Music NFT market update, Q2 2021: Sales down by over 90%, but artists are still experimenting

By: Cherie HuBrooke Jackson

Published: 2021-07-29

The music industry’s history with blockchain technology is a literal roller coaster.

Flashback to 2015/2016: Organizations like Blokur, Jaak, Vezt, Verifi Media, Ujo Music and the Open Music Initiative were popping onto the market, hoping to use the decentralized, immutable and programmable promise of blockchain technology to fix music rights and ownership metadata, which was decidedly siloed and inconsistent across the industry, leaving money on the table for hundreds if not thousands of artists and rights holders. But there were two main roadblocks. One, blockchain was (and still is) a garbage-in, garbage-out scenario, in that “smart” contracts were only as smart as the quality and accuracy of the data they ingested; the music industry had a major systemic problem with metadata quality and incompleteness that blockchain alone could not solve for them. Two, major record labels, publishers and PROs felt that their competitive advantage relied on a lack of transparency, especially around their contracts/NDAs; getting these behemoths to agree to share song metadata in a truly decentralized way using blockchain became a losing game.

Much of the music industry became disillusioned with blockchain in general, and most of the startups from this era either are still operational but have removed the word “blockchain” entirely from their marketing copy, or have shut down altogether. The following years (2018/2019) were all in all pretty quiet as far as new blockchain-related music announcements were concerned.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, where live music revenue plummeted by 98% year-over-year, forcing the music industry to reckon with the unsustainability of digital music economics and experiment with alternative revenue models for artists.

In late 2020, a small, enterprising group of electronic artists like 3LAU and RAC began selling their work on niche crypto-art marketplaces like SuperRare and Nifty Gateway for tens of thousands of dollars apiece, inverting streaming economics by engineering scarcity rather than ubiquity around their music. Major celebrities soon caught on, with the likes of Grimes, deadmau5 and Snoop Dogg generating millions of dollars from NFT drops in early 2021, sparking sudden interest and hype around the token format for everybody and their mother. Ultimately, monthly music NFT sales peaked in March 2021 at $26.8 million, driven largely by fixed-price drops from independent electronic artists and growing activity from major-label acts, as we covered at the time.

But the market plunged almost as quickly as it rose. According to our own music NFT database, monthly sales for music NFTs are down almost 94% from their peak just four months ago. Artists and fans alike criticized the environmental impact of crypto and the financially exclusionary nature of the big-ticket auction model, while labels and rights holders nervously tried to wrap their heads around licensing and rights in a crypto-first world — and what role labels even play in this decentralized, direct-to-fan world in the first place, where artists commanded more leverage.

To adapt terminology from the Gartner Hype Cycle, we’re now in a second “trough of disillusionment” with music and blockchain. But this time around, we’re slightly more “enlightened,” in the sense that a larger swath of the music industry and the general public is familiar with crypto and blockchain, and is starting to think more critically about how to take the unique capabilities of the technology seriously. We’ve been through this before, and are equipped with more knowledge than the last time. So what are we going to do with it?

Drawing on our previous music NFT reports in March and April, we’re excited to share our latest music NFT market update below, with a focus on Q2 2021 numbers up until June 30. The biggest trends arising from our data include not only the wider market crash, but also the dramatic increase in platform competition for music NFTs and the emergence of NFT marketing tactics that present a more holistic vision of crypto-driven fandoms. This report is also long (~6K words) because we devote a lot of text to exploring longer-term use cases and strategic implications for different kinds of music companies around NFTs, not just short-term market activity.

Disclaimers, plus methodology as a meta-story

Our methodology has stayed the same: We manually monitor over 20 different NFT marketplaces on a daily basis, and aggregate sales on NFTs that are sold directly by a musician or music brand into our members-only database. Our news sources include online publications and press releases (aggregated through Google Alerts), Twitter threads and discussions within our membership community and Discord server. There may be a few gaps in our data as part of this manual process, but we can guarantee you it’s still the most comprehensive music-specific NFT database you’ll find on the Internet.

