Why I'm Still in Music NFTs

Yo! Black Dave here. I recently started going by Black Dave MK2 on music platforms but we’re still the same old Black Dave in the streets. For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to pen something that talks about why I’m still in music NFTs, and honestly, I’ve been struggling…so I decided to take a different approach to this and talk about something that’s a bit easier:
Why it sucks to be in music NFTs in 2024
Right now it feels like it’s easier to quit music NFTs than it is to stay. It feels easier to quit NFTs altogether than it is to stay. You’re working hard on something just for a memecoin to take the wind out of your promotional sails. You put together a stellar marketing campaign for yet another Cryptopunk derivative on the L2 blockchain that came out that day to suck up all the air in the room.
All of our favorite platforms are becoming social. So far, this has meant that instead of charging people a premium for your work, you accept tips. This isn’t a strict Zora complaint, this has been happening across the ecosystem as a music creator. Catalog Radio (which I love) was an effort at creating a social experience using tipping (cosigns) as a way to reward creators for being involved. In a slow market, I know everyone is trying to find what they can do. Sound shifted to prioritizing amount of mints over minting volume, as soon as things started to take a downturn. Free mints ran rampant, because that was the best way to land in the algorithm they had created. Manifold has put forth zero effort to create a better music minting experience. You can mint a song there, but prepare for it to be a less than stellar user experience, on top of having no platform to support pushing forward your work (or for you to be mad that they didn’t push your work).
There are a lot of people in the NFT ecosystem who have collected zero NFTs who have had a lot to say about them. I’m lying, they probably collected an Ed Balloon NFT because my dawg knows how to play the game and I’ve always envied that, shout out Ed. Your favorite NFT content creator spaces host who hypes things up to dump on you hasn’t participated in the ecosystem enough to understand our desired outcomes as participants but just goes “how am I supposed to play this” like they’re Kobe Bryant doing a between the legs dunk in the 1997 dunk contest. Guess there isn’t enough flip potential for music like there is a picture of a goblin brought to you by some anonymous dudes on the internet who you were praying were Beeple instead so you could sell it for more.
Speaking of flip potential, I think music artists kinda fucked up, too. We didn’t get better. We didn’t become bigger or more well known. Our NFTs ended up being worth the same thing because we…ended up doing more and more of the same thing. We priced our NFTs at their maximum possible value because so many artists who were showing up in 2021 had already had such a negative experience with the music industry that they saw it as a way to finally get back what was lost…and collectors were paying! What a time. Finding success as a musician is fucking hard, so I get it…but aside from a couple of edge cases, no artist has been able to really find a way to make it from what I call a “traditional music NFT” which is essentially one that puts the song into focus. Without PFP rarity mechanics or some AI addition or inclusion of stems that you’ll never use by a producer that you’ve definitely heard of, artists couldn’t find it.
I typed all these words to say that the state of platforms sucks, the state of interest sucks, and the state of artists sucks…but I’m still here trying to figure it out.
So, what doesn’t suck about music NFTs?
Honestly, at this specific moment, everything sucks about them…but I know there are a ton of folks who are passionate specifically about music and blockchain and NFTs who are thinking about the landscape and the tech offerings and are looking for and building ideas that could lead in this direction. I’ll be here trying as we all figure it out.
Later.