Best NFT music streaming platforms and how they will change the music industry
Music distribution has long been a crux of artists: Labels take a lot of money, Spotify only plays top hits in playlists and self promotion is high effort. 90% of music streaming revenue go to the top 1% of artists. In total the music industry generates about $42 billion in revenue and less than 12% goes to artists.
Music NFT's are a great way for artists to connect directly with their fans — and monetize that connection profitably.
Here are some recent songs that dropped as NFT - stream the NFT songs here:
The normal modus of artists is to list on several streaming platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud as well as purchasing platforms like Beatport or Bandcamp. More nuanced providers like Epidemic Sound offer music licensing.
Future music distribution as NFT are mainly focused on fan engagement which allows consumers to support the artist directly. If you want to read more about NFT’s, here is an in-depth NFT guide: Here are a few of the best music NFT platforms:
- Music streaming: Rocki is a music streaming platform on top of the blockchain that makes the streaming royalties split public. Also popular: Audius
- Catalog allows artists to sell NFT minted full songs without giving up the rights to the song.
- Songcamp: Is like Y-Combinator for music and multimedia artists.
- Opensea offers a catalog of music NFT’s.
- OneOf connects artists with fans in a private space.
Because it has become a trend for music celebrity artists to launch their own platforms, here is an overview:
- Snoop Dogg took over Death Row Record and coverted it to an NFT music label
- Pharrell launched GODA
- John Legend launched Our Song
As of 2022, NFT sales have surpassed $4Bn USD (source) and could reach $80Bn USD by 2025 (source) - all this while monthly music NFT sales have only been $10-$25M USD per month in beginning of 2022 (source) - here is a statistic of music NFT sales per month:
One unique feature of music NFT's is the distribution: Fans buy the NFT and show it off on social media platforms which itself enables more sales and higher resale values of the NFT. If you think back to some of the greatest music artists who live today you'd love to own one part of their album.
To me this is the most fundamental difference to regular NFTs: Music NFT's are a lot higher quality. Many big name artists distribute their new music releases as NFT contrary to art NFT's which are typically distributed by hobby artists or programmers and have on average a much lower quality.
After thinking about this a bit more, here are the main differences between art NFTs vs music NFTs:
Art NFT's:
- Artist Type: New experimental artists
- Prices: Very high for most popular
- Role for user: Get a piece of this new movement, show it off
- Role for artist: Selling art as art
- Annoying for: No one. Maybe for famous artist who can’t go NFT because it will destroy their existing body of art value.
Compare this with Music NFT's:
- Artist Type: Established famous artists
- Prices: Comparatively low for most popular
- Role for user: Similar role as initial vinyl editions - collect
- Role for artist: Become more independent of music label, a way to monetize missing revenue from streaming royalties. In the future marketing channel for selling concert tickets, increase streams, build fan base for real life privileges.
- Annoying for: Major Music Labels who chokehold on streaming royalties.
NFT music streaming royalties forecast
Some platforms allow to purchase streaming royalties as part of the NFT. To analyze if streaming royalties are worth it, let's take Diplo's "Don't Forget My Love" song which dropped as NFT on Royal.io:
- According to Songsters Diplo has about 32M monthly listeners on Spotify. You can see the features in playlists going up steadily as well. For relevance you can also see his Instagram streams and Shazams are going up which we take as indicator as relevance as people identify with the music.
- You can see Diplo's most recent NFT drop on Opensea.
- In the Royal.io dashboard - the platform Diplo chose to partner with for the NFT drop - you can see number of streams going up. Unfortunately this can only be seen by owners off one of the NFT tokens. The data is based on Stem.io - a song insights and royalties distribution platform which you could subscribe to directly to get these insights before purchasing the NFT. It seems to do a similar job as some stock analysis tools.