The usual disclaimers still hold, plus a few more that were not previously addressed:

We also believe that the fact that we’ve been forced to approach data collection in a manual rather than automated way is itself a significant part of the music NFT story. Sure, there are some aggregated blockchain data sources out there like Bitquery, Etherscan and NonFungible.com, plus APIs like those at OpenSea and NFT.Kred, that would allow us to capture a representative view of the NFT market as a whole. But because the market is still relatively new, there are no metadata standards that allow developers or researchers to distinguish among, say, which NFT is from a musician versus from a filmmaker or visual artist (in fact, most of these more creatively-driven NFTs are grouped together in datasets and tagged simply as “Art”). For our industry-specific purposes — where a connection to a musical artist or music brand is required for inclusion in our database — this lack of metadata forces us to take a hand-curated approach to data collection and tagging, and to cultivate more hands-on, intuitive knowledge of the NFT platforms where artists are particularly active.

Aggregate pricing info is also not easily accessible on many NFT sites, which is ironic given the supposedly open and decentralized nature of blockchain. On certain sites like Crypto.com and Near, for instance, we’ve found it difficult if not impossible to retrieve simple summary stats for a NFT drop like the total amount of revenue generated, let alone the average primary sale price for fixed-price vs. single-copy tokens. Some smart contract platforms simply remain unreadable or illegible to laypeople without a deeper technical knowledge of how crypto works. In these instances, we’ve had to reach out directly to the companies in question to fact-check sales data for us, which has been helpful but will be inefficient as a methodology long-term. There are also certain, centralized platforms like Nifty Gateway and Sotheby’s that allow collectors to pay for NFTs with credit cards, which means the financial transaction is registered off-chain, further exacerbating the need to consult these platforms manually for sales data.

Given that NFT awareness has gone mainstream at this point, our hope is that both consumer-facing blockchain platforms and backend protocols will stay true to the spirit of decentralization and work to make their financial transactions and analytics more legible to the average user, which will help multiple industries — not just music — better understand and leverage crypto market dynamics, instead of going in blind.

Summary stats

Since the market peak in March, it’s been a consistent downhill climb. In May, music NFT activity decreased dramatically across almost virtually all of the key measures we track:

In June 2021, aggregate music NFT activity decreased yet again:

Overall, from the two-month period of March/April 2021 to the two-month period of May/June 2021, aggregate music NFT sales declined by over 90%, while the number of music NFTs sold declined by 85%. This is consistent with wider NFT market trends as tracked by NonFungible.com, which displayed a 90% dip in weekly NFT sales from early May to early June.

Interestingly, the average primary sale price per music NFT increased despite an aggregate dip in revenue. To be fair, this growth is highly skewed by Don Diablo’s auction on Sotheby’s, which sold for $927,500 in June and led the proportion of music NFT sales from single-copy auctions to nearly triple from March/April (17.5% of sales) to May/June (45.7%).

With all the hype around crypto, you might think that speculation, rather than social clout or the pure aesthetic value of an audiovisual artwork, is still a major driver behind music NFT purchases. Indeed, some of the markups we’ve seen on secondary NFT sales in our database have been amusing, to put it lightly. For instance, each NFT in Kaskade and Chad Knight’s ANNUAL drop on Nifty Gateway cost just $1, but they’ve already been selling on the secondary market for a few thousand dollars apiece — a.k.a. a 2000% markup.

That said, a recent academic paper proposes that secondary NFT sales are actually a lot less common than one might think. Out of all the NFTs that generated a primary sale between June 23, 2017 and April 27, 2021, less than 10% of them generated a secondary sale within a week, and only around 22% within one year. This data suggests that the speculative value of NFTs is a myth, which makes sense if you look at how the music NFT market specifically has largely weeded out artists who are only looking to make a quick buck from a splashy auction.

At the same time, according to our database, the number of musicians and music brands minting and selling NFTs has actually stayed pretty consistent month-over-month, at around 60 to 100 artists a month. While aggregate sales data might imply a financial bubble, more artists continue to enter the playing field for the first time, while platform competition has significantly increased, creating more partnership and marketing opportunities for artists across career stages (more on that later). The sudden dip in music NFT sales in May and June likely reflects widespread fatigue with the exclusionary, big-ticket collectible model for NFTs, and a hunger for more interesting use cases with more utility and inclusion in the long term.

Unlike in the previous two months, there were no million-dollar music NFT auctions in the months of May or June. In fact, only five artists even cracked $200,000 in total primary NFT sales over this two-month period:

Notably, two of these top-ranking artists, Verdigris and HMLTD, sold their NFTs through Async, a platform working on NFTs as vehicles for co-creating dynamic art by allowing collectors to own individual stems or layers (as we covered in the previous report).

