GM ✨ I’m Løyd, I make electronic music and I’ve always been interested in new technologies. I’ve been involved in the web3 ecosystem since last year.

Music NFTs are getting some hype lately so I thought this would be helpful. 🔍

In this article, we’ll release a song as a 1/1 NFT with our own smart contract (thus with true provenance and full control) from square one !

If you enjoyed it, please consider following me on Twitter, checking my NFTs on Zora and giving a listen to my music. 📡

This is what this article covers :

Why would an artist do it ? - Why would a collector buy it ? - Being clean - The basics - Creating a wallet and getting some ETH - 1 NFT, 2 files : audio & artwork - Catalog - Manifold, your own smart contract - Royalties/creator share - Gas fees - List the NFT - Utility

Why would an artist do it❓🛠

It has become really difficult to generate income from music these recent years, with Spotify giving 0.003$ per stream, a global pandemic (therefore, almost no gigs at all) and other issues.

Releasing music doesn’t feel that good anymore : there is a lot of pressure to release songs constantly (hoping for a few playlist spots), creating (sometimes questionnable) « easy » content to please the algorithms for a bit more exposure, buying ads for people to actually see what we post on social media … This system cannot work.

This cannot work financially for an artist, but also in regards of building a community and interactions with supporters. Web3 & NFTs might be the solutions to solve these, and create a unique bond between artists and fans.

As explained in the Catalog FAQ,

Music NFTs are unique, one-of-one records that exist on the internet forever, free from any one platform, and provide artists and fans with a programmable canvas for a new world of music ownership. Artists collect 100% of their initial sales, and earn a creator share every time their records are resold.

The music industry is not easy, and learning everything you need to mint NFTs is not either. Good news : the tools are in front of us now, and I hope I’ll be some help !

Why would a collector buy it❓🛍

When buying a music NFT, the collector creates the most powerful & immediate patronage a fan can offer, and has access to the perks the artist provides with the NFT (the utility, talked about later in this article). This is a great way to support an artist directly.

There are now quite a few success stories out there underlying the deep connection between an artist and its collectors. For example, people who bought the Disclosure face logo NFT got in touch with Guy (from the duo) several times, and he even showed up to throw a DJ set at one of their parties. They eventually became friends.

Being clean 🛁

This is common sense but before anything, the song you’re about to mint must be 100% from you. No uncleared samples. If you’re signed to a label, you’d want their written approval and everything clearly explained to them.

If there is any, the collaborators on your song should also be at least aware of it, or discuss how the sale would be divided between everyone involved.

Avoid any legal issue and have everything written down.

Let’s dive in. ⚓️

The basics 📝

If you’re new to NFTs & web3, you have to understand what a blockchain is. I’d suggest you to read about it online, but basically it’s a peer-to-peer network & database secured by cryptography. It’s decentralized, that means no one can decide to shut it down.

We’ll mint a song on the Ethereum blockchain. NFTs can also be minted on other blockchains such as Tezos & Solana.

Minting a song means creating a unique (non-fungible !) token attached to your track that proves the authenticity, the provenance and ownership of it. The digital files (here, song + artwork) are generally stored on IPFS or Arweave.

If « non-fungible » does not ring a bell to you, see it as the opposite of something « fungible » : the 5$ bill I have in my pocket is fungible - I can exchange it to my friend’s 5$ bill, even though mine is a bit folded or whatever. A 5$ bill equals an other 5$ bill exactly and this is not the case for NFTs, because each NFT is by definition unique.

This shouldn’t stop you from uploading your song on all digital platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. Information on the internet wants to be free, like Kayvon Tehranian (Foundation’s CEO) said during his TED Talk.

More importantly, if a song becomes successful there is a chance its NFT will increase in value.

⚠️ We are creating scarcity and ownership of the original song, and no rights are included with the NFT (unless explicitly specified otherwise). If this scares you, include « no rights included » in the NFT description.

Creating a wallet and buying some ETH 👛

First, you’ll need to create an Ethereum wallet. The most common one is Metamask. If you happen later to get some more ETH (Ethereum currency), you might consider to get a Ledger wallet. Metamask is available as a desktop browser extension and phone app.

Understand that your wallet (and by extension your Ethereum address) is « you » in the world of web3 and NFTs, and looks something like this : « 0x … ».

⚠️ When creating a wallet you’ll be provided a seed phrase of 12 words, write it down carefully in the physical world and NEVER tell it to anyone. If someone has your seed phrase, he can access your wallet.

You’ll need some ETH to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. We could go into details about this (proof-of-work, mining, …), but understand that creating and listing tokens will require you to spend some ETH (we call that « gas fees ») to ensure that information stored on the blockchain is safe and 100% correct.

You can purchase ETH on all crypto exchanges : Binance, Coinbase, … I personally use crypto.com. I’d suggest getting 0.1 ETH.

On crypto.com, your 0.1 ETH will be stored in your « Crypto wallet », you can hit Transfer > Withdraw > External wallet > + > Wallet address. Here, copy/paste your Metamask address (« 0x … ») to send ETH you bought on crypto.com to your Metamask and confirm. There will be a small fee for this transaction.

⚠️ Copy/paste your Metamask address carefully. If it isn’t 100% right, funds will be lost.

You should see ETH appear in your Metamask app/extension after a few seconds (up to a few minutes).

