Ultimate Resource On Music And NFTs And The Implications For The Entertainment Industry

Her post touched a nerve. Stars like Ryan Tedder, Maren Morris and Niall Horan praised her candor. “There was a collective ‘yes’ within the artist community,” Maggie Rose, 33, a Nashville singer-songwriter, says in an interview. It “felt like a rally cry and a sigh of relief all at once.”

Mastering social media is part of being a modern pop star, but some musicians say they have had enough. Industry executives push artists to maintain busy feeds on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, tasks that they say leave them with too little time to focus on writing and performing. The pressure is particularly acute for up-and-coming and midsize acts, who have built audiences but not enough of a business to hire digital-promotion teams to handle posts.

Chelsea Cutler

Even superstars are feeling it. Post Malone recently told Billboard he had felt overwhelmed by industry pressures. “You think about everything at the same time, and it’s f—ing overload,” he told the magazine.

Making a living as a musician has never been easy. Self-promotion is a prerequisite—whether it is passing out fliers for shows, waking early for radio interviews or making music videos. The pandemic exacerbated things by pushing a lot of marketing online.

Interviews with artists, executives and analysts suggest that the problem runs deeper than the pandemic. The democratization of music, they say, has come at a cost.

Armed with laptops and streaming and social media, musicians can make, release, distribute and promote music without the help of record labels.

Virality on YouTube and TikTok offers new routes to success that bypass traditional gatekeepers. Artists can experiment with snippets of incomplete songs on social media, effectively conducting market research in real time.

Yet building a sustainable career—and life—has arguably become more difficult. Streaming doesn’t pay the way CDs did, and the model encourages artists to stay in the news so listeners are reminded to click on songs.

Spotify Technology SA says it already pays roughly 70% of its revenue to rights holders, including labels. Even if it paid more, the glut of artists and releases puts downward pressure on average incomes, analysts say.

Maggie Rose

The number of self-releasing artists increased by a third in 2020 to five million, outpacing growth in streaming revenue, according to MIDiA Research, an entertainment-analysis firm. Spotify says more than 60,000 new tracks are uploaded each day.

To stand out, some artists are releasing music more often, giving priority to quantity over quality. One common fear, executives say: If artists don’t keep hitting Spotify and Apple Music with new songs, their monthly listener numbers will fall, hurting their reputations in a numbers-obsessed industry.

Constant making of social posts, meanwhile, aims to keep the artist top of mind for fans who might stream music, buy concert tickets or snap up merchandise. Artists feel the need to focus on their public personas as much as their music.

Noah Kahan, 25, who, like Ms. Cutler, is signed to Republic Records, says there isn’t a songwriting or recording session or label meeting—“hell, even a phone call”—without the mention of TikTok. Industry professionals have advised him to make a TikTok a day, music-related or not.

TikTok helps with reaching fans and trying out music, but Mr. Kahan says it has affected his songwriting in “deeply disturbing” ways. For example, he focuses more on hooky, viral verses and choruses than on finishing whole songs.

“If you’re a young artist or songwriter who creates beautiful music with a process that requires time, space, contemplation and privacy, you are going to have a really sh— time here,” he says.

Noah Kahan

Ms. Rose, the Nashville singer-songwriter, says she has made peace with social media, but still feels a “constant nagging of guilt” that she isn’t posting more. “There are a lot of other artists who don’t play their TikTok lottery-ticket every day, but we are often met with a ‘guess you don’t want it that badly’ mindset from others within the industry, which is maddening.”

Another frustration for artists is that it is hard to predict what kind of moves on TikTok and other social media will deliver results. It is also unclear whether all the effort translates into money. Ms. Cutler, after all, made waves on social media by complaining about it.

The confusion is “the product of everyone not knowing what works right now,” she says in an interview.

Talking openly about burnout could help, executives say, though many artists fear appearing spoiled for complaining about what some view as a dream job.

Tamar Kaprelian, co-founder and chief executive of Nvak Collective, a small indie label that says it gives priority to artists’ well-being, says highly individualized care—weekly conversations about how hard artists are going, for example—can mitigate burnout.

When one of Nvak’s artists, Talia Lahoud, struggled with depression, the label found her a therapist. (In certain cases, Nvak covers the cost of therapy; with Ms. Lahoud, a clinical psychologist provided services pro bono.) Ms. Lahoud took about a month off writing and recording and pushed back a single-release timeline. “We basically waited,” Ms. Kaprelian says. “We said, ‘Tell us when you’re feeling better.’ ”

Ms. Cutler, an electronic-pop artist with more than 300,000 Instagram followers, found herself venting to her girlfriend, who encouraged her to post her thoughts online.

