Non-Fungible Token (NFT): A Guide For Producers, Studios, and Indie Artists

This is a guest post by Patrick Hill, Founder for Disctopia, a streaming service for indie artists, podcasters, and creatives.

There’s a new currency concept taking the art and music industry by storm.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have become an overnight sensation, as creators and companies within these sectors race to use NFTs in new ways. Pillars in the music industry have announced their first impressions of it, with Billboard Music terming NFTs as a goldrush. Rolling Stone thinks of them as a revolutionary concept.

Its easy to make your first audio NFT, and it just may set you free.

An NFT is a token that verifies the authenticity of a piece of work as unique, and therefore not interchangeable, by maintaining its record of ownership on a blockchain. When American digital artist Beeple’s Everyday – The First 5000 Days NFT sold in March at a record-breaking sum of $69,346,250—the popularity of NFTs went into overdrive.

That’s because every artist, musician, tech, and businessperson became interested in also hitting the jackpot. Elon Musk wanted to sell a song about NFT as an NFT. Jack Dorsey, Co-Founder and CEO of Twitter, wanted to sell his first tweet as an NFT.

To help make the escalating sales of NFTs clear, let’s do a quick round up of the numbers. The value of NFTs jumped to a quarter of a million dollars in 2020, and in the first quarter of 2021 alone, the value of 38 NFT collections skyrocketed to about $22.5 billion based on CoinMarketCap valuations—this increased NFTs financial growth eightfold.

What is needed now is a NFT guide for small music artists, and those adjacent to them—such as producers, beatmakers, audio engineers, podcasters, and studio owners. A rubric to help those on their way up in the music industry feel informed on how to confidently jump on the runaway train that is NFTs. Many reports now claim that NFTs are where the currency of the music industry is headed.

Let’s take a look at the ways you can prepare for the NFT Mania.

NFT: Combining Artwork and Tech

An NFT can represent anything digital—from drawings, to music, to a domain name, to a tweet. A lot of the current excitement around NFTs stems from being able to use tech to sell digital art.

An example of this in the music industry is the recently released album by the Kings of Leon, When You See Yourself , sold exclusively as an NFT. They were the first band to sell an entire album as an NFT, and unlocked potential NFT additives in the form of exclusive opportunities for their fans—such as “golden ticket” experiences, front row seats at future concerts, and exclusive merch items. While this may be the first example of NFTs used in the music industry, we don’t think it will be the last.

The abbreviation NFT (again, Non-Fungible Token) may sound like jargon but in reality, approaching the creation of an NFT doesn’t require a degree in computer science. There are straightforward ways of getting started.

The first step is creating a NFT in the form of your music on your preferred blockchain. That being said, the first step in comprehending NFTs is understanding Blockchain, and then understanding its relationship with NFTs.

For those who don’t know: Blockchain is a structure of recording information in a way that makes it virtually impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system. A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed in its entirety across a network of computer systems.

Because blockchain allows for a unique digitized ledger, this gives the capacity to the creator to place their signature on the script of the blockchain—stamping the digital file with the author’s details and the authenticity of the art.

Because this is possible for blockchain, it coincides perfectly with NFTs, as the value of art often depends on factors such as authenticity, age, and the number of owners. You can see these details in the realm of digital art through the virtual ledger that is the blockchain, attached to the piece.

Now that you understand blockchain and its relationship to an NFT, let’s break down how to make your first NFT.

A Step-by-Step Guide on Creating a NFT

1. Prepare The Music: Decide what you plan to release with NFTs —whether it’s a sound sample, podcast, or an album.
2. Decide on the Blockchain: There are close to a dozen blockchain platforms that you can use. Note that these Blockchains have standalone NFT protocols, marketplaces, and wallet services.

When you create a NFT on one blockchain network, you’ll only be able to sell on that platform or within compliant platforms: something to keep in mind when choosing the network for your NFT sales. A short list of popular blockchain networks are: Mintable, OpenSea, and Binance Smart Chain (BSC)—which will be the network we use as our example for this guide.

