On March 1st, 2023, Web3 Hamburg Music's 0th episode podcast was officially launched. The audio will be released on podcast platforms and music players. Additionally, it will also be distributed through Decent on the Ethereum network, with a total circulation of 100. Among them, 70 will be airdropped to the 37 holders of Hamburglar Genesis Edition. Each holder will receive a Web3 Burger Music Issue 0 airdrop for every Hamburglar Genesis Edition they possess.
About Hamburglar Genesis Edition
Within less than a month, using an open sales model and selling at a price of 0.0069 ETH, 70 Hamburglar Genesis Editions were minted, attracting 37 collectors.
Among them,@Cooopahtroopaminted 10; @kirbyongeominted 6; @ReoCragunminted 5;@0xsndsminted 4; @JackieTian7and@SAGA3Kminted 3; @ashventure、@michyagape,@forace11,@DjakeNFT,@roadtoaly,@Fio02618066,@MigueFinance, and one mysterious address each minted 2; @cjin56925,@msft_fml,@jasonmeinzer,@lilei105,@wu_wingo,@pqseags,@mynameisheno,@mathcheck_art,@byobu4,@tiehan_xyz_old,@zeckxyz,@PrimeNight_eth,@Crittie_p,@glbkst,@dannycase,@madifxyz_,@brokeinvstr,@hi_mija,@acedaluo,@codeboymadif, and three mysterious addresses each minted 1.
Thanks to all the great collectors who collected Hamburglar Genesis Edition!
About Web3 Burger Music Issue 0
How to listen and mint
The first episode of Web3 Burger Music is released on the no-code publishing platform Decent, where you can listen and mint it.
You can also listen and mint through the Web3 music aggregation platform Oohlala. Oohlala currently has two versions, a web version and a mobile version. If you don't have a computer with you, you can listen to Web3 Burger Music through the mobile version of Oohlala!
In Web2, I will be uploaded to streaming platforms such as Xiaoyuzhou. You can follow the show "Web3汉堡音乐" or follow the user "hamburglar".
Sales Model
Web3 Burger Music Issue 0 adopts a fixed quantity sales model to ensure the scarcity and collectibility of the Podcast NFT. Through airdrops, owners of the Hamburglar Genesis Edition will be rewarded with one Web3 Burger Music Issue 0 airdrop for each Hamburglar Genesis Edition held.
The total issuance is 100, with 70 airdropped to owners of Hamburglar Genesis Edition. The remaining 30 will be available for public sale at a price of 0.0099 ETH.
Content of this Issue
The content of this issue is presented through writing and reading, which may be a bit dry. The recording process was bumpy, with cuts and revisions, but ultimately resulted in a ten-minute audio presentation. One can feel the hardships of the content creator in the production process!
The rough contents are as follows:
Hello, everyone! Welcome to Web3 Burger Music. I'm Hamburglar. Today is the 0th episode of Web3 Hamburger Music, and also my first time recording a podcast. I'm ready to share with you what music NFT is.
About NFT, I think many people are familiar with it. In 2021, Curry's high-priced avatar was widely spread on domestic social media platforms. Now, you can still see many people using boring monkey avatars. That year, many celebrities entered the market, and the concept of Facebook's metaverse became popular, making the NFT market very lively. But what is NFT? It is translated into Chinese as non-fungible token, but this is not in plain language. We can understand what a fungible token is. I think the most common one is currency, and every unit is the same. So a non-fungible token is probably like the little raccoon instant noodle water margin cards we collected when we were young, or the circular cards that children played with, which are also called "piaji" in the north. So the NFT model has been around for a long time, but the difference between NFT now and "piaji" in the past is that all NFT activities are recorded on the blockchain. This means that NFT has transparent traceability, and all information such as when it was born and when the first transaction took place is recorded on the blockchain. Under different contracts on the blockchain, there will be different NFTs, so the blockchain can also help us distinguish between real and fake. And avatar NFTs are just one manifestation of NFTs. What we are talking about today is music NFTs.
Music has existed for a very long time, but with the passage of time and the advancement of technology, the medium carrying music has changed. From the era of vinyl records, to the era of cassette tapes, and then to the era of CDs - these are all physical mediums, which I will collectively refer to as the record era. Now, we are in a streaming era where we can listen to music freely on the internet. However, I believe that the development of blockchain technology will change everything. Music NFTs use blockchain as their medium, which combines the characteristics of both the record era and the streaming era - collectibility and the ability to listen to music online. During the record era, music did not have collectibility because people bought records to listen to at home. But as we entered the streaming era, records gained new characteristics and became collectibles rather than just something to play music at home. However, streaming music lacks collectibility. The emergence of music NFTs can supplement this deficiency of streaming. Of course, the advantages of music NFTs are not limited to increased collectibility - the royalty mechanism of NFTs is a great thing for artists.