Electronic music continues to dominate as the top genre in our database, accounting for 76% of all-time music NFT sales and 70% of sales in May and June, accounting for over $2.6 million in the past two months. 60% of the artists in the top-10 charts from the past two months are electronic artists and DJs.

That said, classical has also made its first big appearance in the music NFT world — surpassing rock, pop and hip-hop to rank as the second-highest genre for NFT revenue, with almost $600,000 in total sales since May.

Async has played a large role in classical’s rise, driving around $270,000 in sales for Verdigris’ offering “Betty’s Notebook” in May. (To be transparent, there may be a conflict of interest for the buyers here: One of the top buyers of the original “Betty’s Notebook” master track, metapurse.eth, also bought Beeple’s record-breaking NFT through Christie’s, which helped drive up the value of the collector’s own NFT investment fund.) The technology that Async provides can be especially interesting for more experimental, improvisational and instrumental composers who are more open to exploring co-creation and remixing projects using NFTs, beyond just the limited confines of the scarcity-driven auction model that has gained traction elsewhere.

The other main composer to drive NFT sales in the classical genre is Logan Nelson, who sits at the center of classical, electronic and film scoring, and has worked on scores and soundtracks for the likes of Green Book and Dear White People. Nelson’s NFTs have earned over $310,000 in revenue to date, particularly through Nifty Gateway and Sotheby’s.

Major-label activity slows down dramatically

In our last report, we found that NFT revenue from major-label artists had been accelerating rapidly, reaching over $22 million in a matter of just a few months (February 1 to April 30). The growth was so steep that we had even predicted major-label acts would “at least equal, if not surpass, indie/unsigned artists in NFT revenue by the end of this year.”

Revenue figures in May and June could not paint a more different story: Artists signed to major labels generated under $700,000 in total revenue over this time period, pulling down their share of the market from 31% to 17%.

Herein lies an important contradiction: While music stars and celebrities are driving most of the mainstream awareness around NFTs, it’s really independent and unsigned artists who are driving the lion’s share of market activity and continuing to set the standard for everyone else.

There are a few hypotheses for why major-label artist activity in NFTs has slowed down. One has to do with contracts: Perhaps major labels and publishers are clamping down on their roster artists’ NFT activity, claiming that artists cannot sell NFTs around their music unless they get permission from their label/publisher and then give those partners a cut of revenue.

But a more likely hypothesis has to do with a key strategic difference between individual artists and larger rights holders: While artists tend to optimize for the value of their individual brand and the direct relationships they cultivate with their fans, major labels and publishers tend to optimize for value and profits across an entire, aggregated roster of thousands of artists and millions of songs. It’s a matter of artist value versus catalog value.

Traditionally, the way that labels and publishers drive catalog value is by striking blanket licensing deals directly with tech platforms, as the majors have done with DSPs like Spotify and social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. This behavior has ported over to crypto; in fact, we’re seeing labels announce platform-level deals and strategic partnerships at a much faster rate nowadays than one-off NFT campaigns around individual artists on their rosters. Some examples of these platform-level deals include Warner Music’s partnership with Genies and Dapper Labs, Universal Music Group’s partnership with Ikonick (via UMG’s merch arm, Bravado) and JYP Entertainment’s partnership with Dunamu — all announced in the last three months.

Interestingly, all of these label partnerships seem to be focused on promoting the artist’s likeness and image through ancillary items like photographs and avatars, rather than music catalogs per se. This reflects a wider reality for most crypto applications in music today — namely, they monetize an artist’s community, brand image and reputation, not their copyrights.

Unsurprisingly, Nifty Gateway still commands the majority of music NFT sales, coming in at around $1.6 million, or 43% of the market. Sotheby’s comes in second (again, thanks to the outlier Don Diablo auction) with $980K, followed by Async with $650K. Interestingly, Crypto.com, which was a major contender for top music NFT platform in April, did not seem to release any music-related NFT campaigns in May or June.

Looking at the number of music NFTs sold rather than total revenue, Fanaply emerges as the runner-up, ranking ahead of Nifty Gateway with 27% of total NFTs sold. For now, Fanaply makes the vast majority of NFTs on its platform available for free, often in exchange for some form of fan data (e.g. integrating one’s Spotify account and following a particular artist on Spotify).

