NFTs in Music: Increasing Collaboration, Engagement, and Revenue

5 min readJun 21, 2021

This Week’s Clubhouse featured voices from five music industry professionals who are deeply involved with NFTs. The five speakers discussed how NFTs are creating value for musicians, fans, and the music industry.

“I’m excited about music being collectible again.”

-Mike Casey, a prolific songwriter, producer, and saxophonist

Mike Casey, saxophonist

Read on to find out more about:

The Collaborative Opportunities NFTs create for Musicians
NFTs create new Revenue Streams
NFTs transform Concerts and Touring

The Collaborative Opportunities NFTs create for Musicians

People are constructing innovative models to tokenize music. These applications are increasing collaborative opportunities for creatives and also generating new revenue streams.

One NFT platform that is encouraging collaboration between musicians and their audiences is AsyncMusic. Conlan Rios, CEO & Founder of Async Art and its subsidiary AsyncMusic introduced us to his platform:

Conlan Rios, CEO & Founder of Async Art

“AsyncMusic is a platform that allows artists and musicians to deconstruct work into layers and tokenize them to create a community of collectors who can control ownership of a piece of music…

Musicians can put individual collectors in control of different aspects of the song and the collectors essentially become part of the song themselves.”

Async’s model enables fans to engage with music they like in a dynamic and unexampled way.

AsyncMusic allows collectors to recompose up to nine components of a single music track minted by an artist.

Max Shand, Founder of Serenade Sound, spoke about an application of NFT adoption in the music industry that is introducing non-crypto native people to NFT music productions. Amplify X involves pairing sound artists and everyday people to create memorials of people’s lives. People send photos to a producer who will then add a music score to the photo collage and mint the soundtrack as an NFT.

Max Shand, Founder of Serenade Sound

Max told the audience:

“What excites me most about this wave of NFT adoption are these types of mainstream applications.”

NFTs create new Revenue Streams

NFTs carry the potential to increase revenue streams for musicians.

A musician sells their music, but also so much more. Accompanying the sale of music is merchandise and collectibles.

Andrew Schiffman, a music industry veteran currently working at Songclip, explained:

“When you have pieces of artwork, or exclusive content, or something that could replicate a concert ticket, that doesn’t take away from ownership — it just adds value.”

Merchandise and collectibles that correspond to an artist’s music can be embedded with royalties and tokenized, bought, and sold by fans.

Mike Casey talked about the experience of selling album cover art that he created as an NFT. Instead of minting just one version of the album cover art, Mike minted different iterations of his album cover. The different versions tracked the evolution of the final product and produced an additional revenue stream.

NFTs transform Concerts and Touring

Cameron Bale, co-founder of NFT.NYC, noted how NFTs can tie digital assets to in-person events.

Andrew Schiffman commented on this:

“I believe that there’s so much that can go into an NFT ticket including dropping future experiences into that NFT.”

He also suggested that NFT tickets can become widely adopted when more NFT platforms allow concertgoers to buy NFT tickets with their credit cards.

GET Protocol outlines some of the many benefits of using NFT Tickets.

Follow This Week’s Featured Clubhouse Speakers:

Mike Casey, @mikecasey
Constantine Kostenko, @ifirebrand
Andrew Schiffman, @andrews77
Max Shand, @max.shand
Conlan Rios, @conlan

Next Week’s Clubhouse Topic: Women in the NFT Community

Each Wednesday at 4 pm ET in the lead up to the November in-person event, NFT.NYC will host a session on Clubhouse, focused on a topic suggested by the community. Each session will include Featured Speakers from the upcoming NFT.NYC.

June NFT.NYC topics include:

If you’re passionate about NFTs and have an interesting use case to share with the community, please apply at our website NFT.NYC.

Speaker applications close July 31st, 2021.

Frequently Asked Questions

How are NFTs changing the music world?

Over the last few months, artists from Eminem to The Weeknd have created NFTs to deliver to their community of fans. Take Eminem, for example. In April 2021, the multi-platinum artist developed fresh, never-before-heard instrumental tracks, particularly for this NFT release. The songs are only accessible as part of the NFTs that are limited-edition and one-of-a-kind. He also released action figures to go along with the release. Eminem’s release illustrates just one aspect of how NFTs are changing music, but beyond fan engagement, NFTs can also permeate the music industry by improving issues with royalties as well.

Can music be sold as an NFT?

Since an NFT is a digital representation of a one-of-a-kind good, anything that is one-of-a-kind can be sold as an NFT. As mentioned above, Eminem was able to embed totally unique tracks into the NFT’s contract. He’s not the only artist to do this. Kings of Leon, Grimes, and Aphex Twins (creators of the Tetris soundtrack) also released music this way. As a matter of fact, Kings of Leon became the first band to release an album as an NFT. The Kings of Leon NFT additionally included limited edition vinyl and concert tickets with front row seating.

What are the benefits of using NFTs for music?

Releasing totally unique music through an NFT is one thing, but dozens of more use cases for NFTs in the music industry are developing. To offer a brief overview of a few ideas, one platform allows music lovers to purchase blockchain-secured NFTs, stake them, and receive royalties from some of the world’s best musicians. Another use case was developed with the ERC-11555 that payout 8% royalty on any future sale music sales. As time marches onward, more and more use cases will come out with NFTs. Some of these use cases may even improve on the state of royalties as a whole.