Now, many music stars are minting their music as NFTs. While the music industry has everything they need at their disposal, that may not be the case for everyone, especially emerging artists.
Are you a musician looking for how to sell music as NFT? Through our guide, you can discover what a music NFT is, how to mint and sell it, plus the best NFT marketplaces in the music industry right now.
Key takeaways:
- Music NFTs are digital assets that represent ownership or proof of rights to a piece of music or related products, stored securely on a blockchain network.
- Music NFTs give artists a chance to keep full ownership of their creations, make exclusive content, and tap into secondary marketplaces for their fans.
- Top Music NFTs Marketplace, including OpenSea, Foundation, Catalog, Audius, Royal, etc
- The concept of Generate Music refers to the process of composing music by using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms without human intervention.
What is a Music NFT?
NFTs are digital assets that represent a real-world or digital object using blockchain technology. They are one-of-a-kind, akin to rare art pieces. Thus, NFTs are unique assets of which the authenticity and ownership can be easily verified.
NFTs can represent a range of digital assets, including music. With NFTs, musicians across the globe can sell their exclusive songs for what they’re worth and connect with fans worldwide.
Music NFTs aren’t limited to singles or album releases. Artists can even sell virtual or physical merchandise, wearables for metaverse avatars, concert tickets and exclusive behind-the-scenes footage. Plus, producers can sell beats, songwriters can sell lyrics as NFTs, and much more.
How do Music NFTs work?
Music NFTs help to shift the ownership of music from companies to individuals. While record labels play an essential part of the music industry and serve various business functions for artists, music NFTs enable artists to retain full ownership of their creations.
With the development of Web3 platforms and marketplaces, artist now can independently produce and promote their NFTs, thereby controlling their own careers and sources of income.
Another upside is the token-gated community where fans can join exclusive events and promotions. Opening up a secondary sales and market changes what it means to be a fan, and makes it possible for fan groups to be more connected.
How To Create & Sell a Music NFT
Before diving in how to create a music NFT and sell it, an important thing to note is copyright law. If you don’t own the complete recording and publishing rights of a song, you’ll have to first get the license to use it as an NFT.
Here are 4 simple steps to create and sell music NFTs:
- Choose a marketplace: Choose a platform for music NFT creation and sale. Each platform has a different creation procedure, so research carefully and choose one that suits you.
- Create your NFTs: You need to upload a high-quality file such as audio, artwork, and add information like the name of the artist or band, title, and genres. You’ll also decide to release either a collection or a 1/1 edition.
- Set a mint price: You can choose to set a fixed price for your NFT or go for an auction. You might want to consider some factors like how popular you are as an artist, how unique your NFT is, and the market needs for music NFTs.
- List your NFTs for sales: Once you finish setting your price, start listing your NFT on the platforms. The transaction would be completed on the blockchain when someone buys your NFT. The payment for your NFT sales will be sent in your wallet.
The Best Music NFTs Marketplaces
Common marketplaces usually have less strict requirements when it comes to selling your music as an NFT. Each of them have different capabilities so make sure to check before you mint your song as an NFT.
- OpenSea: The largest NFT marketplace in the world, has gained significant trading volume. When it comes to music NFTs, you can mint file types MP3, MP4, and WAV.
- Rarible: It is simple, has an attractive interface, and has its own ERC-20 governance token, called RARI. It supports file types MP4 and MP3 of a maximum size of 100 Mb, perfect for selling your first music as an NFT.
- Nifty Gateway: Owned by cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, is another NFT marketplace popular among musicians. The platform has hosted NFTs of music stars including deadmau5, Grimes, and Steve Aoki.
- Foundation: Another NFT platform that has a meticulous application process in place to accept artists on the platform. For music NFTs, it supports the MP4 file format.
Specialized Music NFT Platforms
There are plenty of marketplaces to buy music NFTs. Although the biggest platforms like Opensea and Foundation also support music NFTs, there are a few NFT Marketplaces for music, that focus solely on that.
Catalog
Zora, a decentralized NFT platform, partnered with 20 emerging artists to launch Catalog Music Marketplace, offering artists 100% of their sales.