While music NFT sales activity has decreased across the board, one key area of growth is in new platform competition specifically for a music customer base.According to our research, we’ve found over 20 different NFT platforms that focus on music and/or have several music executives on their advisory boards — many of which have launched in the past few months alone.This does not include more generalist platforms like Nifty Gateway, SuperRare and OpenSea where musicians are also active. (If you’re a Water & Music member, you can access this list in the tab titled “NFT platforms focused on music” in our sales database.)

The new generation of music-specific NFT platforms can be broken down roughly into four categories, based on what each platform highlights, prioritizes and monetizes:

Emerging use cases

The rise of the crypto-native album rollout

There are a growing number of artists who are releasing new singles, albums and audiovisual works using multiple different applications of crypto and blockchain tech, including NFTs, DAOs and social tokens. This is nothing new; independent artists like Taryn Southern had been experimenting with using social tokens to facilitate creation and distribution of new music among collaborators and fans as early as 2017. But this release strategy has taken on new meaning in 2021 as more people are aware of and familiar with the technical capabilities that NFTs have to offer.

Some examples:

The NFT-to-DAO-to-NFT pipeline

A few art-driven NFT campaigns have given token owners access to artist-branded DAOs, primarily for the purpose of long-term community engagement. For instance, the platform YellowHeart worked with Maroon 5 to mint NFTs that granted collectors voting rights in the band’s charitable DAO, focused on donating to organizations combating climate change.

In the other direction, there are also several examples of what Cooper Turley recently called “collector DAOs,” or DAOs that focus on collecting and/or minting NFTs themselves, and splitting equity and earnings of those tokens among DAO members. In this case, the NFT becomes a collectively shared digital asset, with the DAO acting as automated governance infrastructure. Most of these examples sit outside of music and focus on collecting visual art, such as PleasrDAO, Flamingo, herstoryDAO, JennyDAO and WHALE.

These two sides of the same coin create a sort of “NFT-to-DAO-to-NFT pipeline” — where NFT ownership can grant fans or contributors access to a closed community run by a DAO, which then has equity in all future creative projects and digital assets released under the DAO. Some music-specific DAOs like The Song That Owns Itself (STOI) are working on self-serve tools to help artists build DAOs in this way, giving both industry partners, creative collaborators and fans alike fair equity in a given creative work.

NFTs and live music — connecting online x offline experiences

Matt Medved, co-founder/CEO of the new crypto media company NFT Now, tweeted last month that “IRL products for digital communities will be a multi-billion dollar industry.” Funnily enough, the music industry is already there: “IRL products” for digital music communities are basically just tours.

Hence, it should be no surprise that promoters, venues and other live music companies are investing in a crypto/NFT strategy as they gear up for a return to in-person shows. In this context, there are two main value props that NFTs provide: 1) A potentially more reliable and verifiable form of identity to tie to tickets, to reduce scalping and bot activity, and 2) A direct channel to attendees for remarketing and/on ongoing community engagement after an event.

A few examples: eMusic’s livestreaming platform recently began offering both free and paid NFTs to attendees of select virtual concerts. Katy Perry and CAA are also launching NFTs around the star’s upcoming residency at Resorts World Las Vegas, as part of a co-investment in blockchain video platform Theta.

Most notably, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino cited NFTs in the promoter’s latest earnings call in May 2021 (emphasis added):

… I think you’ll see us come out with an interesting Live Nation concert NFT angle. We think it’s a great way for us to engage with our fans using that NFT and that direct relationship now to add rewards, add perks, add souvenir moments. We’ve all learned from top shops at the NBA, so we envision Live Nation with the marketplace and looking at some of its concert moments as magic moments that we could mint and attach to our ongoing ticket festivals and special moments … if you have IP, we think it’s an exciting time to use that IP to create some exciting moments with fans that can trade it ongoing and live that moment and kind of cement that relationship they have with that July 16th first concert back at Jones Beach … I can trade it. I can put it in my wallet and own that moment forever.

Certain startups like GUTS Tickets are working on building NFT technology to curb scalping by tying a ticket to an individual person’s wallet or identity, as well as give artists a cut of secondary market revenue. (This was YellowHeart’s initial use case, before the company pivoted to a more general NFT collectible marketplace this year.) NFT-based tickets could then serve as fans’ verifiable entry points and bridges to online communities and experiences that remain active long after a given show concludes. In this vein, we’ll be closely following platforms that allow collectors to display and show off their NFTs visually in online virtual spaces, such as Rainbow, Showtime, NFT.Kred, Cryptovoxels and Decentraland.

