Music-related use cases for Web3 technologies are piling up as the industry continues to adopt. From democratizing song rights ownership and blockchain licensing to legacy companies like Sony Entertainment that file non-fungible (NFT) music patents.
While electronic dance music and pop seem to get the most attention in relation to NFT music, they are making a difference in more traditional fields such as opera.
Just like any new and new tool, however, there are content creators who live far from the hype. This is often seen with “shitcoins” and pump and dump NFT projects, both of which have little or no value or long-term benefit.
As music NFTs grow in popularity, so does the hype. Hundreds of NFT music projects have appeared on Twitter, creating what could be roughly considered a subgenre of NFT music.
All this hype begs the question: What comes first, the music or the desire to create NFT music?
Cointelegraph spoke with creators in the music industry NFT to answer this chicken-and-egg question and understand this new genre.
Related Topics: Experts explain how NFTs will strengthen the relationship between creators and fans
Currently, NFTs are breaking rather than creating music genres, said Adrian Stern, CEO and founder of Reveel – the Web3 earnings-sharing platform for musicians -:
“Music NFTs are against genre. We see a lot of diversity and creative freedom in NFTs – as if artists are finally free to create for the sake of creativity and not conform to algorithms.”
Before the NFTs, the next wave of internet musicians was composing music for liveliness in short videos. “There is no doubt that artists have been creatively edited by NFTs. They no longer have to write music that works on a 30-second TikTok video,” says Stern.
One example can be seen with NFT musician Sammy Arriaga, who has leveraged his online community on TikTok and Twitter to sell over 4,000 NFT music.
Thomas “Pep” Beepolo, another musician at NFT and creator of the blockchain music label, told Cointelegraph that his artistic passion for making music comes before anything else:
“The drive to create music and then use NFTs as an artistic tool to get an actual product to sell to fans and investors is what motivates me.”
However, when it comes to music being promoted for the creation of NFT, Pipolo says that good music is good music, and bad music is bad music, whether it’s in Web2 or Web3:
“What I think is important to get rid of selling ‘bad’ or ‘lower quality’ music is that artists sell more of their music.”
The importance lies in technology that allows artists to use accessible tools like Twitter artists to sell their characters and stories while giving fans more credibility as owners and participants rather than just followers. Pipolo says this “rewards the playing field for those who have the ability but lack the connections.”
Web3 record company founder Jeremy Fall backed this statement and said it was definitely not about hype. More than that, the idea is:
“To take advantage of technology to be able to create a secondary experience around music that people couldn’t have before.”
Fall says that musicians have always needed to incorporate many types of art into their creations – visuals, performance, audio, and video – and that these new Web3 tools allow this.
Regarding noise, in many scenarios surrounding music, there is consensus that it is learned and natural. Web3 musicians and creators like Pipolo, Fall and Stern see NFT music as a result of the true power of decentralized technology.
