PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Experimenting with music NFTs

Hello Band-in-a-Box lovers

I am so excited to release my very first music NFT! If you are interested in collecting NFTs then I would really appreciate your support in purchasing this. Current price is 0,0003 eth (about $1). Lets do this thing and see where it takes us.

https://www.mintsongs.com/editions/130294

Produced 100% with Band-in-a-Box

PS: for those who are concerned with the legality of this here is proof of my license

I'm always intrigued by TLA's

Hope this is absolutely successful for you, Joanne.

Now, to check on that NFT bit.

In case you have been living under a rock NFT = Non-fungible token. supposedly the next best thing for artists......perhaps after Spotify?

I am not sure where this thing goes but I've got my toe in the water. I am also trying to purchase my first music NFT....

Not living under any rock happening here Joanne. Thanks for actually describing the term. Must be more common knowledge in your parts. I genuinely doubt I'm the only one who wasn't familiar with the term, so the 'under a rock' comment was perhaps a little unnecessary. Good luck. I do hope it's very successful. I know you work hard.

I had to read up on NFT's so you brought me out from under my rock Joanne. Good luck with the experiment. It sounds promising.

Charlie

Apologies Trevor. It was meant as a joke but I realize it was in poor taste.

On a lighter note: my first NFT has been sold out! To one collector! This looks very positive. Im'gonna try another song

Perhaps we aren't living on the digital cusp but we are internet savvy, have licensed 26 songs via the net, released many songs on the various platforms, create/maintain our website including occasional HTML encoding and conduct nearly all our financial activity on the net; however, NFT is a term we had zero familiarity with. So live and learn!

Hope it proves productive for you.

J&B

Its the next big thing in buying stuff you can't touch with money that only exists as code. Can't see how that can go bad. But more power to those who make it work!

I can see NFT transactions for something that is not reproducible, like an original painting. But what prevents the person who buys a music performance in digital form from marketing it further?

I don't think I want to go there, but best of luck.

Joanne, since forum rule #7 requires explicit permission from PG Music for advertising, have you checked with them as well? You should be OK since you used only BIAB.

Absolutely nothing. The idea is that you're buying an NFT, which makes you the owner of that NFT as far as that blockchain system goes. Whatever the NFT points to, in this case an MP3, obviously remains as reproducible as ever.

It's all about collectability and saleability. If you have an NFT of an MP3 and can convince somebody to buy it from you, you might make money. The blockchain is there to support this sort of transaction. But it has nothing to do with playing music, the fact that the MP3 is involved at all is a technicality. You might as well be buying and selling NFTs of the number 17.

OK, Mark, thanks for that, I think. Then if someone bought my music, it could be re-marketed legally in any way and the composer and publisher do not make anything further? No, thank you.

You're purchasing a link in the blockchain that says you "own" what the link points to.

You might wonder what rights are conferred to the purchaser of the music NFT.

It's not "unique access", since anyone can go to the web page and play the song themselves. This is probably a grey area, since Joanne's mechanical license is only for "25 Digital Downloads", and that doesn't seem to be enforced by the website. But that's an issue for the website to enforce, not Joanne.

The purchaser of the musical NFT can't sell a copy of the NFT, because they don't have a mechanical license for that. The mechanical license that Joanne purchased gives her the limited right to create covers of the song. This wouldn't be necessary if she owned the mechanical rights to the song herself (say, one she wrote herself).

But this mechanical license doesn't transfer to the person who purchased the NFT, so they wouldn't be able to make copies of the NFT without purchasing a mechanical license for themselves, the same as Joanne needed to.

The purchaser of the musical NFT also don't have the right to play the NFT publicly, as that would require a public performance license.

The only transferable right the purchaser has is to sell ownership of the link.

So the actual value of an NFT is... zero. It's pure speculation.

Hi, Matt.

See my response above. Since the owner of the NFT doesn't have a mechanical license, they can't re-market the NFT itself.

The only thing they can sell is the link. Which gives the rights to... sell the link again.

AFAICS it's a bit like buying a signed limited-edition print. Other people can have copies of the print, but only the buyers have the signature.

I do find it a decidedly odd concept.

NFTs are an interesting concept for sure and I don’t think anyone really knows where they are going. They could all just go to zero.