This use case of NFTs as bridging the online/offline community gap is even more prominent outside of the music industry. In the art world, several physical galleries have opened over the last year that exclusively display NFT art, such as Superchief in New York, imnotArt in Chicago and CrypTOKYO in Tokyo; Sotheby’s also has its own space in Decentraland.

The popular social-token experiment Friends With Benefits ingeniously incorporated token gating into their community experience during the IRL Bitcoin conference in Miami — creating gated city guides for Miami (10 $FWB required for access) and organizing a gated rave (60 $FWB for admission), then auctioning off the official poster for the rave as an NFT on SuperRare. This multilayered approach shows how artists don’t just have to invest in NFTs in a vacuum, but rather can build experiences that treat NFTs as just one of several fan-engagement channels in crypto, in addition to social tokens, DAOs, decentralized finance and more.

NFT services companies help artists rise above the noise

How are music companies operationalizing their crypto strategy?

For now, the simple answer is no answer. Some labels like Warner Music Group are already investing in crypto platforms, but under the general umbrella of business development and strategic investments, rather than as part of a dedicated division that can execute on bespoke crypto campaigns for artists.

That said, one of the most interesting emerging trends around music NFTs is the establishment of dedicated third-party services for helping artists understand and leverage crypto. We talked earlier in this report about the increasing platform competition in music NFTs, but this has also expanded to NFT agencies (e.g. six, NetGems), NFT artist management firms (e.g. AG Artists’ Permanent Arts) and NFT media companies (e.g. NFT Now).

Specialist organizations for blockchain media, marketing, branding and PR had already existed for several years, with firms like Yap Global, Coinbound and the Association of Cryptocurrency Journalists and Researchers (ACJR) helping to set standards for how the general public perceives and talks about the technology. But fintech-focused blockchain companies have vastly different sets of marketing/PR needs from music companies or artists. Given how far-ranging crypto is, there’s a clear business case for services companies to focus on a specific customer niche, so we should expect to see more music-facing crypto services divisions established in the next year.

Key challenges and concerns

Mass-market accessibility is still limited

In everyday crypto and NFT speak, there’s an important, often misconstrued difference between mainstream awareness and mainstream adoption.

You’ll see headlines all over the place about how NFTs “went mainstream” this year (e.g. here, here, here and here). Most of these claims are driven by public celebrity endorsement and adoption of NFTs as a marketing tool, spanning Paris Hilton, Jack Dorsey, Will Smith and several of the big-name artists mentioned throughout this report.

For sure, this drove mainstream awareness of NFTs as a technology. But in terms of adoption, the scope of NFT collectors is still limited to a highly specialized, wealthy set of buyers who are already familiar with crypto and comfortable risking disposable income on a product whose long-term value has yet to be proven. The aforementioned research paper also showed how most NFT collectors are highly specialized in particular sectors such as gaming, with a little but not much crossover into other categories or collections.

If the music industry has mainstream ambitions for music NFTs, it’s not enough for them just to back new music NFT platforms and make a higher volume of tokens available with more affordable prices. They have to invest in the entire value chain around making sure people even know how to make the most of NFTs in the first place — from direct education to fans about crypto, to detailed instructions about how to obtain a crypto wallet, to creative ideas for what fans can do or how they can contribute to an artist’s community and growth once they own an NFT.

Identity and scalping

Some musicians have had to deal with rampant bot activity around NFTs, which is to be expected given parallel bot activity for other scarcity-driven secondary marketplaces, like those for sneakers and streetwear. For instance, in early May, RAC revealed on Twitter that his Minerva drop with Nifty Gateway was made much less accessible than normal — available only to fans who already had a Nifty Gateway NFT in their account — because of bot bidding activity consistently weeding out fans/collectors who might genuinely care about the art. Some Nifty Gateway users have also gotten hacked and had their NFTs stolen, for reasons that have partially to do with how Nifty is more centralized in how it processes payments and user accounts compared to other competing marketplaces.

