Music Ally’s guide to making and selling an NFT (And ...

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07-08 Tools AudioMob 09-10 Campaigns Lil Nas X, Da?i Freyr,

Hans Zimmer, AJ Tracey 11?16 Behind The Campaign- Bring Me The Horizon

| Music marketing for the digital era

APRIL 21 2021 ISSUE 274

Music Ally's guide to making and selling an NFT (And should you even do it?)

OMGNFTsWTF?

Sandbox Summit Global is aimed at anyone in the music industry who is interested in keeping up to speed with the latest developments on how to build and engage audiences digitally. Event includes:

? Keynote interview with Seven League's Richard Ayers, digital adviser to the world's leading sports bodies including FIFA, UEFA, Premier League, NHL, NFL, NBA and football clubs including FC Barcelona, Juventus and Leicester City

? Presentations of inspirational campaigns from other sectors ? including the amazing haptics-based interactive LEGO UK campaign

? Keynote interview on NFTs with 's Joe Conyers III

? Premieres and Listening Parties with YouTube's Kathy Baker and Lee Martin founder of Listening Party

? Songfluencer on the Global Impact of Influencer Marketing

? Panels on How to market a live stream and Tipping Economy and Memberships

? Music Ally Learn Live sessions where you can learn who are the most important companies for opportunities in the gaming world and how to make the most out of Short-Form Videos

? Presentations from Warner Music Group & Global Records on marketing in Russia, CIS and Eastern Europe

? Panel discussions on Classical Music and Posthumous marketing

? Your chance to vote on the Music Ally Campaign of the Year Award

Book now for your early bird tickets at just ?69 + booking fees See more details at

Sandbox Summit Global 2021 - A Music Ally Event in association with Linkfire, Vevo and Songfluencer and supported by Colabox

25-27 May 2021 | From 3pm BST/4pm CEST/10am EDT

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CONTENTS

In This Issue: After two excitable months, the wild, get-in-on-the-ground-floor hype around NFTs is starting to abate somewhat, and while interest - and cynicism - remains high, now is a good time to find out what we have learned so far. So here's Music Ally's analysis and guide to making and selling NFTs. What did people who made them find out? Why should (or shouldn't) you sell them - and how do you do it? Meanwhile, in Campaigns, Lil Nas X becomes a twerking class hero; Da?i Freyr gets holographic; Hans Zimmer makes a ringtone; and AJ Tracey makes an infectious game. In Behind the Campaign, RCA's Edd Blower and Will Stevens explain how they worked with Bring Me The Horizon to create a release campaign that allowed fans behind the scenes, and applied a pop-style, always-on release strategy to the metal world. Finally, in Tools, we talk to AudioMob, which inserts audio ads ? with accompanying clickable banner ads ? into mobile games, and find out how it has worked for artists who have used it so far.

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LEAD FEATURE NFTs: The rise of NFTs has been a confusing two-month sensation. So what have we learned so far? Plus: Music Ally's handy guide to making and selling NFTs for musicians. What are NFTs anyway? Why should (or shouldn't) you sell them - and how do you do it?

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CAMPAIGNS Lil Nas X becomes a twerking class hero; Da?i Freyr gets holographic; Hans Zimmer makes a ringtone; and AJ Tracey makes an infectious game.

7

TOOLS We talk to AudioMob, which inserts audio ads ? with accompanying clickable banner ads ? into mobile games, and find out how it has worked for artists who have used it so far.

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BEHIND THE CAMPAIGN RCA's Edd Blower and Will Stevens explain their work with Bring Me The Horizon in creating a release campaign that allowed fans behind the scenes, and applied a popstyle, always-on release strategy to the metal world.

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COVER FEATURE

Music Ally's guide to making and selling an NFT (And should you even do it?)

Actionable takeaways ? NFTs could ? potentially ? be an important source of income for musicians, allowing them to monetise storytelling. ? For all the hype, NFTs should have solid thinking behind them: don't just sell an NFT because they are new. ? It is best to look at NFTs as an exclusive offer - don't replicate with NFTs actions or offers that already work on other platforms. ? Think hard about whether you want to offer "just" an NFT or bundle your NFT with something extra. Collectors probably prefer the former.

OMGNFTsWTF?

The speed with which NFTs ? nonfungible tokens, but then you already knew that ? have made their way into music industry thinking has been nothing short of sensational. Two months ago, most had probably never heard of them; now, they are the

hottest thing under the artfully rendered digital sun.