1. Connect Your Wallet: You will require a wallet to access any NFT Marketplace. To save yourself stress, use TrustWallet. Make use of the in-built DApp browser to connect your wallet to the NFT marketplace.
2. Top-Up Your Wallet: If on the BSC network as we used for this example, fund your wallet with at least 0.03 BNB. BNB is Binance Coin, the native coin of Binance Chain.
3. Mint Your Music: First, go to “Mint Artwork” on BakerySwap and fill in all of your details— these include things like genre of your music or category of media (Audio, Picture, GIF, Video), your biography, the details on your piece, etc. Then, upload your music, check the agreement section, and finally approve the transaction.
4. Review the Price: You’ll find your music in your Trust Wallet dashboard. With time, your NFT will be approved, and you’ll be the one to set the price. Voila! You just published your first NFT.

Visit Bakeryswap for an easy way to list your first NFT.

How to Take Advantage of NFT as a Small Artist

Trends in the music industry have not always favored upcoming artists and individuals in indie music.

The boom of record labels in the ‘90s and ‘00s completely changed the game, especially for smaller up-and-coming artists. The scenario repeated itself with the growth of music streaming, where many independent music artists require thousands of streams to make minimum wage.

With NFTs, however, the game is changing—so how can smaller artists and those that help them craft their sound take advantage of this shift? Scattered all over the internet and forums are these questions on NFTs by creatives:

• Can NFTs help market my music?
• Will NFT help drive ticket sales and fan engagements?
• Will NFT provide me with sustainable income?
• What happens when I collaborate with other artists and use NFTs?

We believe that NFT can bridge the divide in the following ways:

1. Higher Profits For Indie Artists, Producers, and Studio Owners: NFT allows individuals in the indie music industry to directly sell and reach their audience. It doesn’t matter if you are listened to by a million or just a few hundred because there is no hustle in the NFT game for labels or streaming platforms. Without the middleman, you get to keep what you earn and thereby you get the full value of your sales.
2. Passive Income Generator: NFT is a true game-changer for those in indie music  because you can earn royalty on your music forever. Depending on the NFT platform you select, digital creators can earn royalties, getting a cut whenever their work changes hands.
3. A Rare Opportunity For Upcoming Individuals in the Industry To Grow: For every trend, a new set of trailblazers emerge. Radio first did this, and then later the Internet also created its own set of movers and shakers. There’s no better time to pitch your tent with NFT than now. That’s precisely what the Kings of Leon most likely hoped to achieve by releasing their first album in five years as an NFT.
4. Being Able to Determine What To Giveaway: Even outside of the NFT mania, copyrights are always a complicated transaction for creatives. This can be fixed by NFT, as creatives can determine exactly what they can copyright, and then thereby sell if they so choose—protected by the immutability of blockchain technology.

Final Thoughts

NFT is undoubtedly on the rise. Not to mention that the possibilities are virtually endless (no pun intended) as an NFT can assume the form of an ever-growing list of things such as musical artwork, concert tickets, unreleased songs, and more.

Patrick Hill is founder of Disctopia.

When artist/producer/Linkin Park co-founder Mike Shinoda sold a 37 second teaser of an unreleased song, it created a buzz for the $30,000 it generated. In a Twitter thread, Shinoda noted that he would not have gotten close to $10,000 after sorting out the cost of marketing, digital service providers (DSPs), and other extraneous fees if he had sold the audio clip in a non-NFT format.

NFTs are making it possible to monetize your works and eliminate the intermediaries shortchanging your revenue— which is especially vital as an upcoming producer, or indie artist. Recording studios that want to provide full service also benefit when they can guide their clients through the NFT process.

“Better safe than sorry,” my mother always said. It’s better to prepare early when it comes to considering NFTs for your music—and the sooner the better. NFTs are taking off at unforeseen speeds. As a form of a digital collectible they can open up new worlds of possibilities–and revenue streams–for your creative work.

Patrick Hill is Founder of Disctopia, a streaming service for indie artists, podcasters, and creatives.

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