Category: Artists

2022 closed with a dynamic debate in the #web3 channel of the Water & Music Discord server about the role of aggregation and traditional IP law in the music NFT landscape.

Capturing the W&M community’s unique, early-adopter, critical pulse on the music/Web3 landscape, backed by ongoing reporting from our Web3 research team that you won’t find elsewhere.

Our new, collaborative editorial vertical about the future of work in the music business.

We interviewed nearly 20 different artists and community leaders from underrepresented genres in Web3, to learn about the role of genre in shaping long-term branding strategies as well as artist sentiment around the technology.

A recap of how we designed the latest iteration of the W&M Academy, and the main themes that our speakers shared with our community.

There is a new generation of alternative streaming and curation services being built on top of music NFTs, providing a crucial contextual and social layer on top of the wider music/Web3 ecosystem as it scales.

A self-directed guide for artists and their teams to explore the diverse set of entry points into musical metaverse experiences.

A diverse set of ideas to monetize music IP and engage meaningfully with fans in the metaverse, across three main categories: Creating visually immersive content, licensing music IP directly to platforms’ content libraries, and making artist IP available for user identity and expression.

A set of nine artist- and fan-centric design principles for building the next generation of musical metaverse experiences.


Over the last month, several contributors in the Water & Music community collaborated to analyze music NFT market dynamics, based on data from our members-only music NFT database. This report is the result — an in-depth analysis of 2021 music NFT sales by artist genre, platform/protocol, and label affiliation, covering over $86M worth of revenue, as well as a qualitative discussion of popular and emerging forms of utility that have emerged around the format in the last year.

As a follow-up to our myriad studies of fan sentiment around music/Web3 projects in Season 1, we embarked on a survey analysis of how artists and music-industry professionals were feeling about Web3 across its numerous forms, including NFTs, DAOs and social tokens.