They have been quite successful for pieces of digital artwork (think JPEG). Sure they can be copied/ printed/ emailed/ displayed on your website but the blockchain knows who the “actual owners” are. So you can’t sell your “copy”. Sure you can “look” at it but you can’t sell it. It’s like having a photo of the Mona Lisa in your home. What joy would you get out of looking at it if you didn't pay anything for it? You sure can't sell it as an original. Even if you have the perfect "forgery" of a painting you can't sell it because the blockchain has a record of it and who the rightful owners are.

Edited to add. I think from an artist's perspective they are great because every time the NTF is resold you get a percentage. So unlike the “Napster” model, the artist is getting compensated for their work in perpetuity.

To my way of thinking NFT's are as likely to be pirated and resold as anything else.

That is the beauty of the block chain. They can’t be pirated.

Good Luck in your NFT endeavors, Joanne!

If anything this will be a good education to us all in the experiment.

Despite some of the negativity, I'm excited to see where this goes like I am a new tech toy.

Thank you Steve. Just tried it out with one of my original songs. Only put one copy on and it sold immediately.
I also purchased one but can’t see where you figure out how much is the going price if you want to sell it! It is a learning curve all round.

If you guys are interested I can keep you all informed. Let me know.

The whole blockchain thing of course has other applications, but this, I think, paints a pretty good picture of what's going on with digital art NFTs. You create a valueless entity and engage with other speculators in the hope of driving it up. Conceptually, it's like selling a notarized statement that someone owns the RAM token of the MP3 of "My Way" you played on your computer on a certain occasion.

I’m not sure that they are all valueless. Sure, there are some that are valueless but imagine that Picasso had created an NFT of the scribble he did on the napkin. That would not be valueless.

I'm not saying the associated art is valueless. In your Picasso scenario, the art would have its usual value and the NFT would have whatever value is generated by speculation. You could actually buy and sell the painting and the NFT separately. One is a painting, the other is a cryptographic entity on a blockchain.

You could even create an NFT of the NFT, and buy and sell that independently of the other two. You might become rich that way!

I’m not sure I understand your point. Some art is made on the computer. It is only digital. There is no physical painting. You could argue the music is an example of “digital art”.

I think that it would be very enlightening if you keep us informed. Thank you.

Not in question. Which is why audio tokens of songs are sold, for download or streaming, on services like Apple Music or personal websites.

My point is that creating an NFT creates nothing new of value, it only provides a way for people to (A) speculate, in the hope of making money, (B) donate to people they like, or (C) fool around with fun tech stuff for the hell of it. Nothing wrong with any of that, per se, but as outlined in the wiki article, there are reasons for caution.

Or (D) own something they love.

To do that, one would have to break the encryption.

NFTs are supposed to gain value due the limited availability of whatever it is you are selling. It is the proof of ownership that is the limited part. I think it is a scheme and probably will be hugely popular. Who knows what is going to happen with all this stuff?

Old Phineas Taylor Barnum is smiling for sure.


Regards,

Bob

I hate to upset you, but yes it can be done.

You would have to hack, undetected, into thousands upon thousands of computers on which copies of the block chain ledger are stored. It’s not possible. NFTs can be lost and they can be stolen but they can’t be pirated.

And you really think that there are people out there that cannot do that. Not many, but they are there. They are called hackers.

This is 100% accurate. It's already hugely popular.

But it's not sustainable.

The value of NFTs is entirely based on the expectation that the future value of the NFT will rise, because people are expecting someone in the future will pay more than they did.

But the price of something can't continue to rise forever, as people don't have an infinite amount of disposable income.

At some point, an NFT will reach an equilibrium price, where the perceived future price is lower that the selling price.

Since the only value of an NFT is that it will have a higher price in the future, the last person to purchase the NFT will be stuck holding something of negative value - they can only sell at a loss.

The tipping point for NFTs happens when collective value of negative valued NFTs outweights the sum speculative value of new NFTs.

At that point, it's game over for that NFT market.

The blockchain assumes it's too big to fail. Unfortunately, there are a lot of sufficiently large bad actors who could prove this wrong.

