NFTs: The Future of the Music Industry?

Music is one of the oldest forms of art, and has been around since ancient times. The earliest known instruments date back to about 40,000 years ago in Europe. Early humans would make bone flutes or blow into animal horns to create music. Even today, there are still places on Earth where people rely on natural sounds for their entertainment instead of playing instruments like we do. So it’s no surprise that music touches every corner of our lives-from work to relationships, from religion to recreation-and can even change us at a fundamental level. Yet its influence is so pervasive that it’s easy for us not to notice how much power it has over our feelings and thoughts in ways both good and bad. This isn’t just a site for music fans. Music has an influence over people and society as a whole, and the next steps in disrupting that should be taken by Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

What Are NFTs?

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) stand to disrupt how we create and consume music in ways that could change how you experience your favorite artist. If you’re not familiar with NFTs, here is a quick summary so we can move on to talking about the impact they have on music. Simply put, NFTs are tokens which cannot be replicated-like currency for cryptocurrencies like BitCoin. They are unique and thus not interchangeable. There may be 10 BitCoins, but there is only one “yourname” NFT token. This means that if you have a limited edition token, it cannot be duplicated by someone else after you have sold or traded it.

NFTs are currently being used in crypto-gaming, games which bring elements of traditional gaming into the blockchain space. CryptoKitties was one of the early adopters of NFTs and still exists today as a way for users to buy tokens that represent their favorite cats from the game or other collectibles they might have an affinity for. The aim with these apps is to create something like any traditional video game where you can earn rewards and level up.

But, the potential of NFTs goes beyond this. They can also be used in many different ways in how we create and consume music.

Music Monopolies Will Be Disrupted…

One key issue with the music industry today is that there are a small number of companies controlling most of what we hear and creating restrictions on distribution and access to certain artists’ work or songs. This is one advantage that blockchain-based platforms like Ujo Music try to disrupt by allowing listeners all over the world to pay fractions of a penny for their favorite tracks instead of becoming captive consumers within Apple, Google, Spotify, etc. We already know that money made from streaming will surpass CD sales . Yet even people may still buy single songs on iTunes or Amazon if they can’t find it through streaming. This is problematic because more people are only buying the songs they want instead of subscribing to a service like Spotify where all-access users end up spending more money than those who buy individual tracks. And with some artists earning fractions of a cent per stream, you can see how this becomes unsustainable for musicians to make any decent income off their work.

It isn’t just music either. Movies and television shows also suffer at the expense of larger companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video who have increasing control over what we watch and when we watch it. More people are catching onto binge watching rather than waiting week by week to catch up on their favorite show, but this is only possible with services offered by the bigger companies who also air originals.

These centralized entities are set to be disrupted when NFTs enter music and entertainment, allowing users to buy single songs or even just fractions of a song than whole albums or movies. You could potentially pay $0.25-or much less-for your favorite single rather than shelling out $12 for an album that might only contain 2–3 songs you like. And this goes both ways too; artists may charge more per token (think dollars/tokens) for popular singles while charging less (tokens) for deeper cuts on their albums.

Or If We Play Our Own Instruments?

With NFTs, anyone make their own version of Spotify or Netflix and offer the same service. If enough users flock to a particular platform, it could become even more popular than its centralized counterparts with total control over what is available at any given time. Instead of having an algorithm decide what you listen or watch when you use these services, businesses could be built around allowing musicians and content creators to upload their own work in exchange for tokens they can use for other things on that platform (think Brave Browser). Of course, there would still need to be some sort of curating process so that spammy or unoriginal content doesn’t flood this new space (again like with Brave Browser where certain ads remain blocked).

This model allows artists to make money by selling their tokens directly rather than waiting months before seeing any profits from album or movie sales. You might see a token with an artist’s face and name on it for sale alongside other memorabilia at their concerts, too-as well as tokens representing songs they have released. It would be like buying tickets for specific seats to a concert but also getting digital downloads of the songs you heard live in addition to some exclusive backstage footage.

With only $0.25 paid per single song, people might even turn away from large streaming services and decide that they no longer need them if NFT-powered platforms offer more options and better prices. The next step this could take is having artists using these platforms to sell tickets directly to fans rather than going through TicketMaster or another major ticketing service.

This all sounds great, but how will it work? This is where blockchain technology comes in.

Blockchain Will Make It Easier for Artists to Sell NFTs

Tokenizing content isn’t easy. That’s why SMTs were invented by the developers behind Steemit so that common folk could easily use the blockchain without having to learn Solidity or other coding languages (and if you’re wondering what an SMT is, read this article first). However, there are many others who want to use blockchain without relying on any other platform like Ethereum. The solution here is something called EOS which includes features that make issuing tokens easier than ever before.

I hope you’ll join me on my Discord server https://discord.gg/SEK7FfudgW where we can chat about art, crypto, and everything in between. You can also find links to my OpenSea collections there. Thanks for reading!