Mint Season 4 Recap: The World of Music NFTs

Mint Season 4 was epic.

We now reach over 20,000 web3 creators, founders, and investors per month across audio, video, blog, and newsletter, to name a few. I started Mint 10 short months ago to focus on the web3 creator economy and couldn’t be happier with its progress to date.

A special thanks to Coinvise and Polygon Studios for collecting my sponsorship NFTs and making this season possible.

The primary theme for this season was music, and with that came an incredible lineup:

For this season, I curated 20 creators to be featured across 20 episodes. Yet, as publishing time increased and trends evolved, so did my guest list.

I ended up publishing 34 episodes with leading figures in the web3 creator economy and music movement featuring everyone from the founders of Catalog, Mint Songs, and Royal, to the top collectors and music creators defining this decentralized revolution.

To close out season 4, I wanted to take a moment to compile some thoughts, favorite takeaways, and summaries from a few key episodes.

Let’s begin with the two primary and controversial types of music NFTs.

The two primary types of music NFTs (today)

The main types of music NFTs today revolve around two themes: patronage and ownership. You own both NFTs at the end of the day, though what you own differs across each type.

Patronage NFTs

Patronage-based NFTs are collected to support an artist with collector upside derived from appreciating secondary sales.

Artist royalties are accrued through secondary sales and, depending on their popularity, often outpace what one would earn through web2 streaming platforms. Reference RAC as an example:

Patronage evangelists argue that, for the first time, there’s finally a way to value a song in its proper artistic form, hence why it’s worth collecting.

You can gain a solid understanding of this narrative by listening to my episode with Catalog founders Mike Mckain and Jeremy Stern, who shared why music NFTs and the art of collecting are merely the start of building a better future for the music industry.

It’d be worth checking out Mint Song’s take on this narrative as well as LimeWire’s perspective on this model.

Ownership NFTs

Ownership-based music NFTs involve buying a fraction of a song’s IP, with collector upside generated through copyrights and streaming royalties accrued by the song on web2 platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

While ownership on-chain is still a grey area, some call this format a meme, while others argue this is the most authentic way to value a song.

NFT thought leader, EDM DJ, and founder of Royal.io Justin Blau outlines his perspective on the two different formats and why the ownership model will eventually prevail. 👉 Listen Now

Conclusion

While these two formats serve as the foundation for how drops work today, we’re seeing experimentation happen in real-time with projects like decent.xyz, introducing bonding curves into the mix to rethink pricing models and liquidity. We’ll hear more from them in Season 5. 😉

Speaking of prices, how would an artist determine what their music NFT is worth at launch?

How to price a music NFT

Many guests shared their thoughts on this one, from Cooper Turley to Justin Blau, the new co-CEO of LimeWire, Daniel Allan, and more. Yet, there’s one guest in particular who stood out the most.

American singer and songwriter VÉRITÉ recommends instead of setting a pre-determined price for your first drop, let the market decide what it’s worth using a timed, open-bid structure. 👉 Listen Now

Building a fan club using crypto (aka starting a creator DAO)

After building a band of collectors, many music creators start their first token-based community, otherwise known as a creator DAO, which was a core theme in Season 4.

Throughout the season, we heard different hot takes on what is a creator DAO and how you form one from the practitioners themselves.

Season 3 guest BlockchainBrett defines a creator DAO as a “...set of Tokens that own and govern an artist's treasury of their NFTs and its sale proceeds.” You can listen to his episode here.

While there’s a scale to DAOifying a community, most creators today start with a private, token-based group chat on Discord, Telegram, Twitter DMs, WhatsApp, etc., and evolve into having a shared treasury with cosmetic-level governance processes.

What better way to learn how to start an actual creator DAO successfully than to hear from those who are setting the example:

First up is my favorite web3 music duo: Daniel Allan and Henry Chatfield. Together, they broke down the dynamics of their partnership, with Henry outlining the day-to-day of being a community manager and Daniel recapping his end-to-end web3 journey.

From releasing his EP crowdfund to building a passionate community of collectors to publishing the EP in a web3 native way, he reveals how he did it on Mint. 👉 Listen Now

DJ Steve Aoki shared with us a unique look into the problems plaguing the music industry today while exploring his vision for building a metaverse for his token-holders coined the ‘AOKIVERSE.’ 👉 Listen Now

Gary Vaynerchuck shared tips on building a minimum viable community (MVC), suggesting that you should “spend six months learning about NFTs and live on discord and Twitter” before launching anything. 👉 Listen Now

Queen George told us how she growth hacked 150 Ethereum collectors by giving away free tickets as NFTs to attend her concert during Ethereum Denver. 👉 Listen Now

Avenged Sevenfold lead singer M.Shadows highlighted how his iconic band onboarded a non-crypto native fan base into web3 via the Deathbats Club and why NFTs were the ultimate glue for building the community of his dreams. 👉 Listen Now

Independent artist Grady outlined his journey of bringing like-minded people together IRL and URL through a decentralized record label called Good Karma DAO, which helped curate some of his music NFT collectors today (including myself). 👉 Listen Now

Yury Liftshits of SuperDAO explained the various basic structures of forming a creator DAO and how to start one in just a few clicks. 👉 Listen Now

Bonfire’s Matt Alston and Melissa Zhang shared their perspective on how creators should be thinking about governance and the various ways to include one’s audience into the day-to-day of one’s creative process. 👉 Listen Now

Mark de Clive-Lowe taught us that breaking free from legacy record deals is the ultimate form of freedom. He shared how he orchestrated a group of collectors who aligned with his vision to help buy back complete ownership of his catalog using crypto. 👉 Listen Now

William Bailey of Bolero Music discussed the various utility frameworks on structuring one’s first social token and when you’d consider launching a fungible experience to build an audience over an NFT. 👉 Listen Now

And last but not least, Xcelencia and Charlie Crown taught us the various crowdfunding mechanics used in building a collector base and how they collectively raised $60,000 to pursue creative freedom.