The people who say the blockchain "can't" be hacked are either promoting cryptocurrencies, or lack sufficient imagination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania


At least ^ has aesthetic value

Well, a blockchain certainly can’t be hacked by doing something naughty on thousands of personal computers at once, but that wouldn’t be the ticket anyway. You’d find a vulnerability and exploit it from a single node, injecting your toxic transaction and turning it loose to replicate.

It is an interesting debate for sure on whether the block chain can be hacked or not. I am sure that individual exchanges and wallets can be hacked (for example via the normal phishing type attacks) and the contents of that wallet or exchange can be stolen.

This is the same with any financial institution that has a digital offering.

The difference is that crypto is not regulated and these exchanges don’t have the means or insurance or processes to pay the clients back for what they have lost. Savvy investors know this and mitigate this risk by taking care of their credentials and researching what exchanges/block chains to get involved with. They also don’t put all their eggs in one basket.

But how would someone hack the actual block chain? If anyone has knowledge of how the block chain actually works and has any feasible theories on how this could be done I would love to know because the Bahamas are waiting for me

Asking how it would be possible is rather like asking a magician how he does a spectacular trick. You have nothing to fear about it happening to your piece of music. Anyone capable of doing such a thing is highly unlikely to try and do it with a $1 piece of music.

... which is, of course, the way all speculation works, from commodities to art.

The trick is to estimate the effect well, and often enough, to gain more than the bad estimates lose.

Nice job on the song JoAnnne! And yeah, keep us informed!

Exactly! Could not have said it better myself.

My point exactly. This is even more recent.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/20/22943228/opensea-phishing-hack-smart-contract-bug-stolen-nft

This is getting ridiculous. I can also use google
https://river.com/learn/can-bitcoin-be-hacked/
The world is made up of nearly 8 billion people. No matter how outlandish a particular pov is there are bound to be plenty of others out of that 8 billion who think the same way.

I’m not trying to get at you, all I wanted to do was point out that nothing is impenetrable online.

The river.com link you posted is not actually a valid source. If you scroll down the page you will see that they are selling crypto currency. I would rather believe a well respected source such as this

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2022/03/29/second-biggest-crypto-hack-ever-600-million-in-ethereum-stolen-from-nft-gaming-blockchain/?sh=5610f6ac2686

As I said, the chances of someone wasting their time trying to hack a $1 NFT song is remote, but possible.

Yeah well I’m willing to take that risk. As I said, smart investors know how to mitigate their risks.

I think it is a GREAT opportunity for independent artists who have been at the mercy of “the music business” and record labels in general. Do yourself a favour and go and watch Searching for Sugarman if you think the old way was better.

I completely agree with you that NFT is an opportunity for creatives. I have read widely on the NFT system, as I have since the blockchain was conceived. My point was to inform the forum in general that nothing is 100% secure. As we are talking very tiny amounts of money of course it is worth a punt.

Yes! We are on the same page there.

Using the word "investor" is probably not the best way to describe buying digital assets...and are they really assets?

Speculator is a more apt term.

The only thing I will say further is that I kinda wish I had bought a few thousand bit coins when they were about a penny each. But who knew!

A hacker stole $625 million from the blockchain behind NFT game Axie Infinity

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/29/23001620/sky-mavis-axie-infinity-ronin-blockchain-validation-defi-hack-nft

This is interesting. I have questions if you don't mind.

First, if am I understanding this correctly,

- you set up this song as an NFT with 25 copies to sell
- you sold 25 of these to one collector but they could have sold to multiple (up to 25) collectors
- they sold for approximately $1 each
- you got 90% of that amount (approx. $22.50)
- if the NFT collector (who bought all 25) sells any or all of these down the road you will receive 10% of that sale amount
- and you continue to earn 10% on all future sales (if any) of these NFTs

1) were there any fees at all to do this (not including the license fees because it is a cover)?

2) did the collector who bought this already know you and your music?

3) why did you choose a cover instead of one of your originals? I assume it was in the hope that song name recognition will help it's success chances?

4) how would one promote their NFTs? I assume, just like Bandcamp and Spotify, you couldn't reasonably expect to be randomly discovered.

5) was the process from start to finish easy or complicated?

6) what made you choose mintsongs?

