When you think of Music NFT Business, what comes first to your mind? How do you make money from NFT Music?
Let’s start with the obvious – you can invest into a music NFT, buy it, and then sell it later for a higher price. Next, obviously if someone is buying and selling them, this means someone creates them and sells them. So the second way is to create a music NFT and sell it, in other words become an NFT musician.
What facilitates the minting, buying, and selling? That’s right, NFT market platforms. So, the third way to make money from NFT music is to provide the platform for NFT musicians to mint, and for buyers to buy the NFT songs, and for sellers to re-sell it.
What else do we know about the music industry in general? Artists rarely make it big completely on their own. Although the concept of NFTs brings much more power to creators’ hands, there are agents, agencies, and labels in this space already as well. They make money off the fees they charge NFT artists for promo and marketing. But isn’t it the middle-man we were trying to get rid of? True, but for the artists that don’t mind help from a third party NFT and smart contracts provide the way to control the royalties way better than ever before.
Ok, let’s take a look at the Music NFT Landscape below (huge kudos to @Cooopahtroopa on the infographic). Did we cover everything?
Clear with 1/1 and Editions section, those are the platform where you can mint and distribute your music. Agencies and Labels are clear as well. Artists are sellers, Collectors are buyers, Fanclubs and Chats are platforms for community-building and engagement (how do they make $$?), and out of the obvious ones it appears we missed Tickets, Events, and Merch (lonely there, go join them before they build a monopoly!).
Not sure why Royalties are listed separately – major marketplaces distribute royalties as well. But this is very interesting if the three services listed there actually provide some added value, eg. smarter royalty distribution mechanisms for the parties participating in a music project. On a similar note, glad to see the Grants, and encourage everyone to apply – always!
The generative category doesn’t make me happy as it seems to be occupying the space of some proper AI music composition projects rather than the randomnizer machines. I would like to believe that the landscape here will change here the most in the nearest future.
If every platform wasn’t able to playback music I would question why streaming category is so underpopulated. But then again, most popular marketplaces, like rarible, opensea, etc. are SO BAD at streaming (FACEPALM).
Whether all these categories in the landscape are profitable already is questionable, but they are certainly punching FOMO hard.