Beyond building a creator DAO, the season highlighted what I believe will be a significant trend towards the end of 2022: short, mid, and long-form videos, with music videos currently in the lead.

Video NFTs

With over 37 million YouTube channels and 100,000 TikTok influencers worldwide, we’ve yet to see the staggering hype around video collectibles.

We’ve seen examples of music video NFTs doing well, like LATASHÁ’s piece titled ‘GOGO WYNE’ selling for 13.4 ETH on Zora back in December 2021, yet, there aren’t nearly enough examples to showcase in comparison to the demand for digital art and music.

Dayo Adeosun, founder of Glass.xyz, was featured early in the season to share his point of view on all things video NFTs.

Glass protocol is building the ultimate destination for video NFTs, with a current focus on highly curated drops to help liberate the everyday video creator, starting with music artists.

In our episode, Dayo shares the fundamental macro problems facing short, mid, and long-form videos in web2, why people want to collect videos, how we can better educate creators worldwide on the concept of ownership, and so much more. 👉 Listen Now

Collecting music NFTs

This season wouldn’t be complete without featuring some of the industry’s top collectors and builders.

We learned that Justin Blau doesn’t understand the value of collecting purely patronage-based NFTs, while collectors like Cooper Turley have spent over 100 ETH on them.

Cooper’s session ended up being the most extended episode in the season, coming in hot with 1.5 hours of pure alpha.

We talk about everything from getting started as a music creator in web3, the soon-to-be consumption layer for music NFTs, tokenomics, and so much more.

I'm still impressed that he didn’t take one sip of water during the entire interview. 👉 Listen Now

Music production: beats, loops, and the headless artist

I also explored the creative process of producing a song on-chain and the various founders, DAOs, and producers that are experimenting at this forefront.

Brothers Kyle and Evan Dhillon of Arpeggi Labs are on a mission to empower the creative value of music through on-chain production tools.

They walked me through the process of building a web3-native digital audio workstation (DAW) and their vision for the on-chain music industry. 👉 Listen Now

Shortly after, 2x Grammy award winning producer !LLMIND hopped on to explain his web3 music project Squad Of Knights, why producers are better off selling beats, loops, and sample packs as NFTs, and the various problems plaguing these creators today. 👉Listen Now

Web3-native artist Matthew Chaim popped on for the last episode in the season to highlight his passion project SongCamp and the 80-person music collective that goes by the name CHAOS. This has to be one of the most forward-thinking, creative group of folks in web3 I’ve ever come across.

TL;DR: he hosts songwriting camps, and at the end of each cohort, they tokenize their music. CHAOS is the latest project to stem from their most recent camp that’s about to redefine what music collaboration means. 👉 Listen Now

Beyond collaborative projects, I explored the intersection of where DeFi meets the music industry with some interesting insights worth sharing.

DeFi and music copyrights

Decentralized finance, or DeFi for short, promises the disruption of artist micro-loans, security-backed NFTs, and much more, or at least that’s what Lee Parsons envisions.

The serial entrepreneur and music industry veteran founded Opulous to change how music artists get funded and paid.

They’ve created an innovative model where revenue-generating artists can take a loan against their IP contracts to utilize their future projected cash flow.

Definitely an interesting case study worth exploring. 👉 Listen Now

The web3 music project I’m most bullish on

While hard to choose, my favorite episode to record this season was with Benny Conn, co-founder of Beat Foundry, who shines with enthusiasm and an overwhelming passion for empowering musicians via a new genre that he likes to call on-chain generative music. He’s basically building the Art Blocks for the music world.

Benny was featured twice during this season simply because I’m a big fan of what he and his team are building. I’m not a private investor or advisor; I merely collect their drops because they’re thoughtfully engineered to odd perfection and have revealed a new appreciation for music that I never knew existed.

The era of completely auto-generated music is upon us. While still in its infancy, I imagine a Billboard 100 and Grammy award-winning hit on the near horizon. 👉 Listen Now

That’s a wrap

And that was just Season 4.

Every guest brought their unique spark to the conversation though I felt these were the most significant points worth digesting after four months of discovery and documentation.

I can’t wait to reveal Season 5 on April 28th. 👀


As for the thumbnail at the top, I curated a map outlining a few of the projects discussed in Season 4 and the various tools, communities, collector groups, and research arms used to empower web3-native creators. S/o to @devinmancuso on this collab.

Can you identify them all?


Additional Resources from Season 4

Season 4 Participation Pin NFT

If you haven't already, get your free Season 4 Participation Pin. This NFT will come in handy in the future as Mint develops. 👀 Collect here.

Beginner’s Guide to Music NFTs + 300 Collector Database

I’m releasing a simple beginner’s guide to music NFTs soon as well as a list of the top 300 music NFT collectors to help you find some new collectors. Get your copy here.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get the latest insight from the web3 creator economy: https://levychain.substack.com/


Full Disclosure: I’ve invested in some of the projects mentioned in this post.

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