How NFTs Can Shape the Future of Music

The first and most important way that NFTs could change the future of music is through monetization. 

If there’s one thing people underestimate in the music business, it’s money. People rarely understand just how important money is to artists who are looking to hit the big time. Artists who eventually get popular and get successful don’t often do so because of their talent—even though they usually have some—instead success is more or less a question of how much you can spend on marketing. 

Music is just like every other product in the market. The success of a particular artist is dependent on talent, which is product quality in this case, and market budget. Unfortunately for a lot of talented musicians, it’s extremely difficult to get enough money to reliably push their music without greedy record labels. 

Music NFTs will enable these talented but unsuccessful artists to sell their music directly to their fan base. They will also be able to use monies realized from the sale of their music to promote their artistry. These monies can be invested in things like marketing, brand promotion, and even shooting music videos. 

At least one musician is already using music NFTs just like that. Violetta Zironi came in third in 2013 when she participated in the X Factor competition. Ever since then, she’s tried all she could to be a mainstream success, but she saw very little progress. One day, after she went home for Christmas, her mum told her about NFTs and she decided to get into them.

After months of grinding and promoting her music on Discord and Twitter spaces, she finally began to see real progress. After about three months or thereabouts, she was earning thousands from selling her music as NFTs. 

Asides from giving up-and-coming musicians a leg up, music NFTs could also be the key to equitable compensation amongst artists. Like most industries, the music industry is divided between the haves and have-nots. For example, most of the top 1% of artists on Spotify earn less than $50,000 every year. Unfortunately, these artists often sign record label deals that practically offer them peanuts. 

Music NFTs will put power back in the hands of artists. They could sell one NFT for tens of thousands of dollars—which is money they might never get from the streaming income of the same songs. 

Lastly, music NFTs open up a new door for creative collaboration between artists. Digital artists and musicians can come together to create a music and art NFT collection, which would be a unique art form. And this is true across all kinds of art. 

The fact that music NFTs could be upgradable means that musicians can effectively distribute new content without the help of DSPs. The owners of these NFTs could even upgrade them themselves by creating a fan edit. 

The future is essentially limitless, as there’s no telling what form music NFTs could take.