Music Artists
Music NFTs continue to increase in popularity. About a year ago, most people didn’t even know what it was or how to use it. But today, Music NFTs are the rave of the moment.
NFTs are revolutionizing the music industry. Currently, the industry is undergoing a radical transformation powered by NFTs. Artists are regaining full creative control of their digital assets, cutting out middlemen, and record labels, and in the process, generating revenue by selling their music as NFTs.
To truly appreciate the impact Music NFTs will have on the industry, we need to understand the traditional revenue model of the music industry and why it’s not favorable to artists.
The Music Industry Before NFTs and Why Artists Need to Jump on the Music NFT Bandwagon
Traditionally, the music industry operated on a royalty-based system where a chunk of the money goes to the record labels. The financial practices of some of these record labels were not too favorable to artists. Some of them took advantage of the uneducated, easily swayed artists who didn’t care much about the money but were more passionate about making music that resonated with their fans.
These record labels created a strange and convoluted system that was difficult for most artists to understand or wrap their heads around. Because of how complicated these record deals were, whenever artists signed an agreement with one of these record labels, they were invariably agreeing to a bunch of things that weren’t explicitly stated.
A typical record deal goes like this; let's say the record label gives an advance of $250,000 to an artist to record an album. After the artist records the album, let’s suppose the album sells 500,000 copies at $10 each, yielding $5,000,000; the record label then takes their cut, which is usually 85% of the total sale leaving the artist with $750,000.
After taking their cut, and before the artist receives any payment for his share of the sales, the record label first deducts their advance of $250,000. In addition, the record label then recoups other costs, such as the recording cost, half the promotion cost, half the video cost, tour support, packaging cost, and much more.
At the end of the day, most artists won’t make as much money as they could from the deal, because of the expenses accrued by the record labels in marketing and promoting the album.
Aside from how complicated some of these deals were, some record labels charged or passed on other fees to artists. For example, some record labels charged artists breakage fees even though most songs are streamed online.
Although the music industry is better than it was before, there’s still some room for improvement, and that’s where Music NFTs come in.
With Music NFTs, artists don’t have to worry about getting short-changed by some of these record labels, and that’s why at Xircus, we’ve created a protocol that uses smart contracts to fix how the music industry is systematically broken.
With our platform, artists and their fans can start making money through the blockchain technology of NFTs.
What is a Music NFT?
Now that we understand how the traditional model of record labels doesn’t always favor the artist - let’s look at the new exciting blockchain technology of Music NFTs and how it will enable artists, musicians, beatmakers, producers, and DJs to make more money with their music.
Music NFT is a tokenized certificate of ownership of an audio or musical piece that can be bought, sold, and traded. They provide proof of ownership via smart contracts and are bundled with a certificate of authenticity that can be validated at any time to show who owns a piece of music.
Artists, musicians, beatmakers, producers, and DJs can claim full ownership of their music through NFTs without sharing their income with middlemen such as attorneys.
With NFT music, artists can launch their music albums or singles in .mp3, .flac, and .audio format and bundle them as NFTs.
There is a collectible market for music. One where fans can directly buy music from artists they believe in. With this technology, they can sell their music directly to their fans.
With Music NFTs, fans can do two things. Firstly, they can support artists that they like and appreciate. Secondly, they also have an investment that would hopefully become valuable and make them money.
How Xircus Helps Artists and their Fans Make Money
At Xircus, we built our platform to provide artists, musicians, beat makers, producers, and DJs with the tools to incentivize and empower their fans to support their work. This is a win-win situation for both fans and artists who have a much lower overhead in producing the album than before because there are no more physical items involved in the distribution of the music as the album is now digitally distributed.
We are not just an NFT marketplace but a protocol where artists can build and own their token economics. We provide artists with a platform to create their own NFT store, mint their NFTs, put them up for sale, do giveaways, gamified access, incentives, marketing, and auction in minutes.
The Xircus platform makes it easy for artists to deploy and launch a branded NFT marketplace free of charge, with no hidden cost.
Make Money as an Artist or Ringmaster
Lots of famous artists are beginning to enter the Music NFT space. Artists such as Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and 3LAU are a few examples of top artists who are foraying into the space. For instance, Ibn Inglor, a rapper from Chicago, generated $92,000 by selling shares of his upcoming album’s royalties as NFTs. Also, the artist 3LAU re-released his 2018 album as an NFT music album and was able to earn a profit of nearly 11.6 million USD.
Even lesser-known artists such as Heno, Black Dave, Iman Europe, and MoRuf Adewunmi who appeared on Snoop Dogg’s NFT mixtape, all found success releasing their music as NFTs.
At Xircus, we help artists make money with Music NFTs.
On our protocol, artists, musicians, beatmakers, producers, and DJs can deploy their own branded NFT marketplace, customize fees and themes, and create staking opportunities for their fans. Artists can also make fans shareholders through IMO, make fans pay in specific marketplace currencies on multiple chains and tokens as long as it's verified by the Xircus team.
We are here to bring enormous relief to artists, musicians, beatmakers, producers, and DJs. With our platform, artists have full royalty over the sales of their music albums and can keep their intellectual rights over the piece. We are here to give artists peace of mind because we keep it simple for everyone.
Our platform comes fully equipped with everything artists need to pack NFTs and Tokens as one for listing. For example, if you buy a bundle or a few tracks of an artist’s music NFT, you will get the album cover, special access, and discount tokens that you can use the next time you want to buy an NFT on their marketplace.
This is useful for marketplaces with two or more tokens within their ecosystem, where each token can be used to purchase specialty NFTs.
Let’s say, for example, there are two NFT listings on the marketplace; NFT A and NFT B. To buy NFT B, you would need to buy a unique Token X that can only be purchased using NFT A. So, to get NFT B, fans would have to buy NFT A first, receive it, and the Token X, then use Token X to buy a limited edition of NFT B.
In other words, Xircus makes it possible to create special access through NFT like a key, or by holding an X amount of tokens that artists configure when creating the marketplace.
Make Money as a Fan or Ambassador
Unlike in the traditional music industry, fans are rewarded when the artist they support succeeds. Music NFTs don’t only empower artists - they also empower fans.
With our platform, fans can earn money by being ambassadors and influencers of their favorite artists. The more music NFT your favorite artists sell on our platform using your referral link, the more money you earn. Fans can also make money on our Xircus by staking, owning marketplace shares, hodling 5000+ Xircus tokens, owning, selling, or reselling XircusPunk, marketplace skins, and many more.