news hardware No more JPEGs, Warner Music wants to develop musical NFTs
We’re not going to teach you anything, NFTs regularly take the form of an image. The most popular collections bear witness to this, like the JEPGs of apes from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) or Cryptopunks. However, the technology is not only used to certify ownership of digital images (it could do the same for an mp3 format). Warner Music Group is aware of this, so the music label has set itself the goal of creating music with non-fungible tokens (NFT).
Warner Music enters musical NFTs
The third largest music label in the world, Warner Music Group (WMG), recently announced that it is entering music NFTs. For this, WMG has teamed up with a giant in the industry. For the implementation of this project, the music publisher has entered into a partnership with the NFT purchase and resale platform OpenSea.
This massive partnership between these two giants demonstrates that technology adoption continues to thrive regardless of market conditions. As a reminder, NFTs have seen a significant drop in value since the beginning of the year after the cryptocurrency price plummeted.
If Warner Music seems interested in the technology, it’s because it offers new opportunities in the music industry.
NFT: a new way of consuming music?
Through this collaboration, the company intends to develop a Web3 platform dedicated to the label’s artists. This future platform aims to reduce middlemen in the distribution of music. The music platform offers artists the opportunity to build a Web3-style community.
In order to market a project, aspiring artists currently face several obstacles that reduce their chances of getting paid. Between the lack of transparency of certain streaming platforms or even aggregators, an unknown singer is finding it difficult to spread his project.
By using NFTs, Warner Music wants to develop a new, more direct business model between the composer and the end listener. With this technology, the artist could distribute their music project directly without going through an organization. This is also the main argument of blockchain aficionados, namely to eliminate intermediaries and conduct peer-to-peer transactions.
“NFTs represent a new creative medium and mechanism for building community, connecting directly with fans, and expressing yourself across borders and languages,” said Shiva Rajaraman, vice president of products at OpenSea.
The platform also aims to highlight several artists. A support developed by the Opensea teams will accompany the artists in their NFT creations so that they can create real communities of web3 fans. We know from experience that Web3 communities are noisy, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
“to provide the necessary support and infrastructure to welcome the artists of the Warner Family to the exciting NFT ecosystem,” adds Shiva Rajaraman.
This new launch has an air of déjà vu… Napster, the famous music streaming platform, had also followed web3’s move by announcing that it would integrate cryptos and NFTs into its new streaming platform. Whether musical NFTs can be as successful as visual collections without being pushed by profile photos on social networks remains to be seen.
