Home » How are NFTs and Web3 stimulating creativity in the music industry?

How are NFTs and Web3 stimulating creativity in the music industry?

by Thomas

Capable of bringing musicians closer to their communities and enriching the way we experience live music, NFTs and Web3 are opening up new opportunities for artists. The most enterprising are already exploring these new territories to push the limits of creativity, sometimes well beyond the musical field. Explanations with three experts in music and Web3.
The end of the dictatorship of algorithms

The music industry is now dominated by streaming platforms, and their remuneration policies are not without consequences for artists’ creative choices.

On Spotify, for example, musicians are only paid after 30 seconds of listening. In order to keep listeners hooked until that fateful mark, most recent hits no longer have an intro and the chorus comes earlier than before.

The platforms’ algorithms have also led to a reduction in the length of songs, because once the 30 seconds have passed, the listening time no longer has an impact on the artist’s remuneration. As a result, the average length of a song has dropped from 4 minutes 30 seconds in 1995 to 3 minutes 42 seconds in 2019.

The famous producer Mark Ronson, who produced Bruno Mars’ single “Uptown Funk!” and Amy Winehouse’s album “Back in Black”, criticised this dictatorship of algorithms in an interview for The Guardian in 2019:

“All your songs have to be under 3 minutes and 15 seconds, because if people don’t listen to them all the way through, [it] drops your ranking on Spotify. (…) It’s kind of crazy the way you have to think about music today. “

Faced with these drifts imposing a formatting of music, the innovations brought by Web3 appear to be a lifeline for creativity.

The creative freedom brought by NFTs

Web3 allows musicians to cut out many of the intermediaries that keep them away from their fans and inhibit their creativity.

Thus liberated, they can push back the limits of their inventiveness, allow themselves all kinds of fantasies, imagine new formats… Even if it means confusing their fans! But at least they have new tools to propose pure artistic creation, works coming from the depths of their being

Some artists who refuse to be restrained are now finding refuge in music non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces like Pianity.

Its CEO and co-founder, Kevin Primicerio, confirms this quest for freedom by some of the platform’s users:

“With us, you have no limits, you can release 25-minute songs. We have people who record their gigs and then sell them as NFTs on Pianity. These are tracks that can be an hour and a half long. Freeing the artists from any constraints frees their creativity, because they don’t have to worry about getting distribution. They can spend all their time producing, experimenting, just being more creative.

An explosion of hybrid works at the crossroads of the arts

Many musicians have mastered other artistic disciplines: video, photography, painting, drawing, poetry, writing, etc. With NFTs, they finally have an ideal tool to merge their creations and create hybrid formats at the crossroads of the arts.

Perrine Guyomard, Head of Business Development and Innovation at Warner Music France, highlights the many opportunities offered to musicians by NFTs:

For very creative people, it allows them to link worlds and reveal their personality even more, by opening up their field of expression. We’ve had artists in the house come to us and say they keep a handwritten diary, or they draw, and they don’t really know what to do with it. I told them that with NFTs they could, for example, link a song and the notes that were used to write the lyrics, with the erasures, the changes that were made. It may not fit in the traditional formats, but it lends itself very well to NFTs. It’s a tool that allows you to create very interesting complete works. “

NFTs also facilitate collaboration between musicians and artists from other disciplines, or even people who are not involved in the art world. This is what Agoria has been experimenting with, by creating the first plant-based NFT with his friends Nicolas Desprat, a biophysicist, and Nicolas Becker, a sound designer who won an Oscar for the film “Sound of Metal”.

Together, they mixed scientific observation with music by sounding the life cycle of a hemp plant and the way it communicates with its environment. To capture this process on video, they went so far as to modify a CNRS microscope. The result of their collaboration is the film “Phytocene”, sold as an NFT by the Phillips auction house.

Fans take back the music

Before the democratization of streaming platforms, the general public owned records, vinyl or even cassettes. NFTs allow us to return to this notion of ownership of the music we consume.

For Flavien Defraire, creator of the music and Web3 blog Le Son Dopamine and community manager of the Blockchain Game Alliance, this is one of the explanations for this newfound freedom for music fans:

For me, the fact that we have this freedom to do what we want with these digital assets over which we acquire a real right of ownership is the best way to explain the interest of Web3. The notion of freedom is inseparable from that of “true ownership”. “

By combining the notions of ownership and interoperability, one could even imagine that a musical NFT could have utility on another platform.

A piece of music could, for example, take the form of a racing car in a blockchain-based video game, or allow one to take advantage of promotions with a clothing brand sponsoring a musician. Again, this is largely uncharted territory that leaves the field open to creativity and redefines the boundaries of the artistic sphere.

Perrine Guyomard also mentions the possibility of creating fragmented musical NFTs to invent new uses:

“Perhaps the fact of splitting an NFT will be interesting for music. For example, it could be envisaged that a piece can only be listened to in its entirety when all the owners of its different fragments are together in the same physical place. There are lots of things to imagine in terms of experiences that strengthen the link to creativity and music. “

The rise of generative NFT music

NFTs are an ideal format for artistic collaborations. They simplify the creation of hybrid works, but also the payment of the different people involved in the creative process. Thanks to smart contracts, all payments are automated and transparent.

This phenomenon can also be observed when musicians choose to be assisted by algorithms or artificial intelligence in order to create generative music, which evolves over time and/or according to certain parameters defined by the artist.

The NFT format facilitates the monetisation of these mutable works, while offering fans the opportunity to own a unique piece of music by their favourite artist.

Kevin Primicerio is always looking for new music innovations for the Web3, and is thinking about offering programmable music NFTs on Pianity:

We’re talking to Sony CSL Paris, Sony’s AI department. There are things to be done from a creative point of view, with NFTs that could change over time, or be different depending on the edition number… This allows owners to own a unique variation of a certain music that has been generated and chosen by the artist. “

Flavien Defraire also considers generative music to be one of the most interesting innovations that Web3 has brought to the field of music:

“When you’re a musician, you’re not just a musician.
When we had music on CDs and vinyl, the format was really fixed. So is the stream. Now, thanks to NFTs, we can imagine pieces of music that will evolve over time according to certain criteria chosen by the artist. He can decide that each new purchaser of the same NFT will get a new version of the music, or that the music will evolve over time according to certain data… We can also imagine NFTs to be collected and combined to create more elaborate pieces. There are a lot of things to invent, and it hasn’t been exploited much yet. “

Armed with the tools provided by Web3, musicians can explore new creative fields, limited only by their imagination. In the months and years to come, expect to see the emergence of completely new musical formats.

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