Much of the activity, certainly in music, around NFTs has been driven by the artists. They see it as a way to take control of the artist-fan relationship – and make most/all of the money. They will also talk about how it is “empowering”, “liberating” and a “new creative canvas”, but maybe they are mainly just looking at the numbers cascading into their bank accounts.
The majors are all talking about the potential of web3 in general and NFTs in particular to boost their revenues, but so far they have kept their involvement as unobtrusive as possible.
In the live sector, however, lights are not being concealed under bushels quite to the same extent.
Events promoter AEG is looking to bring NFTs and web3 into the live arena – to an extent. It has partnered in a multi-year deal with web3 company Autograph and the first fruits of their relationship will be at the two-day BUKU Music + Art Project festival in New Orleans on 25th-26th March.
There will be an auction of eight different graffiti artists’ work as NFTs and those attending will also be able to mint their own NFT posters.
“Festival culture creates an opportunity to build and curate communities at scale using web3,” Dillon Rosenblatt, the CEO of Autograph, told Variety. “Our goal is to create an experience that lives digitally and physically to enhance the festival attendees’ overall experience. We are thrilled to kick-off our partnership with AEG Presents through an interactive experience at BUKU defined by celebrating the connection between art and technology.”
After BUKU, AEG will be looking to carry this over to a number of its other events such as Electric Forest, Hangout Music Festival, Day N Vegas and Firefly.
This comes after the move by Coachella to sell 10 lifetime passes to the festival as NFTs (and collectively they generated $1.5m).
Arguably the boom in musicians’ interest in NFTs at the start of 2021 was tied to the fact that their major source of income (i.e. live) was on hold due to the pandemic.
Now that touring is returning, the heavyweights of live are keen to make up for lost time (and lost revenue) by jumping most assuredly onto the NFT bandwagon while there is still time.