Marketing “is not my job—and I don’t want it to be my job,” Ms. Cutler told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s not what I’m good at.”

Updated: 2-24-2022

BTS Again Wins Top Recording Artist In World First

The South Korean boyband was joined by Taylor Swift and Adele atop 2021’s chart of the 10 top acts.

South Korean boyband BTS have once again been named the global recording artist of the year.

BTS, a K-Pop group also known as the Bangtan Boys, have won the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) Global Recording Artist of the Year Award 2021, making them the first act to win the award for two consecutive years.

The award is calculated according to an artist’s or group’s worldwide performance across digital and physical music formats during the year – including music downloads, streams and physical sales – and covers their entire body of work.

The award was announced at the culmination of an online countdown by the IFPI, which gradually revealed the top 10 best-selling artists of the year.

Frances Moore , chief executive of the IFPI, said: “BTS’ phenomenal success over the last year is a testament to their creativity, hard work and ongoing commitment to continuing to find ways to bring their music to the world.

“By performing in three different languages, they demonstrate their extraordinarily unique global appeal and their dynamic and passionate fanbase has helped to make them the first artists in history to top the global artist chart in two consecutive years.”

BTS, consisting of members Jin, Suga , J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V, and Jungkook, first entered the IFPI global artist chart in 2018 at number two.

In 2020, they became the first Korean act to win the Global Recording Artist of the Year Award, as well as the first winner to perform primarily in a language other than English.

The band are the best-selling artist in South Korean history and their album Map Of The Soul: 7 is the best-selling album of all time in South Korea .

BTS were joined by Taylor Swift and Adele in the top three of the 2021 chart.

Swift, 32, finished at number two for the second consecutive year, having previously topped the chart in 2019.

Adele, 33, secured third place, re-entering for the first time since taking the top spot in 2015.

Drake, Ed Sheeran , The Weeknd, Billie Eilish, Justin Bieber , Seventeen andOlivia Rodrigo make up the top 10 on the 2021 chart.

The award has been running since 2014, with British boy band One Direction becoming the first to win as they were named Global Recording Artist of 2013.

The Top 10 Global Recording Artists Of 2021, According To The IFPI:

1. BTS

2. Taylor Swift

3. Adele

4. Drake

5. Ed Sheeran

6. The Weeknd

7. Billie Eilish

8. Justin Bieber

9. SEVENTEEN

10. Olivia Rodrigo .

 

Updated: 3-12-2022

Spotify Who? Musician’s Earnings Go From $300 To $60,000 In Web3

For smaller acts, NFTs offer financial gains once elusive in a music business dominated by streaming — at least for now.

A savvy cadre of recording artists has been using the new, blockchain-based digital frontier sometimes known as web3 to do what they’ve always dreamed of: Making money by making music.

The revenue they’re earning from selling their songs and music as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, is significantly larger than the pennies they pull in from streaming services such as Spotify.

At the same time, they are providing a tangible use case for elements of web3, the preferred nomenclature of venture capitalists who invest in online services built using blockchain technology, where control isn’t concentrated in a single business entity.

“I had one person buy my song for the amount it would have taken a million streams to get,” says Iman Europe, a singer-songwriter who has made 22.2 Ether (now worth almost $60,000), selling five singles and a music video as NFTs since November.

That compares with the roughly $300 a month she was earning from streaming, despite having garnered some 4 million listens across platforms. Nearly 40% of her NFT revenue was made on secondary sales, where she received a 10% cut of each resale.

Musicians like Europe took in $83 million in primary sales through NFTs last year, according to Water & Music, an organization that researches digital music innovation. Independent artists accounted for 70% of that revenue, the group found.

It’s a trend that is attracting the attention of larger investors, including 12-time Grammy Award winner John Legend. With a group of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, he announced earlier this month that he’ll be launching a platform for artists to monetize their work using the technology.

Popularity with independent artists can partly be explained by the fact that the world of NFTs is much more accessible for them, compared witheasier than landing a lucrative, corporate record deal.

To release an NFT, artists attach their media — such as a song or video — to a verifiable digital token and then auction it off on an online marketplace such as Nifty Gateway or OpenSea. These operate on blockchain technology, which offers an online record of the transaction history.