Hi jx3
I have now published 5 songs. I am experimenting with different quanties and prices.
1. Fly me to the moon. 25 editions. All sold immediately to one investor
2. Diary. 50 editions. Only one sold so far
3. Three original songs. 1 edition each. Two have sold to one investor. The same person who purchased Diary.
I am increasing the price very slightly each time. I think the last original song was about $2.

To answer your questions.
1. No there were no fees. Mintsongs take a % of each sale.
2. I don’t know who the investors are. It only shows a nom de plume.
3. I figured that covers would be easier to sell because people would recognise the name of the song and we’re more like to listen to it. I think Diary was a bad choice because people don’t know that song. I may try out well known public domain songs
4. I’m not sure how you get discovered. I think you have to try and reach music lovers who are interested in collecting NFTs. I had very little interest in the post I did on my Facebook fan page. Yesterday I was trying a Facebook ad to target people who are interested in NFTs but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. Perhaps I will try google ad words. As we can see from all the negative responses to this thread these types of music lovers are few and far between!
5. It is very very easy. To mint a new song takes a few minutes. To get the License for cover takes a couple of days though.
6. I don’t actually remember why I chose mintsongs. I may have seen a fb ad?

Thanks JC! Really appreciate you sharing these details!

It is an absolute pleasure! Let me know if you do mint some songs.

How much is a Compulsory Mechanical Licenses?

It depends on how many copies you want but starts at around $20 for 25
https://www.easysong.com/default.aspx

Hi all. For anybody who is interested, I am going to be running a two hour zoom webinar to help people release their music as NFTs. I will also go into what NFTs actually are and why you could consider them for your music.

You can keep informed of this webinar by adding your email to my list here. https://www.joannecooper.co.za/newsletter

Hi all.
If anybody is interested in learning more about my NFT journey, I held a two-hour Zoom webinar last night (11 May 2022) and went through what I have learned in detail, answered questions and showed around inside my Mintsongs account where I have been creating these things. PM me if you are interested in learning more.

The NFT, that some guy paid a huge sum, for the first ever tweet by Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder) recently only reached something like $280 at auction. He wanted 50 million. It was a digital file of a static image of the 5 word tweet stored on a block chain and sold for 2.9 million originally. Granted a very inflated price to begin with. It is a scam the likes we have never seen.

However, if you are the person that collected the original huge sum do you really care if the NFT now brought $280 at an auction?

The whole interview is a good watch but NFTs come up at 1:04:00.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM4sEl8avug

Paj
8^)

Thanks so much for sharing. I enjoyed watching it.

However, I think this guy is talking rubbish about music NFTs. I dont think he understands music NFTs at all. He says the musician makes money out of sharing his/her music with only one person (if he/she, say, chooses to mint only one edition of a song). But it is only the OWNERSHIP of the NFT that the one person gets. The music can still be listened to (streamed), shared, and enjoyed by millions, which obviously increases demand for the NFT,

The music environment he envisages with both the creator and the music fans making money out of the music they make/love is already here with NFTs. All without the traditional gatekeepers of the record label.

He is talking about making these "super vinyl" things, which is essentially what NFTs are about. IMO the best way to learn about NFTs is to start minting and collecting them. I wouldn't hold much score on the opinion on somebody who, in all probability, has never minted or collected an NFT.

It has been over one year since Joanne Cooper first started this thread.

So, how is everyone's NFT sales going? Has anyone made a substantial revenue out of the blockchain?

I've been running a side business called "ArtVillain" in the past year. It is essentially about trading digital fantasy artwork via NFT blockchain.

It hasn't been very successful so far due to the obstacles of "gas fees". A gas fee refers to the transaction cost for the crypto ledger to be validated each time a work is being sold from one self minted account to another.

So, for those of you who have already made a good ethereum fortune on the NFTs, could you provide some expert advice on how to circumvent the mining cost and turn the inflated sales into a profitable business?

Hey musicvillian.

I stopped publishing my music as NFTs a while back. The processes to publish and monetise were rubbish, at the time, but I am not sure if they have improved.

I have been focusing my energies on products and services that help other musicians reach their goals… like my lyric tool, my play along videos and making sgu files. I’m also much more interested in developing tools using ChatGpt and GPT 4.

I think the market for nfts tanked….