On the flip side, beyond the art-collectible model, there’s been growing discussion about using NFTs as a means to verify one’s identity and reputation on-chain. On the topic of decentralized social networks, tools like InterRep are emerging that help people mint NFTs to port their identity and reputation from Web2 social platforms (e.g. Twitter) to Web3. In the long term, there’s also a data-privacy angle, in terms of giving users the ability to transfer their data from one decentralized social platform to another and, say, get compensated any time other third-party businesses want to access said data. These kinds of features are highly relevant for artists who want to build brands on Web3 without entirely starting from scratch, and/or who want to verify a fan’s identity or history with the artist’s work before inviting them to a particular community or online experience.

Environmental concerns

Over the past few months, several artists like Jacob Collier and the K-pop group A.C.E. have cancelled or postponed their NFT campaigns due to fans’ outspoken critique about the environmental impact of Ethereum and other proof-of-work blockchains.

There is no simple way to address this problem, other than the fact that alternative, eco-friendly blockchains do exist, and the blockchains that consume a lot of energy are actively working to resolve the issue. The Ethereum Foundation has claimed that its upcoming transition to a proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work blockchain will reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by at least 99.95%. In the meantime, this has created a small promotional opening for music/art NFT platforms that don’t run on Ethereum to earn new audiences, such hic et nunc and OneOf, both of which run on the proof-of-stake Tezos blockchain. Some more established, higher-volume NFT marketplaces like Crypto.com and Nifty Gateway have also made public commitments to become carbon negative in the coming months.

The enduring wild west of rights

In our previous market update, one emerging use case of music NFTs involved artists fractionalizing ownership, rights and royalties for songs among collectors, investors and fans. Multiple new examples of this use case have popped up since then, including Royalty Exchange’s latest “publishing NFTs” with Lil Dicky and A Tribe Called Quest. As a form of investment, this use case makes sense for historical catalogs. But one enduring challenge is that the actual rights transfers and royalty allocations themselves are still happening off-chain through traditional publishing and investment agreements — which arguably means that using an NFT to represent this relationship is just a marketing tool driven by novelty, rather than an absolute technical necessity.

At the same time, the music industry also saw its first large-scale NFT lawsuit last month, with Jay-Z suing Dame Dash for auctioning off an NFT related to Reasonable Doubt without Roc-A-Fella Records’ permission. (In a stroke of sweet, sweet revenge, Jay-Z auctioned off his own Reasonable Doubt NFT on Sotheby’s for over $130,000 shortly thereafter.) While this is certainly the most public instance of music copyright infringement on an NFT, there are certainly dozens of not hundreds of other examples out there of people minting NFTs tied to songs, images or videos that they don’t own, without the original owner’s permission. Ironically,

A deeper ideological issue with rights management for NFTs is that many crypto-native IP franchises, like CryptoPunks and Aku, take an intentionally decentralized, laissez-faire approach to copyright and licensing, with fans and collectors driving IP development even more than the original founders in many cases. This is contradictory to how many major rights holders approach IP development in a more top-down, behind-the-scenes manner. Any music rights holder that wants to use NFTs to expand the value of their IP needs to grapple with the inevitability of collectors taking an NFT and running off with it creatively and financially, and the issues of quality control, community management, copyright enforcement and reconciling off- vs. on-chain brand value that come with that.

The long view: Moving beyond the NFT vacuum

To conclude this lengthy update, we want to propose that music NFTs should not be studied or implemented in a vacuum, but rather should be incorporated into a more holistic vision for the role crypto plays in musical creativity, fan communities and artist monetization.

As our data suggests, the short-term value of music NFTs has clearly tanked, but this decline is within the specific, limited confines of the collectible art model. In reality, NFTs can play many other roles in our everyday lives — for instance, as vehicles for fostering long-term community development and IP co-ownership, or for cultivating a decentralized, verifiable identity that is portable across multiple Web3 social platforms — that artists and music companies are only starting to invest in for the long term.

As these additional use cases grow, the music industry will also need to do a lot of self-reflection. Are all artists necessarily ready to act as community leaders and managers, not just performers or recording artists? Are music rights holders really comfortable with crowdsourced co-ownership of their IP, and are they ready to invest in new forms of IP aside from just music copyrights? How will power dynamics among traditional music-industry stakeholders change with decentralization?

All in all, developers are still building, artists are still minting, platforms are still competing for mindshare and attention, and the music NFT market will survive only as much as the music industry is willing to stretch its own imagination.