A few weeks ago, I posted two polls on Twitter: one asking "Which is more important for Music NFTs: 'good music' or 'good sales'?" Even though there were only 26 participants, 92.3% of them believed that "good music" is more important. The other poll asked "Which is better: 'Music NFT' or 'NFT Music'?" Again, with 26 participants, 96.2% of them thought 'Music NFT' was better.
I was a little surprised by these poll results because I always thought the focus of Music NFTs was on the hype of NFTs. However, more people chose "good music" while also choosing "Music NFT". Of course, there is a survivorship bias here - the collectors who are still active in the Music NFT market are music enthusiasts who see NFTs as a medium for music, rather than just hype. Those who care more about "good sales" are unlikely to vote or pay attention to the market.
I am also a music enthusiast, so I am still here.
Starting from 2015, I got into live music and fell in love with rock music. But it wasn't until the winter of 2018 that I collected my first signed album from a band. That day, I went to see the 2018 tour of the Wen Que band and after the show, I excitedly joined the band's signing session and talked with the band members. I still remember the guitarist telling me in Beijing dialect to "study hard". Because I had brought my backpack that day, mainly to save money on coat storage during winter shows, I would carry clothes in my backpack. After hearing that "study hard" remark, I embarked on the road of "collecting well". From then on, for every concert I attended that had a signing session, I would participate because I felt the connection between musicians and fans. It was intangible, but significant.
Later, during winter break, I lost interest in some bands, so I randomly put their signed albums on the online marketplace, Xianyu, for 150 yuan each, which I had originally bought for 50 yuan. I was surprised when they sold out the same night. After that, I listed another band's signed album that I wasn't too fond of for double the price, and it sold in a few days. It was then that I realized that fans were willing to pay higher prices for signed albums from bands they loved. From then on, I attended every signing session because I knew that signed albums would not lose value and could even be resold at a high price.
In the second half of 2019, I started paying attention to the circulation of signed albums of various bands on Xianyu. I bought some albums with good prices in bulk, using the hoarding strategy of the sneaker market that was popular at the time. I couldn't afford to speculate on sneakers, but I could accumulate a large number of records in the same way. The advantage of records over sneakers is that they take up less storage space. If you hoard a hundred pairs of sneakers, you may need a room to store them, but a hundred records may only need a few sneaker boxes to store. Then, towards the end of 2019, a global black swan event erupted, and everyone was at home. However, this did not seem to affect what I had to do, which was to sell records on Xianyu. I used my twice-a-week going out pass to send the only existing SF Express package. I felt that people's desire to collect at home was increasing, but I found fixed price sales a bit boring, so I started the second mode of selling records, which was auctioning them off.
In terms of auctioning records, the most well-known auction project in the NFT field is Nouns. So when I saw the Nouns auction, I felt quite familiar with it. Going back to records, I found that many records sold in auctions fetched higher prices than my fixed prices, possibly due to FOMO (fear of missing out). In any case, the combination of fixed price and auction modes made my life quite fulfilling in the first half of 2020.
In the winter of 2021, I came across NFTs. This was my second time entering the crypto market. The first time was in 2016 when I only learned about blockchain technology, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the prevalent ICOs at the time. With the black swan event of 2017, I stopped paying attention to the crypto market. So when I encountered the concept of NFTs in the winter of 2021, I felt a sense of belonging to it, which reminded me of Satoshi Nakamoto's quote, "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." The decentralized era created by Bitcoin was born with a rebellious spirit, a punk spirit, which shares the same core values as the rock music I love. Throughout the history of rock music, there have been constantly emerging subversive styles that oppose popular music, creating alternative and rebellious genres such as new wave, punk, post-punk, etc. It is this spirit that drives the development of Web3 today, and our current Web3 is in the same position in the historical development process as these rebellious music genres. That's why I love alternative rock, and I love Web3.