Buyers get ownership of the digital asset as well as the cultural cache of having something released to a finite number of people, in some cases only to one person. At times the music is only available as an NFT; it’s a bit like owning the only copy of a CD by your favorite artist.

Alec D’Alelio, a 25-year-old living in Brooklyn, bought his first NFT of a song in February 2021. It was produced by an artist named Supa Bwe, who D’Alelio says is an influential artist in the Chicago music scene close to where he went to college at Northwestern University.

“It was still really, really early at that point for music NFTs, very few people were doing it,” D’Alelio said. “I wanted to show that people will buy this stuff, people care, people want to support.”

D’Alelio, who also produces music for fun, has since bought over a dozen NFTs of songs and albums from various artists. He estimates his total collection is worth 4.75 ETH, or about $12,000. He bought each piece for somewhere between 0.1 to 1 Ether.

Christian Kaczmarczyk, a principal at venture-capital firm Third Prime, owns more than 20 NFTs of songs from various artists. A few of the names in his inventory, such as rapper Jon Waltz, are artists he has listened to since college. Other musicians, he discovered directly on NFT platforms. He estimates his collection is worth about $150,000.

“There are some artists that I plan to never want to sell just because I’m a big supporter of their careers,” Kaczmarczyk, 27, said. But, he added, “It’s nice to be able to have this option that if it does become worth something, I could potentially sell it for a value.”

The opportunity to flip purchases for a higher price is one of the clearest financial incentives for buyers. Daniel Fowler, a music industry strategist based in London, said there is a concern about whales, entities or individuals with large sums of cryptocurrencies, buying up music NFTs.

“You get into a world where people are essentially squatting on culture, in the same way that people would try and hoover up property and literally extract rent from that,” he said.

One study found the top 10% of NFT traders perform 85% of all transactions, and trade 97% of all assets at least once. Fowler, who used to work at a blockchain startup, said a key driver in the increase of NFT activity was “people having spare crypto and wanting to do other stuff with it that might be more interesting than just buying Bitcoin.”

Other complications abound. Collectors may be given bragging rights for “owning” the music or art in their NFTs, but not necessarily the copyright. It’s not always clear whether NFT collectors can alter or repurpose the music they pay for. Artists and the platforms they use say the answer is a resounding no. (Unless, they are selling open-source beats or instrumentals.)

“The convergence of copyright law with NFTs is still a great unknown,” said Kevin Greene, a law professor at Southwestern Law School who specializes in intellectual property and entertainment law. “A case is going to come at some point where some of these issues are clarified, but right now it’s a Wild West and even copyright lawyers are struggling.”

There is also the issue that other NFT projects have come to face: mainstream players entering the arena. Headliners from Katy Perry to BTS are starting to cash in. While independent artists are pulling in the majority of revenue, the gap between them and major-label artists is closing, according to Cherie Hu, founder of Water & Music.

But independent artists have something bigger acts don’t: Licensing agreements often prevent A-list artists from listing singles or albums as NFTs. Instead, stars tend to release visual art. Perry, for instance, sold a collection of behind-the-scenes photos, moving art and a physical concert prop.

Unsigned artists are able to avoid many of the legal hurdles to releasing music as NFTs. Also, because they often work with a few collaborators or alone entirely, they capture a greater portion of profits.

The business model attracted Allan Kyariga, a rapper living in Saint Paul, Minnesota and known in the music world as Allan Kingdom. He says he stopped pursuing a full-time music career after being offered industry deals that “didn’t make sense” to take.

He started releasing NFTs when a fan recommended he sell a music video using the technology in November. After selling ten, his earnings total $40,000, or 15.8 Ether — an amount, he says, is double the paycheck of a distribution deal advance for an artist of his level.

One of the 28-year-old’s singles resold for as much as seven times the original price, which started at 0.1 Ether or about $400 on a marketplace called Sound.xyz.

There is no guarantee that independent artists’ success with NFTs will continue. Last year was a bumper year for NFTs. With buy-in from celebrities, politicians and even socialites such as Paris Hilton, the market for these digital collectibles surpassed $17 billion. Yet with many cryptocurrencies down this year — most NFTs rely on the native token of Ethereum — some wonder if the model for musicians is sustainable.

“If this thing doesn’t get more popular anytime soon or doesn’t give incentives for people to get involved, then this will go away,” Kaczmarczyk, the music NFT collector, said.