After 3LAU released an album via NFTs earlier this year, it was only a matter of time before more artists began to follow suit.
Today, I saw a tweet from Li Jin highlighting Daniel Allan, an emerging artist, who crowd-funded 50 ETH (~$140,000) to produce his next EP.
On the surface, it sounds like a great idea. Dive deeper and it looks even better.
Making music since he was 14 and inspired by the likes of Odesza and Kanye West, Daniel entered the music industry but realized how challenging it is to give up your masters while getting little to nothing in return from a music label. Being friends with @Cooopahtroopa, an established name in the crypto space, he was introduced to NFTs.
For the first time in his career he could release music, own all the rights, and get paid directly by fans & supporters.
On September 27th, 2021, he put out this post on Mirror.xyz, announcing that he was going to be tokenizing the masters and crowdfunding his next project via crypto. This is one of the, if not the, first community-owned, crypto-funded music projects to ever exist and while it may not seem significant, this is the beginning of an evolution in the music industry.
For years, artists have been hindered by the power of music labels but when the art can be funded by supporters rather than money-hungry labels, things change a little bit.
Artists can reward their fans for their support by distributing royalties from the album's earnings. From the fan's side, owning tokens from an artist's early projects is going to become a status symbol. Fans know what it's like to have their favorite underground artist blow up one year and then suddenly everyone's a fan. With tokens, you can prove your early fandom.
Given the uniqueness of this crowd-funded project, it was fully funded in one day.
Leading with transparency, he also noted within the article how the funds were to be used, provided a timeline for the EP's production, and highlighted some token holder benefits below:
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Pulled from the original piece on Mirror.xyz:
Additional expenses may include but are not limited to curation, contributor compensation and living expenses.
I plan to retain ~$40-50k worth of funds to cover my day to day life as a living salary.
Pulled from the original piece on Mirror.xyz
Pulled from the original piece on Mirror.xyz
Lifetime Access (3 total)
The top bidder will receive lifetime AA +1 to any Daniel Allan headline show.
The top three bidders will be added as signers on the Overstimulated multsig.
Platinum - 1 ETH (10 total)
VIP +1 to any Daniel Allan headline show of your choice.
Gold - 0.25 ETH (25 total)
Signed Vinyl + VIP access to one Daniel Allan headline of your choice.
Silver - 0.1 ETH (100 total)
Early access to a private listening party and governance rights in the Overstimulated project.
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With supporters of the project receiving royalties from the album & other benefits and Daniel only giving up 50% of his artist share of the project's master royalties, I can't imagine that artists won't be all over this in coming years. Now, I don't know if this is the best way to do it or how it'll play out in years to come but from an initial perspective, the fact that this is now happening almost feels surreal.
Power is being given to people in ways we've never seen.
In many contexts people always say "well, the government's not going to save us" - and I completely agree.
We're going to save each other, and crypto & web3 is making that more possible than ever.
h/t to Li Jin and CoopahTroopah for the find
