Music NFTs a powerful tool to transform an audience into a community

As one of the oldest entertainment industries in existence, the music business has experienced many technological advances that enhanced widespread adoption. The digitalization of music meant that artists could reach any audience across the world, and digital distribution gifted people with unlimited access to music. 

With these advances in distribution came some drawbacks in music monetization. The way musicians make money in a digital format has reduced margins from media or video revenue. Artists have been pushed back to generating revenue from offline endeavors like concerts and selling merchandise as the online landscape has been filled with intermediaries that take a piece of the pie.

“Web3 and existing platforms help us build a new chapter of the music industry.” Takayuki Suzuki, CEO at MetaTokyo — Web3 entertainment Studio — told Cointelegraph, “It was hard to find good music for me, checking many record stores in Tokyo and sometimes overseas. Now it’s very accessible via streaming.”

A new paradigm of Web3 tools is giving creators the means to develop an existing audience and transform it into a community. Fan relations have become crucial and they have never been tighter with artists in Web3.

Marcus Feistl, chief operations officer of Limewire, a Music NFT marketplace that was originally a free software peer-to-peer file sharing music-based platform, told Cointelegraph:

“The music and creator industry is certainly on the verge of a step change, moving from a Web2 model focused on content consumption to a Web3 model focused on content ownership. Artists are just beginning to find their way to best utilize Web3 to interact with their audience.”

Among the many use cases for nonfungible tokens (NFTs), the most prevailing has been the ability to form communities around token holders. The rise of decentralized autonomous organizations experimented with coordinating these communities in a digitally native way. All these unlock potential opportunities for independent artists willing to innovate in the next iteration of the music space.

Disrupting the music industry once again

The music industry has always been willing to try new things. As Mattias Tengblad, CEO and co-founder of Corite — a blockchain-based crowdfunding music platform — told Cointelegraph, “When music videos came out in the 80s, it was entirely new and people weren’t sure what to make of it. Adoption of these things often starts slowly but eventually becomes…