As a dedicated music NFTs marketplace that truly helps artists to reclaim music ownership, Catalog is growing in popularity in the music industry. Within two months of its launch, the marketplace onboarded acclaimed artists like Richie Hawtin, Laxcity, SALVA, and Boys Noize, among others.
Audius
Audius is a California-based decentralized music streaming platform. It is basically like a decentralized version of Spotify or Apple Music based on the Ethereum and Solana networks. This means, the platform is run by a community of artists, fans, and developers, allows artists to upload their music on the platform free of cost.
It also offers AUDIO tokens for governance capabilities. Unlike the platforms mentioned above, Audius does not allow you to mint NFTs. However, offers ‘Audius Collectibles’, where music artists can display their NFTs on their profile.
Royal
Another NFT music platform that you can check out is Royal. The platform works in a simple way, musicians can sell royalty ownership to their songs along with special perks. Then, the collectors can buy the royalty ownership directly from the artists through tokens. To sum up, every time the artist earns via music streaming, so does the collector.
Royal is up to the artists to decide the percentage of royalties they want to sell. The royalty percentage also depends on the token’s tier. The higher the tier, the larger the royalty payout that the collector receives.
Async Music
Async Music is an invite-only marketplace that focuses on programmable music, which changes over time. It is a vertical of Async Art, Ethereum’s platform for programmable art. According to the website, it allows users to create a single “Master Track NFT” which comes with individual components, “Stem NFTs”. While the “most hardcore fan” will own the 1/1 Master, the Stems will go to the other fans. As of now, the platform only supports MP3 files.
Sound.xyz
Sound.xyz is a music platform that aims to solve two main issues in the music industry. First of all, while a majority of the produced songs go unheard, the top 1% of artists get 90% of streams. Next, artists barely earn $0.003 per stream and have to struggle to make ends meet.
Thus, Sound was set up to solve these problems and support the next generation of artists. It describes itself as a platform created “for a more collaborative music movement, built on web3 technology and values.”
Famous Musicians with NFT Collections
Electronic dance music producer and DJ, 3LAU sold his album as an NFT in 2021 for over $11 million. Similarly, in March 2022, British MC and Rapper, Big Narstie dropped his latest single ‘Gas the Set’ as an NFT.
Australian singer-songwriter Sia too has a music NFT collection to her name, called Siaverse. On the other hand, American rapper, singer and songwriter, Doja Cat sold her NFT collection for over $188,000 late 2021.
In the meantime, Snoop Dogg recently announced his plans to make Death Row Records into an NFT music label. Essentially, he will be “putting out artists through the metaverse.” Then, in August 2021, The Dallas Symphony Orchestra dropped classical-music-themed NFTs complete with a full concert video, behind-the-scenes videos, and VIP access to a reunion concert too.
What is Generative Music?
Much like generative art NFTs found their popularity, many also consider generative music NFTs the next meta. In contrast to the typical practice of dropping albums as NFTs, an algorithm creates generative music NFTs. Most often, these NFTs offer music that adapts real-time, depending on a situation or some built-in function.
Let’s take a look at some of the popular generative music NFT projects in the space!
The Ghost of Frank Dukes
The Ghost of Frank Dukes features 9,999 pieces of original generated audiovisual artworks. All the music NFTs in the collection are algorithmically generated from decades of source material produced by music producer, Frank Dukes.
The project has a solid roadmap in place, with future developments such as a Ghost Downloader, Ghost Sample Generator, Ghost Editor, and more.
Omgkirby Genesis – Lo-fi generative music
The Omgkirby Genesis collection is perfect for those who love lo-fi music, music with many imperfections. The collection includes 3,000 unique pieces of generative lo-fi music created from a combination of algorithmically-assisted music and hand-drawn art.
The collectors get full ownership of the song, complete with the master recording and publishing rights. Besides, all members will become part of the omgkirby DAO, where they will have the power to make decisions on the omgkirby treasury.
Final Thought
NFTs have opened up an all-new means for musicians to earn, engage with fans, and amass a global following. While these digital assets offer a promising future for artists in the music world, it is important to do your due diligence and analyze the market before dropping your first NFT.
