What I’ve learned from visiting my first NFT conference
I just got back from a trip to Minneapolis where I visited Veecon, an NFT conference.
I know that a lot of you don’t believe in NFTs, think it’s a scam or don’t see the value of it but I wanted to give you a list of things that I learned from this conference to give you a better insight of what this revolution is about.
NFTs can be a scam, honestly, a lot of them at this moment are.
Many projects are being created to collect a quick buck so be careful out there. This technology is young and there is still a lot to discover and build to make this a safer space for everyone.
Aside from that, I would like to seduce you to have an open mind and look at how many opportunities this technology can offer (and will) in the future.
I’m mainly going to focus on the music industry for now because you are an artist and I believe that the music industry will be one of the many industries that will get disrupted heavily by NFTs.
This event had an amazing lineup with speakers such as Steve Aoki, Pharrell, Snoop Dogg, Gary Vaynerchuck, Beeple and many more…!
These are my main takeaways from this event:
- We are early.
This is something I realized before I visited Veecon but this got confirmed 100%. It’s best to compare this period in time with the very beginning of the internet. I’m old enough to remember that moment but I guess many of you aren’t haha. If you would have told me twenty years ago that I would be able to stream all the music in the world through my phone anywhere in the world, I wouldn’t believe it but it happened. It took twenty years for the technology (and every other aspect) to get there but it did. We used to download music illegally through Napster etc and now you have Spotify where it’s legal to stream all the music anytime you want. That’s where we are right now in the NFT space, the Napster era. A wild wild west of rug pulls, scams and fake projects but ten, twenty years from now every person on earth will interact with NFTs. Let me tell you this, your music will be an NFT.
- NFTs will bring back the power to artists
In the past years, we somehow got to the point where an artist is unable to make a decent living from his or her own music. That’s ridiculous. NFTs will make it possible to build a career through your fanbase and make it able to grow together. Give back to your community. You don’t need a label or publisher anymore to get an advance on your royalties in order to be able to make a living from your music. By selling small parts of your royalties to your fans you will be able to monetize your audience and grow from there. If you grow, they grow with you. Investing and supporting an artist at an early stage of their career becomes a really interesting feature. Imagine investing in Jay-Z and owning 0,2% of his royalties when he was just starting out. Wild.
- Quality over quantity
Your fanbase will become even more important. In the past years, we got used to building audiences on social media and end up paying for reaching the audience you’ve built yourself. Crazy. For those who’ve read ‘a thousand true fans’, this is what NFTs are about. It’s better to have a thousand true fans who are willing to invest $50,- in you every year by buying a part of your royalties than having hundreds of thousands of followers who you can’t monetize. Aside from that, spending time and interacting with your fans is also going to change. It’s going to be more personal and direct through platforms like Discord.
These are my main takeaways from the event. I hope you’ve been able to extract some value from this.
I will write more about NFTs in the future. I believe this is the future and educating yourself on this technology will give you a massive advantage in the future.
If this sounds interesting to you and you’d like to know more about it, feel free to join our Discord and click on the #nft chat. I will be active there as much as possible.
Remember, we are still early.
Regards, Joey