Going back to the NFTs I first encountered, they were just some meaningless PFP projects, which are avatar-based projects. It wasn't until March 2022 when Snoop Dogg released his music NFT on sound.xyz that I realized how similar it was to what I used to do. When I was selling records, the first thing I considered was saving inventory space, and music NFTs are authenticated and stored on the blockchain network, which means there is no inventory space required. Secondly, when I was selling records, a portion of the money had to be paid to the courier company from the seller to the buyer, and in the Ethereum network, gas fees are the delivery fees. Thirdly, the limited quantity of music NFTs makes them collectible, and more accurately records how many copies were released, when they were released, and who holds them. Music NFTs add the collectibility of the record era to the streaming era, making it the perfect application for collecting. These are defined by the record collecting habits themselves, and this is undeniable. There are still a lot of record transactions on the current record trading platform Discogs.
As I mentioned earlier, the scene of talking to the band after a performance is a bridge between fans and artists. And now music NFTs make it easier to achieve this scene. After purchasing a music NFT, you can join the artist's private Telegram group through certain authentication mechanisms. There, only a dozen or twenty people are allowed to join, and you can chat freely with your favorite artists, even through voice and video calls.
I also participated in the PFP community before, where many communities would launch some boring rewards to empower their projects. However, the music field is different. Artists can provide collectors with free tickets to performances, give them records, concert souvenirs, stickers, and more. These things combined with musicians are natural, and you don't even have to think about how to please collectors because music itself is what collectors want.
Let me give you an example using myself. I have a strong connection with the American musician Mija. I love her music, but I didn't know she was already a well-known artist, and I didn't even know how to pronounce her name correctly because it's in Spanish. I always called her Mijah. However, during our communication on Telegram, she asked me to send her a 10-second recording, and the next day she remixed my recording with her most popular song. The remix was presold at 0.05 ETH and then publicly sold at 0.1 ETH, and through the protocol on Sound, Mija and I each received 50% of the profits. A total of 50 versions were minted, and the total sales amounted to 2.45 ETH. It is worth mentioning that before the sellout, Mija airdropped a version to Vitalik, who was lucky enough to get the golden egg when it was sold out. This song is also the first Chinese lyrics music NFT on sound.xyz.
Speaking of golden eggs, let's talk about what golden eggs are. There is a golden egg mechanism on the music NFT platform, sound.xyz. Before sellout, each NFT cover and music content is the same, except for the different numbers, which is consistent with the traditional record industry. The difference is that when it's sold out, the blockchain will select a number to become a golden egg, and the cover of the golden egg will be different from others. In other words, it is a unique music NFT. Not only is the cover different, but in terms of rights, different artists will give different rewards to golden egg holders, and some may even invite you to visit their country for a few days. Recently, Snoop Dogg released a music NFT on sound, and the golden egg benefit is that when the sales quantity reaches 42000, the golden egg holder can go to Snoop Dogg's house to collect an antique car. Unfortunately, the sales quantity is only 10498.
Some may ask if the collectors have the copyright. On sound.xyz, you can understand it as a record now. You collect the record, but you don't own the copyright of this song. You only own the ownership of this record, but the value of this record lies in its limited edition and the fact that the album sounds good. However, some artists will state that the song is CC0, and therefore, there is no copyright. Some people say that copyright will hinder the development of music NFT, but as a music NFT collector, I don't want to own the copyright; I just want to get rare records and have more connections with musicians.
Regarding copyright, in most cases, the copyright of music NFTs still belongs to the musicians themselves. With the help of NFT characteristics, in the subsequent resale process, musicians can always receive a 10% royalty on the transaction price. This model allows musicians to avoid intermediaries taking more profit from them, as in the traditional model, where the company that the musician belongs to takes away more of the musician's profit.
Of course, all the music NFTs I have been in contact with are non-copyright music NFTs. However, there are also some music NFTs that are sold based on copyright. But the issue of copyright involves many legal aspects because the distribution of copyright through blockchain is a new model. If you have more insights into this issue, you can contact me.
Up to now, I have been focusing on the music NFT market for a year. I have experienced prosperity, decline, and maybe soon, a revival, as the economic cycle follows this pattern. I am not a professional, just an ordinary person who loves music and blockchain technology. I hope to discuss and exchange ideas with more friends who love music and Web3 through podcasting. If you are interested, anyone with ideas can contact me, and we can do this show together.
You can follow me on Twitter @0xHamburglar, where I share my views through mirror posts. You can also add me on WeChat at hamburglar_ to discuss more interesting things together.
Each episode of the show will be released on the blockchain in the form of a Podcast NFT. If you want to collect them, you can find the links on my Twitter.
All the content mentioned in this show is for personal sharing and does not constitute investment advice.
See you next time!