Ways to make money with music NFTs and Web3

A lot of money circulating in the Web3 and NFT space. We all heard about it for a reason: here and there stories pop up about people making quick and simple income (simple does not mean easy). There are posts about kids making outrageous tips in ETH working at metaverse McDonald’s, there are proven stats of performers selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of song NFTs, and there are videos of teens driving Lamborghinis claiming they made their fortunes by flipping NFTs. 

There’s also a matching amount of spam on Twitter and other social media – “shell your NFTs”, “i’m buying today, send your best NFT”, etc. All this makes it look like the area is full of easy cash, but is it really so? 

My day job is in IT and my passion is music, so when I first heard of the concept, my reaction was – music NFT is my Ikigai. I started looking for ways to gain expertise and come up with a business in this field that would drive me continuously. I created this site to track my findings and then created associated social accounts to interact with others matching my interests. Maybe a little late, as Twitter was flooded with poor-quality posts with #[whatever]nft[bs] tags. But this is life and market economy after all – it pursues equilibrium. 

What are the most noticeable ways to make money with Music NFTs so far?

1. Create music, and sell it as NFTs

1.A. Generate AI sound pieces and sell them

2. Buy music and resell it for more

3. Promote music NFT or music NFT collections for a flat or % fee

4. Establish a Web3 distributor company

5. Curate playlists and charge for marketing

6. Create a platform where music NFTs are traded and streamed, and charge a commission

Most methods are self-explanatory, and all are popular to such a degree that potential business ideas will soon have to go into niche breakdowns such as by genre. This large volume of interest has already caused deflation in the market, and it seems that prices will soon become reasonable.

1. Create music and sell it as NFTs

Music production so far didn’t really experience many changes. The distribution of music did. It became globally available with the introduction of crypto-backed NFTs. In the music NFT world, beatmakers from India, Canada, and Brazil have equal chances of becoming popular and making good sales. It was not as simple with Web2. 

1.A. Generate AI sound pieces 

have little to do with being a musician. I’d assume that the same folks that managed to flip some items on generic art collections went into the music NFTs without much knowledge. In the long term, this space has prospects for sound-designers and collaborations between musicians and developers, but so far – has not seen anything worthy.

2. Buy music and resell it for more

As if you would re-sell a vinyl record. This niche is narrow, and despite the large selling volumes caused by the initial hype around NFTs, one may argue that in the long-term only exclusivity and collectioner mindset may keep this money-making method afloat, which means a very limited number of stakeholders in the game.

3. Promote music NFT or music NFT collections for a flat or % fee

The benefit that a lot of Web3 evangelists claim is the elimination of non-key players in the music industry like agents and labels. The truth is that they actually do add value for musicians who focus on being musicians instead of learning marketing, SEO and SMM. That is why this job is going to be in demand in Web3 as it was before. The distribution of the gains is likely to change as artists have more leverage, and third parties between them and their audiences won’t be able to hold artists hostage to contracts.

4. Establish a Web3 distributor company

Given the number of growing startup platforms, it would make sense for distributors to appear similarly to Web2. If you tried to publish your tracks to online platforms before, you might know it’s a bit of work to get verified and uploaded to all the different streaming services. Somehow this role in Web3 appears to be pretty empty at the moment, but I’m sure it’s just too early. The number of platforms will be reduced as the weaker players go out of business, and the stronger platforms will start providing proper APIs to enable automation. So, we’ll most likely see this business’s emergence in the Web3 space.

5. Curate playlists and charge for marketing

To the folks in the music industry, Spotify playlists may be familiar, especially from the times of COVID-19. As the lockdowns were introduced, artists were unable to market themselves at concerts or any type of live events, which drove a lot of focus toward online marketing. The prices for being included in popular playlists went up. Platforms like emanate.live make good use of this revenue stream for active members of their community. You are already able to leverage this method of making money in the Web3 music space.

6. Create a platform where music NFTs are traded and streamed, and charge a commission

Among the numerous platforms we’ve seen in our 7-day Web3 and NFT music platform reviews so far, we have discussed the variety of business models those startups pick. There’s little evidence to support the claim that those platforms are profitable, given the amount of resources required to establish them and build the community around them. Additionally, the constraint is the great Web3 promise to properly distribute the revenues made from music fandom to prioritize the musicians instead of the middle-man. Time will show who wins this race based on musician preferences, business models, and flexibility of those companies.