More about: NFTs

As much as the internet would like to ridicule Non-fungible tokens, dubbing them—among many other things—“tokens that cannot be turned into mushrooms”, the NFT is a growing part of the technological landscape—and, as tech entrepreneur Jayden Elworthy believes, they may become central to the workings of the music industry within just a few years.

Jayden has a background in tech and music promotion and has strong views on the future of blockchain and its potential for driving change in the music industry. “Spotify is going to die,” he tells Gigwise. “They’ll die if they don’t start doing NFTs…but if they do they’ll have to come up with a new agreement with artists.” To Jayden, the latter option could be equally devastating: “The reason they make billions is because of these artists. The minute you have a platform that sends all the transactions and play costs straight to the artists they’ll all delete Spotify.

“The minute that happens, everyone is going to jump ship. All of a sudden, the billions that Spotify make will go straight into the NFT industry.”

At the minute, NFTs are still a fairly new concept to non-tech heads, though artists are already making big sums of money from employing them. Kings of Leon were some of the first big artists to go for it: non-fungible token sales of their 2021 album When You See Yourself have already reached $2million. Just yesterday (23 February), The Kooks announced they would be ‘minting’ twenty NFT versions of their 2008 album Inside In / Inside Out, which turned 15 this month.

Considering artists currently make between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream with Spotify, the growing interest in NFTs is unsurprising as, by its very nature, a song released in this manner is 'locked' to its creator and will continue to pay that person as many times as it is traded. 

“It’s not quite there yet but it’s only going to get bigger,” Jayden said of the use of blockchain within music, which may involve artists 'minting' their songs and releasing them as NFTs in order to make more money than they currently do. “Soon you’ll start seeing the big players migrate over,” he predicts. The main benefit of an NFT for an artist is money. Once it is recorded on the blockchain, an NFT is ‘minted’ and cannot be copied without crediting—and therefore paying—its creator. “You get a digital asset, slap your trademark on it, link it to your wallet and then lock it. Then everyone in the world knows it’s yours,” Jayden explains.

Now 28, Jayden launched a new cryptocurrency, the Star Wars-themed coin Darth Inu last Sunday. The project, which is now trading publicly, has a strong charitable element with a percentage of the fee from sales of the coin going to renewable energy projects in Uganda. He is planning on expanding Darth Inu into the music sphere in the near future and minting his own NFTs for people to purchase.

Of blockchain as a whole—the underlying technology that is fundamental to the workings of both crypto and NFTs—Jayden said: "It’s now in the peoples’ hands. This is money that used to be in banks, peoples' pockets, peoples' homes". Now that money is migrating onto the blockchain, people like Jayden Jayden believe that payment—and in particular, payment of artists—could start getting a lot fairer.

To be continued...

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More about: NFTs