In my post prior to this one, Making It in NFT As A Rapper, I announced I’m minting a song on Catalog called Sharp, and I called on the community to participate in the collection of the NFT, having all of the members be a part of the future of the song through their votes. After a long road, we made it, and the PartyBid for the NFT was complete! I want to use this post as a post-sale analysis, as well to talk about the next step for everyone who got in on this. I’ll start with the latter, so the collectors can skedaddle if they don’t want to hear me ramble on about the journey to the sale.

Next Steps for Collectors

Thanks for your support! If you’re a bit of a nerd, or interested in what a possible future of music NFTs could look like, this is where it gets interesting. The goal with Sharp is to create a community governed song, where all of the members of the community make decisions around the future of the song, traditionally in terms of the music industry, its digital future as well as its potential physical future.

Let’s break down what the immediate next steps are. There is gas involved, so feel free to wait until gas is low to really get in. You’re gonna get a token called $SHRP, here it is on etherscan, and that token represents your fractional ownership of the NFT, & will also be your pass to be involved in the votes for the future of the song.

1. Head to the page for the PartyBid, connect your wallet and claim your $SHRP tokens. This is gonna cost gas, and it won’t be much, but I still want you to wait until gas is low.
2. For your reference, I want you to head on over on a platform called Fractional. Click here to head to the page for Sharp, just to look at a little bit of details of the fractionalization in a different view. Percentages of tokens per wallet and the like. From here, you’ll also be able to pull your tokens out (yes, in exchange for ETH) & when we get ready to sell the NFT, we’re able to set the secondary sale price as a community.
3. We will be doing all of the voting on a platform called Snapshot. Click here to head there, connect your wallet, and join the Sharp crew to have every proposal posted on your “timeline” there.
4. I’m gonna give everyone maybe 7-10 days to claim their tokens before the governance process begins.

Once again, thanks to everyone who pulled up to support me on this! There are 43 members in the party and this is a great number to experiment this idea with!

Post-Drop Reflections

I’ve had a good chunk of time to look into this. Sharp hit the market on November 8th, and during the time I spent promoting it, almost a 2 month period (😅), I had gained over 3,000 followers. I just crossed 10,000 the other day. I gained 1/3 of my total followers in this time period. I was going super hard, in my mind, around letting folks know about this NFT drop, but to be honest with y’all…I thought I was gonna hit the 3 ETH goal in like a week. I thought that I had built my reputation up in the space enough to be able to make a somewhat ambitious NFT sale (which I recognized how ambitious it was to ask for 3 ETH for a song NFT), and I eventually did, but I was going through it up until that point. I thought a lot about my perceived peers in the space and how well they were doing. I was looking at Ibn Inglor and his monumental 20 ETH crowdfund for an album that no one has heard the music to. I was looking at Latashá and her 10.3 ETH music video sale. I was looking at everyone dropping on Sound and how they were selling 25 editions of a .1 ETH comment on a song in 1 minute or less. I was asking myself questions like “Have I not worked as hard as the folks I consider my contemporaries?” or “Is my community not as strong as I thought?” even to “Has all the work I’ve done been for nothing?” because the overarching conversation is that if you build the community then you’ll be able to sell NFTs, and I thought I was doing that. What has been really important to me despite those feelings was continuing to create content, and talk to everyone about the different things. I was popping into, as well as creating, twitter spaces, I was tweeting threads about the projects and my mindset around the release and all of these different things…which eventually paid off, but what a journey. Here are a ton of links to the different tweets I made about this project. I know I’m missing tweets and shit but after about 5 weeks it became really hard and I was really frustrated. It led me to thinking about all of the artists who haven’t been in the NFT space as long as I have or, like my perceived peers, have a lot of real world experience and potential previous fans in the space. I’m thinking a lot more now about how we can make sure that they get the support they need and are brought into spaces where they have opportunities to interact with all of the folks in the space and be able to get into the right places and do the right things. I’m not sure if there’s a “right” anything but I still think about it. I feel like I’m rambling, but I just wanted to be sure that I talked a lot about how I was feeling during the release and promotional time in hopes that someone reads this and is like “Damn, I feel like that too.”

I think my biggest opportunity with the release and promotion of Sharp was my mindset. It became really hard some days, but I should be at the understanding that not everything works immediately, no matter where you perceive yourself to be. Finding people and safe spaces to get some steam off with helped me a lot.

I think my biggest victory with the release and promotion of Sharp was my mindset, as well. Despite how I was feeling, not giving up and continuing to push and create content to move the project forward is the single thing I had to keep doing in order for this to work.

Anyway, to wrap this up, I’m ironically running a space on twitter called “Why Isn’t My Music NFT Selling?” and while I’m talking to people about their projects and breaking down what we think will help them sell, etc etc, I get an instagram notification that I’m on the 22 Rising NFT Artists to Watch in 2022 list from nftnow, and at the end of the room one of the people in the room actually threw in .9 ETH to complete the PartyBid minimum, and she was collected the next day. I was ready to go on for a few more weeks before going absolutely insane, so I’m happy it happened then. I remember when Kanye won a Grammy and said “Everybody wanted to know what I would do if I didn’t win…I guess we’ll never know.”

…that’s me.

What’s Next?

First thing’s first, I’m giving everyone time to head over to the PartyBid page and claim their $SHRP tokens. The first couple of votes, which will take place on Snapshot, for all onlookers, here’s where my mind is for the first few governing proposals:

• Am I releasing Sharp on streaming services?
  • If so, when?
  • If so, is there anyone who specializes in a release strategy?
• What am I paying myself for this? I’m taking at least .5 ETH so let’s talk about it
  • The remaining amount from the 3 ETH will be used for the song itself
• Music video?
  • If yes, I’ll make some loose ideas and we’ll vote.
  • Should the video be an NFT?
    • With holders getting a % of the sale or is it all for me?
• What other marketing should I be focusing on?
• Should I make a remix?
  • With who?

That’s just an idea of the types of things we’ll be talking about and voting on. I can’t wait to get to it with you guys. Thanks for reading this far. Can’t wait to dig in.

✌️