For artists, NFTs represent a potentially enduring new stream of income, with most sales platforms offering secondary sales fees for the re-sale of their art. It is no surprise, then, that musicians were

quick to embrace the new technology. In February 2021, Grimes sold $6m worth of NFTs via online marketplace Nifty Gateway and the floodgates opened: since then Aphex Twin, Jacques Greene, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Deadmau5, 3lau and Kings of Leon have all offered

NFTs for sale, with more items being offered by the day.

Perhaps wary of the new technology, several of these NFT sales have included other, more traditional goods: Jacques Greene's NFT Promise included the song's publishing, while Kings of Leon offered various incentives, including "Golden Tickets" for their live shows.

On the whole, they have been a success too: 3lau made $11.6m in NFT sales, while Aphex Twin's NFT sold for $128,000. In promotional terms, too, NFTs have provided an interesting story for media who are lapping up anything NFT based. (Music Ally included, of course.) But they are by no means a blanket success: the auction for the Kings of Leon's NFTs, for example, was extended beyond its initial deadline, which suggests potential teething problems.

All the same, interest for NFTs - and

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COVER FEATURE

cynicism about NFTs - remains extremely high within the music industry. So here's Music Ally's handy guide to making and selling NFTs for musicians. What have we learned so far? What are NFTs anyway? Why should (or shouldn't) you sell them - and how do you do it? But first, a little context...

What is an NFT, and why has the music industry lost its collective mind over them? One reason for the frenzy around NFTs is that they represent something that the music industry has been looking for perhaps subconsciously - for years: digital scarcity. In many ways, the rise of digital music has been positive for the music industry, opening whole new markets for artists and labels and giving consumers access to a dizzying variety of music.

But at the same time it has created a problem: if my MP3 (or Wav or Flac or what have you) can be copied, at the click of a mouse, to create another, identical file - then what value does it have? My copy of your MP3 is just as good as your original file - so why on earth would I bother spending any money on it? Streaming, meanwhile, has seen the music industry go beyond the ownership model, where users pay for access rather than ownership.

NFTs presents a solution to this problem. Without getting too technical, NFTs are unique, non-divisible and noninterchangeable, with their ownership written into the Blockchain.

What this means, essentially, is that once an NFT is created it can't be copied and, as each sale (and re-sale) of the NFT is recorded on the Blockchain, everyone knows who owns it. Voil?: a genuinely

limited-edition digital file. The NFT itself is a "digital token" that refers to the digital artwork: typically digital imagery, audio, or video, or some combination of the three. Thus, the owner of the NFT is considered the owner of the "original" digital file.

NFTs could be an opportunity to "monetise storytelling" Joe Conyers III , EVP, global head of NFT at , who is running its recently launched NFT platform, says that NFTs allow musicians to build worlds, to collaborate, to appeal to the collectors' market in the digital age and - perhaps crucially - to "monetise storytelling".

"I think about some of the greatest records that really had a story-telling attribute over the last two decades, I think about things like Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts, and I think about how they built all these videos, this alternate reality game around it," he says. "There was a whole lot of things that fans could sink their teeth into. And it wasn't just beyond the music, there was a whole ephemera around it, a whole feel and look, almost a taste to it.

"You don't see that that often [now] because it is not very profitable to invest that much money into a complicated marketing campaign like that.

"Only the biggest bands can really pull something like that off... You can have a much smaller artist who can actually monetise their story through these collectibles in a way that we have never really seen before."

In the era of streaming, particularly, when many artists see music as being undervalued by DSPs, it is easy to understand the appeal of selling an NFT. Clarian, an independent artist who recently sold his album Whale Shark as an NFT ? including publishing rights to the album in perpetuity ? says that he would rather "share one copy of the digital certificate of

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my album with a human who can cherish the meaning with proof of payment than with a tech giant corporation that pays 0.004 cents a stream and couldn't give a fuck about the message and music, beyond cold machines sending them down a mindless feeding tube and stripping its personality and rarity through the process".

Underground music culture has, he said, been hurting for a past several years, with COVID only exacerbating the situation.

"The streaming monetisation model has devalued music sales to such an extreme degree that it is mainly the small commercialised few who take in large profits," he says, "while smaller artists are pressured harder onto the content creation circle of social media, Patreon newsletters and authenticity and quality

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