in March 2021, by November he’d generated the equivalent of $120,000 in sales. Although the traditional market for solo sax meditations might seem small, Lombardi hasn’t slowed down since. (He co-founded Nifty Music with Spottiswoode.) “Nobody was making music NFTs when I started,” he enthuses. “It was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m actually the first to do something, for once in my life!’”
The novelty of music NFTs encourages all kinds of unlikely experiments, for the time being. Brooklyn electronic producer Crown Shyness tells me he noticed a “newfound beauty” when relistening to Blink-182’s 2003 hit “Feeling This.” Under the alias Creaky Vine, he tweaked and layered the emotive, a cappella chorus until it sounded like a warped, digital choir. The resulting track, “Music for 182 Musicians,” sounds euphoric, part plunderphonics, part Dan Deacon mad science. Like copyright-bending works from earlier eras of technological advance, such as Danger Mouse’s mash-up milestone The Grey Album, the release is unsanctioned, but inspiring.
Crown Shyness also seems to have stumbled into a model by which an artist releases NFTs of their demos to crowdfund a proper recording—which would eventually be automatically delivered to the original “investors.” A full edition of five “Music for 182 Musicians” NFTs quickly sold out at the equivalent of $20 apiece—“much more money per track than I’ve ever sold anything,” Crown Shyness acknowledges—and he decided to use the money to recreate the track with live vocalists. Unbeknownst to the original buyers, the plan is for each of them to receive one of the new NFTs, too. “There’ll still be copies for sale, but it’s this way to reward the people who helped.”
Bajan-American rapper Haleek Maul (born Malik Hall) took a different tack on the NFTs-as-crowdfunding concept, plotting what’s billed as “the first ever fan-produced video.” In January, Hall raised $640,000 in three minutes for a video for his bass-quaking, synth-wobbling song “VERIFIED”—well beyond what he previously would have afforded—so that a whole camera crew could decamp to Barbados. (The splashy finished product boasts more than 4 million views.) “I’m getting to tell my story in a way that feels true to where I come from and what I do here,” he says.
Hall’s case suggests that NFTs may be particularly effective for artists whose credibility with a core audience vastly exceeds their name recognition. A shape-shifting artist with only one proper album, 2020’s focused and fiery Errol, Hall had 4,561 monthly Spotify listeners as of early May. But he has been haunting hip-hop’s deconstructed, electronic corners since putting out his first tracks in 2012, when he was only 16; his more recent collaborators have included fellow experimentally minded rap and R&B artists such as Mick Jenkins and Dua Saleh. With NFTs for individual tracks, he has made more than $250,000 to date.
Hall’s NFT debut, February 2021’s “Home,” is tense and unconventionally structured. “The first song that I dropped didn’t even have a hook,” he marvels. “It was a song that started off with me rapping, then I started singing, and then there’s this weird thing at the end, with mad noise and shit. It was just a very cool thing to be able to put out formless records or very different arrangements.”
As an ethos, this free-thinking approach sounds not too dissimilar to the halcyon days of SoundCloud—and Hall hopes NFTs will inspire other artists to mess around with non-linear constructions that would give streaming playlist curators’ pause. “Recorded music is definitely going to move into a direction that’s going to be a lot more formless,” he says. He also believes that NFTs will especially help other musicians who live beyond the view of major labels’ corporate offices in New York or Los Angeles. “This is going to be important for a lot of artists that live outside of America or live further away from funding from Western institutions, to be able to fund their projects and tell their story in a way that competes with more mainstream artists.”
That said, $640,000 in three minutes is a significant amount for any artist to raise, much less a smaller rapper. So who’s buying all these music NFTs, if not just an artist’s fans? The blockchain tells anyone who cares to look which cryptocurrency wallet owns particular NFTs, but it’s not like Bandcamp, where the buyer hands over their name and email address. Melanie McClain, a former A&R at indie-label family Secretly Group who is now head of community at Web3 platform P00LS, tells me that she bought one NFT because it was by an artist collective she’d been following for almost a decade. But in her experience, many NFT big spenders are people with the means who want to support the overall ecosystem more than a specific song or artist. “It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, because most of us are just fans,” she says. “There are certain people who are patrons of the arts.”
Some of these NFT patrons are relatively anonymous. “They’re not influencers. They’re definitely not the ones hosting the Twitter Spaces. We just recognize their names from the platforms,” McClain explains. Others, she says, might be founders or advisers at tech companies, who have the cryptocurrency to spare. “It doesn't mean they’re the biggest fan of every single person they’re purchasing. It’s supporting those who make the community.” (McClain was formerly a social media associate at a Pitchfork sister publication.)
The gambling-like appeal of NFTs shouldn’t be overlooked. “Suddenly these artists have these collectors who are financially invested in their future success, which is a huge shift,” says Spottiswoode. “There are definitely people that invest a lot in music NFTs because they think it’s the future.”
The speculative aspect, with risk diffused from a single patron or label A&R to “true fans” and wealthy patrons, could also affect the sound and creation of music. Will artists think differently about the way they plan and pace their careers? If the music matters less than the investment and proof of concept, then maybe more outré sounds will keep bubbling to the top of the NFT charts. One optimistic view is that artists could become less likely to make short-term compromises that will burn them out. Dance-pop singer-songwriter Aluna, who recently raised around $13,000 from a set of 69 music NFTs, tells me, “You need to think about the possibilities of building something that you and your fans own forever.”
All of these fun hypotheticals aside, a major development over the past year has been the introduction of specifically music-focused NFT platforms like Catalog and Nina. If cryptocurrencies were supposed to get rid of central authorities, that clearly isn’t happening with NFTs. In the very long term, if music NFTs really take off, the experience for fans probably won’t be all that much different from what it is today. Payments will be in old-fashioned money, and the crypto side of NFTs will be as invisible to users as the splits between copyright holders on Spotify. “We’re not going to see all the messy stuff,” says Dwight Torculas, co-founder of the music NFT platform Mint Songs. “Artists are going to make money off of the tokenization of their assets, and the secondary royalty sales from it, and then we as the end consumer will be able to participate in a streaming app that allows us to listen to music for free.”
This idea of the future may not be aesthetically dazzling, but for certain performers, it might still be a step toward more equitable pay. At this point, the sound of NFTs for most people is likely the whoosh of vast sums of money changing hands, but as this new technology continues to evolve, it’ll be worth wading through the hype to hear what musicians do with it.
This week, we’re exploring how music and technology intersect, and what today’s trends and innovations might mean for the future. Read more here.
