Rolling Stone NFTs + 5 more music stories you might have missed this week
A quick roundup of music NFT news
Gm music fans
Here’s a quick recap of everything going on in Web3 music this week.
1. Rolling Stone x Pussy Riot NFTs
Rolling Stone has teamed up with Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and photographer Ellen von Unwerth for a series of 11 unique NFTs on Coinbase NFT. The lead 1/1 is an iconic cover shot (below). Minting on January 11th, all net proceeds will go to supporting women’s reproductive rights.
2. Reo Cragun, Daniel Allan & TWERL launch Astro
9 of the biggest independent musicians in Web3 have come together to launch an artist collective called Astro. The group – which includes Reo Cragun, Daniel Allan and TWERL — collaborated at a writing camp in LA and the result is an 8-track audiovisual album.
It will drop as NFTs on Sound Protocol. Every track will have a different rarity, as well as a unique burn mechanism (collect four NFTs and burn them to reveal a hidden track).
3. Spores: the remixable NFT
Spores is an interactive music NFT that lets you remix music on the fly with four different sliders, created by Kanye West and Rihanna producer Keyon Christ.
The project is auctioning one Spore a day using the new Nouns Builder tool (which allows anyone to create a Nouns-style daily NFT auction with no code). Here’s today’s.
4. Zora hits 1.3 million editions
Zora is an open protocol allowing any musician, photographer or artist to create NFTs. Despite the bear market, Zora still had a strong year and solidified itself as a hub for music NFTs and videos.
A total of 5.8k creators used to Zora to mint 1.3 million editions last year. It generated 1.5k ETH ($1.825 million) for artists from more than 180k collectors.
5. Decent bets on mass adoption of free / low-cost NFTs
So far, NFTs have been heavily financialized with a focus on record sales, speculation and crowdfunding. But one of the bigger music/creator protocols is taking a different bet.
Decent.xyz thinks that free or low-cost NFTs will act as a ‘top of funnel’ method for musicians and creators to capture fans and retain attention. I’ve talked about this shift to free / low cost NFTs before and I think it’s going to be the dominant trend of 2023.
6. Metaverse music concerts on your TV?
Pixelynx is a music metaverse project founded by Deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin. It features a “Pokemon Go” style AR game and aims to host virtual concerts. Those concerts will now be available to watch on LG TVs thanks to a new partnership.
Pixelynx was recently acquired by Animoca brands - one of the world’s largest blockchain gaming companies and investors.
Bonus: OG crypto-music collective launches media network
Future Modern has been making moves in the music NFT space long before the hype of 2021, helping hip hop artists make more than $250k through Web3. The collective is now raising 60ETH to fund its own media network.
Data roundup
Sound.xyz - the leading independent music NFT platform - ended the year with a 7-month high in primary volume. The number of new drops hit a new record high.
However, collector growth dropped slightly after a peak in November.
See all the stats at Nico Elzer’s Dune dashboard.
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Disclaimers
Ziggy Ziggy owns music NFTs from Keyon Christ, TWERL, Reo Cragun and Daniel Allan.