1 NFT, 2 files : audio & artwork 🎵🖼

Now, you could go on NFT platforms mint your digital file. The tricky thing is, your song « is » 2 digital files : the wav (the music) and the jpg/png (the artwork), and most marketplaces only allow 1 digital file for your NFT.

There are 2 ways of minting your song (with both digital files as 1 token) right now : minting directly on Catalog or minting through your own smart contract using Manifold.

Catalog 💽

Catalog is a NFT marketplace dedicated to songs, the team does an amazing job to deliver music NFTs from a variety of artists. Since this platform is built on Zora, Catalog NFTs will also be displayed there.

Here is a Catalog NFT, and the same NFT on Zora.

You’ll have to fill in their artist submission form to get access; at the moment there are a lot of submissions coming in and the small team cannot onboard many people at once.

Manifold, your own smart contract 📃

Second option is to deploy your own smart contract with Manifold. This is a powerful tool that allows true ownership and provenance of your NFTs, no code required.

Manifold has many good points, one of them is the ability to mint on testnet (the « test network »), before the actual blockchain, the mainnet (the « main network »). You can then see what it would look like, before actually minting.

All of this can be overwhelming at first, fortunately Manifold wrote everything down in their docs; Read them with attention before diving in.

As said in the docs, Manifold suggests you to make 1 contract for everything you’ll mint as an artist.

My contract is the « Løyd » collection. I divide my projects using the « Collection » property I set myself. You can add any property you want.

Example (not audio + artwork though but a video file) : this NFT of mine below has 3 properties : « Artist », « Year » and « Collection ». They have « Løyd », « 2022 » and « Boys In Blue » as values.

As I mint more NFTs in the future using this contract, people will be able to filter them by properties to find a collection of mine in particular or what I did in 20xx, etc.

When choosing the type of your contract, aim at ERC-721. This is explained in the docs but our goal is to make a 1/1 NFT for our song (ERC-1155 allows multiple editions of 1 NFT but this is not what we need in our case).

Then you’ll be able to upload both artwork and audio file, set properties and write the description. Check everything really carefully before actually minting ! If you need to make changes after mint, they will require you to spend some ETH to update on mainnet.

In the future, Catalog might be able to import and list NFTs from Manifold contracts. All of this is pretty recent and it’s not the case for now.

Royalties/creator share 📥

In either case, set the royalties. This amount in % is what you’ll receive from a sale on the secondary market everytime your NFT is resold. Nothing to do once it’s set ! The % will be sent to your wallet automatically (you get 100% of the initial sale). One common amount is 15%.

Gas fees 🛢

Let’s take a moment to talk about « gas fees ». As said in the beginning, they play a role everytime you interact with the Ethereum blockchain. At this point : deploying our Manifold smart contract (one time only), and then each time we mint an NFT.

Gas fees fluctuate : they increase when more people interact with the blockchain, and decrease when less people do. Here are 2 tools to spot the best moment :

This chart gives you the average gas fees every hour during the week based on the 2 previous weeks, and this one gives you the state of gas fees right now.

Their unit is Gwei - I’d personally say that until 50 it’s low, between 50 and 80 is average, more than 120 is a lot, more than 200 becomes crazy.

Etherscan, overall, is a great tool to actually see every transaction and gas used on the blockchain. Try with your address to keep track of every interaction you make on the blockchain.

List the NFT 🏦

Back to our NFT ! We minted on mainnet; it’s almost done ! The NFT exists on Rarible, OpenSea, … But now we have to list it to sell it. This will require gas fees one last time.

I personally love Zora, so we’ll list it there. In their Discord server, there is a dedicated channel to ask them to include our contract address. This will be needed one time, and your contract address can easily be found on Manifold.

They do a great job, this shouldn’t take long. Now our NFT appears on Zora ! We can list it at the price we want. As many platforms, Zora provides docs that help us list our NFT step-by-step.

Buy now/auction 📯

There are 2 ways to list your NFT :

• Buy now : the NFT is listed at a certain amount. If someone pays that price, they get the NFT instantly.
• Auction : when the reserve price is met, an auction begins (you usually can define the time period). The winning bid at the end of the auction gets the NFT.

Split ✂️

Some NFT marketplaces offer the « split » feature, allowing you to split the sales between your wallet and the wallet of a collaborator. It’s being more and more included on platforms however if it’s not, just manually send ETH to your collaborator afterwards.

Utility ➕

Utility plays a big role in successful drops : this is the additional content your collector gets with the NFT.

You don’t have to provide utility : a piece of art can be sold for what it is and it’s fine, but collectors tend to enjoy something extra.

Here resides the true power of NFTs, you can include :

• Access to a token-gated channel on your Discord server
• Physical copy of your song/LP (CD/vinyl/tape …)
• High-quality download of audio, artworks, visuals
• Personal call with your collector
• Unreleased material
• Ableton/FL Studio session
• Remix stems
• Guestlist spots on your gigs
• …

Conclusion

Listing songs as 1/1 NFTs is pretty new, and artists are still wrapping up their head around these concepts. The web3 field has a lot to offer and there is room to experiment.

I hope this article was helpful ! I tried to be concise and put everything into simple words. If you’re an artist trying things out with NFTs, I hope you’ll find success.

Besides 1/1 NFTs, you can also check out SoundMint (generative music NFTs), Royal (each NFT purchased works as a royalty share of a song) and Sound.xyz (listening parties, comments, a better Soundcloud in web3 with limited edition NFTs).

For any additional thought/question/remark, come say hi !

Banner image © Loïs Denis, 2021