The Future of Music NFTs

GM, GM.

As Britney would say;

“It’s been a while, I know I shouldn’t have kept you waiting, but I am here now”.

Before I start dropping tunes with Chaos Collective, I’d like to address the steps we need to take to make any blockchain welcoming to music creators and collectors so that we can go down this path within DotSama. Any chain has the potential to get to this point, so let’s group up and do it.

1. The consumption of music

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This is the elephant in the room that must be addressed. We will see collectors making purchases of music across multiple NFT platforms and chains. How does one listen and organise these tracks?

Solution 1:

Yang Wao @ AmsterDot suggested a great solution: a plug-in within a wallet. If a variety of NFT platforms adapted this plug in, the owners of the NFTs could sort these in playlists and libraries within the dApps and also listen to them on the fly through mobile.

Solution 2:

An NFT aggregator with a custom UI on a platform such as Subsocial, where the user can do the same as the above and showcase their collections within the platform, as well as make playlists and libraries.

2. Motion & IP

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Besides the fact that sound can move matter and impact our psychological state, it plays a great part in constructing narratives, weather in games, series of films. We need to create platforms and music which will be used within these contexts through IP and sharing rights, as this could easily generate passive income for musicians and obviously attract more creators to the ecosystem.

Additionally, music releases can be used to fund films, stories, games etc which can be created later on, as sound gives a very good representation of emotion, direction and experience, thus resulting in the collectors deeper relation and understanding of what their investment would help bring into the world.

3. We need to stop forcing artists to make roadmaps. We need art x business duos and/or platforms which facilitate this.

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Period. Do you think Leonardo da Vinci had a roadmap? Perhaps Frida Khalo? Yayoi Kusama? Kandinsky? Not really. I believe mr. Warhol seemed like someone who did, but he lived with his mother, created a drug den, aka the Factory and a capitalistic view of what art is and should be (basically just gamed the system and kudos to him for doing that).

In the old days art was used to create religious motifs or portraits of royalty. Don’t most NFT collections feel like they are doing something similar in their own twisted way? We have derivatives of derivatives. Remember Fight Club?

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We religiously create collections which are meant to flip and do a 10x. Within this process the importance of quality of art becomes substituted for what its value is. Let’s make no mistake here, 90% of art within the NFT space is underwhelming. If we want to really engage the public and bring great talent which would set the DotSama eco on the map for art and culture, we need to do better than this. We need to nurture talent by:

- making minting easily accessible through UX/UI

- promoting the right talent and not just high volume collections which are driven by hype and/or wash trading

- help connect talent with devs and business oriented individuals so they can learn and grow together

- build platforms which facilitate the above

- have patronage programs for artists which gives them independence and the ability to create without strings attached

Never forget that art has something special within it and it must stay independent in order to flourish.

4. Inclusion & categorisation

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We must welcome a wide variety of genres and build platforms which enable easy ways to upload and search for music. Are you looking for a jazzy track that comes with a vinyl? Maybe just some stems for your next song? There should be an aggregator platform which facilitates all of these. Additionally, the “search” for music could be gamified and turned into a proper adventure, rather than be an endless scroll of death.

5. Stems & collaboration

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With platforms like Invarch, we can easily break all of our tracks into stems that can be taken and re-used in other NFTs and songs, tools, motion. However, we would still need a UI through which this can be easily done, otherwise it isn’t going to work. Every single thing we do needs to be far more automated and easy for non-crypto users.

6. Generative music

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What if we could press buttons labeled with names of emotions and a dApp spits these types of tracks out? You know DALL-E-2, right? Well, imagine if you could type text and the algorithm spits out music or loops which you can compose together. I am not arguing here that algorithms should replace the traditional creation of music, it is nearly a different way of making tracks, and sometimes people just want to make them on the go or have fun, get their ideas out asap (this is dangerous but I believe it is the way that we are heading in: tools which enable us to easily spit out our ideas from our brains are the holy grail of creation). Additionally, we do have some generative music tooling within DotSama: VYBEZ.

7. Easy to use creative tooling & Learn2Earn

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So how do we make non-musicians understand music, its value and the enjoyment the process of creation brings? By building tooling for both musicians and non-musicians. We’ve always had a barrier to entry for, erm, everything within the arts. Technology can break those barriers down, especially if we reward users for learning about music creation and create economies around it.

8. Create partnerships with streaming platforms

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I believe that music should be accessible to everyone. On that note, we became very spoilt when it comes to music availability. Streaming platforms allow us to listen to music at anytime anywhere, and while this is great, the income of those that make music is not.

However, I still think we need to collaborate with streaming platform and more importantly, 3rd party distributors such as Tune Core(eg the owners of the NFTs can vote if the track will also be on Spotify). I believe musicians should have the right to release their music on all streaming platforms and the NFTs are an extra collectible which has its own purpose and existence within a different realm.

9. Utility

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RMRK NFTs enable a lot of possibilities, this can be applied to music NFTs as well. I won’t talk too much on this matter as in the next few months you’ll see this utility being applied within my drops. What I will say is that equippable and multi-resource NFTs allow us to create interconnected universes. This might just be music within a game or an additional resource which serves as a ticket for events and so on.

Conclusion

Based on the above we can conclude that every single blockchain ecosystem needs to work hard on creating a welcoming environment for musicians and collectors of their NFTs. Whilst innovation should be prioritised, we must not forget about simplicity and intuition. The key to creating this environment is slick UX and accessibility in order to harness creativity. If you are interested in building any of the above, please don’t hesitate to reach out and let’s write some proposals to the councils and help DotSama become the home of music NFTs.