Prog-rockin’ dystopia enthusiasts Muse release their sixth studio album, Will Of The People, on 26th August. Among the inevitable flurry of physical formats – a deluxe bundle with vinyl, CD and three colours of cassettes as well as a signed “Artcard Pack” for £52; a bundle featuring the standard vinyl, a collector’s edition vinyl and that signed “Artcard Pack” for £40 – there is a NFT version.
What makes this particularly newsworthy is the fact that it will be the first NFT album release to qualify for the charts in (initially) the UK and Australia.
Each one costs £20 and will be limited to 1,000 copies globally. Purchasers can keep it or choose to re-sell it, with 15% of the resale price going to the act and the rightsowners (Warner for the sound recording and Universal for the publishing).
This did not force a change of the chart rules in the UK as they were already updated for such releases; rather it is the first album sold as an NFT to meet the criteria.
(An NFT boxset album release earlier in the year by The Amazons in the UK was sold as part of a bundle rather than a standalone release.)
The purchaser of the Muse NFT gets the album as FLAC files (they keep the files if they re-sell it and the new buyer can re-download them). It comes with a different sleeve, the band members will digitally sign it and the purchaser’s name is permanently listed on a digital roster.
It is sold via Serenade who sold £10 NFTs at the Brit Awards earlier in the year and the sell to consumers is that they can buy NFTs with a debit or credit card and don’t need to have a crypto wallet already set up.
The newsworthiness is around the chart eligibility rather than the content, which seems the wrong way around. For a major act – and an act that constantly trumpets its interest in new technologies – the actual NFT is a Spartan offering. There are chart rules, of course, about how many digital rewards and gewgaws you can squeeze into an NFT album, but this all feels slightly underwhelming as the first NFT album that can count towards the charts.
Perhaps the NFT offering will unfold after release and all manner of exclusive content will be added to it on a rolling basis. But as it stands, it feels like slim pickings when it could have been a blockbuster event.
