“Why did you give up your music career?”

“Because I need to make a living, I cannot make money by making music.”

“Music shouldn’t be your career, it should be just a hobby.”

I’ve heard this conversation many times. It seems a norm for lots of talented musicians struggling with financials. It’s not their fault. According to statistics, as of the end of 2020, the total global music industry revenue reached 21.6 billion USD, and since 2019, the industry has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 7.4% for the sixth consecutive year. Despite the industry’s seemingly successful track record, it still faces a bunch of problems. It is difficult for many music artists to get traffic in this industry, talented musicians are not paid fairly, and more importantly, there is a scarcity of quality content. It is not an efficient and fast-moving wheel if the creators are not motivated. Only if all the stakeholders of the whole music value chain are motivated, the wheel could run at its full speed.

From this article on Insider How much does Spotify pay per stream? What you’ll earn per song, and how to get paid more for your music, we can see how unfair artists are paid for their music. “Yet, Insider found that Spotify has paid artists as little as $.0033 per stream, with other sites reporting upwards of $.0054. Translated, you’ll need about 250 streams to earn a dollar…This hasn’t always been the case — Spotify’s payout rates have changed over time. In 2014, they paid $.00521 on average, but two years later, the average rate dropped to $.00437. By 2017, the average pay rate had been reduced again to around $.00397, according to artist-rights site The Trichordist.”

Artists could have more opportunities to earn a living by making music if there is a technology that can empower them. Music NFT is a certificate of ownership of unique musical works. The owner has the exclusive right to determine how the composition is used. The term “NFT” applies to all kinds of fungible (multiple copies exist and are held by different parties) tokens secured on a blockchain that grants the owner the right to the music, album art, or videos created to accompany the music, or other exclusive access to content. The concept of “Play to Earn, Create to earn, Listen to earn” is to make the value exchange more visible in the exchange of NFT among different stakeholders such as creators, minters, engineers, designers, managers, distributors, and collectors, etc.

Beyond the ownership feature of NFT, music NFTs help music composers, bands and artists connect and interact with their listeners in a more community-oriented and direct way.

As a huge music fan, I often think music is like air to me. Sometimes some music really can lift up my mood, comfort me, energize me when I am working out, and give me additional happiness which is a blessing I am super grateful for.

The reasons why I started to collect music NFTs are:

1. I want to be a supporter of the musicians directly. His/her music gives me happiness, why shouldn’t I pay the musician directly by buying his/her music NFT? There is just too little left for the artist to be paid if we just pay to the music streaming platform.
2. I want to be an early investor in a music project and an artist I like. Buying the NFT from this project or this artist gives me a chance to be a stakeholder in this project. I can either watch how it grows or help it grow by sharing with more people about this music project or this artist. For example, I just bought Kamaal Williams’ fan token $KMLW on Bolero. According to Bolero, “a Fan Token is a unique object, issued in limited quantities by each artist on the platform. Each token is authentic and unalterable thanks to the blockchain. You can consider these tokens as digital membership cards that materialize a tangible link between the artist and his fanbase. A token has two virtues: 1 — They allow access to the rewards offered by each artist, exclusively to his community that holds the tokens. 2 — They can increase in value over time, depending on the exchanges and the development of the artist’s career.”

Boleramusic.com

3. As written in the press release of KOLO NFT — a classical music NFT marketplace launched in Jan 2022, “NFT brings music rights into the retail era, where fans can share revenues with music creators by buying Copyright NFT. Non-fungible means the underlying assets cannot be divided and exchanged freely, but NFT can verify the uniqueness of underlying physical or digital assets.” I do have the expectation and hope the artists I support could grow big. Being his/her fans, we all could be rewarded for our support. However, it is important all the supports have more intentions in collecting the NFT for the music itself in the first place, rather purely for the return of investment. Music NFT takes time to grow along with the artist’s self-development, which highly depends on if the artist has a long-term plan in this industry, if he/she can produce high-quality work consistently, if he/she can foster a supporter community and grow his/her fan base continuously.

4. For classical music, the value of high-quality scarce classical music can be magnified by NFT. In two days when KOLO NFT launched, its first NFT auction fetched a total of 10,395.37 BUSD, which was about nine times the opening bid. Recent NFT sales have exceeded estimates and are performing strongly. As a big fan of Shumann, the piece of “Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op.54 played by Claudio Arrau” listed on KOLO NFT was a pure surprise to me. I absolutely want to collect it, since we are no longer in the CD era.

KOLO NFT MAREKTPLACE

NFT eco-system is still at its infant stage. The experiences for collectors and music fans are not the best yet. As I complained before “The awkward situation I have now is: I own music NFT from http://Sound.xyz, and I still need to listen to the ads on Spotify to enjoy this music smoothly with other music…the current market might be good for musicians, but not very friendly to fans/collectors yet.”

I currently use the following platforms to buy music NFT.

1. OpenSea(purchased music NFT)
2. Sound.xyz (purchased music NFT)
3. Boleramusic.com (I bought an artist token from Bolero)
4. Crypto.com (purchased music NFT)
5. KOLO.Market (waiting for its new version of NFT minting to launch)

The best is yet to come!