A Closer Look at How NFTs Are Changing Music

Music NFTs Give Artists More Freedom 

Music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music have enabled people to access unlimited music for a monthly fee. A new way for artists to monetize their work has also emerged with the rise of blockchain technology and digital assets, known as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

Creative freedom and financial freedom: that's what I think people can achieve on the blockchain as artists. It's a new dream,” Italian jazz saxophonist and music NFT artist Milo Lombardi told BSC News.

Music NFTs are certificates that represent ownership of unique audio or musical pieces. The distributed ledger in which NFTs are stored makes them hard to counterfeit.

“Through NFTs, artists can claim full ownership of their music without having to share their income with intermediaries like music labels or lawyers,” according to Binance Blog.

In today's music industry, streaming accounts for about 80% of revenues. However, according to Rolling Stone, around 90% of streaming revenues go to the top 1% of artists. In addition, while streaming platforms now help direct 12% of total music revenue to artists, compared to 7% to artists before the internet, many artists still struggle to make a living.

Furthermore, artists are paid only a few cents per stream. Spotify pays around $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, so your song  needs to be streamed 16.67 million times to earn $50,000. It gets worse when you consider the numbers: Only 13,400 out of 7 million artists made $50,000 or more on Spotify in 2020.

NFTs eliminate artists’ need for labels to release their music. Furthermore, artists can sell their music NFTs directly to their fans and earn money from secondary market resales.

NFTs allow artists to launch unique, collectible versions of their music. Their music becomes more valuable by claiming uniqueness and scarcity.

“Before, being a musician was kind of almost mocked. [...] It's not a dream anymore. Now, if you are creative, not only with your music but also with your release structure, you can make some money, which is cool,” artist Lombardi told BSC News.

Ethereum became a home for all kinds of NFTs, including music NFTs. Unfortunately, gas fees on Ethereum make minting and handling NFTs quite costly. However, BNB Chain’s speed and low gas fees make it a good alternative for NFTs in the music industry.

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BNB Chain for Music NFTs

BNB Chain offers fast transaction speeds and is significantly cheaper than the Ethereum network. In addition, BNB Chain supports Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) capability with no network congestion.

Let's examine some of the emerging music NFT platforms BNB Chain:

Corite: Corite is a Web3 music platform built on the BNB Chain to support and share musicians' success. Corite allows artists to raise funds for their music. In addition, musicians can reach out to fans within Corite if they need assistance with marketing and promotion. 

ROCKI: ROCKI is the first user-centric music streaming platform powered by the ROCKI token, which rewards artists and listeners for streaming their songs. ROCKI helps the music streaming industry with its blockchain-based solution. According to the whitepaper, ROCKI cuts out the middleman and provides the most significant benefit to musicians and listeners. 

NUSIC America: NUSIC empowers musicians to monetize their work better and extract value from it. NUSIC offers NFT music bonds that use Chainlink's API functionality to import Spotify and YouTube metrics and assign them a rating based on the artist's popularity and quarterly collateral deposits. 

Crypto has certainly made a mark in the music industry with music NFTs. Artists are beginning to see the benefits of combining music and NFTs. With blockchain technology growing worldwide, NFTs are a unique means of harnessing the tech’s potential for artists.

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What is BNB Chain:

BNB Chain is a community-driven, decentralized, and censorship-resistant blockchain powered by BNB. It consists of BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain, EVM compatible and facilitating a multi-chain ecosystem. Through the concept of MetaFI, BNB Chain aims to build the infrastructure to power the world’s parallel virtual ecosystem. 

For more information on BNB Chain, these links:

Website | Twitter | Discord | Telegram | GitHub |

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