Everyone and their mother seems to have created an NFT this year. They are an essential part of any marketing campaign and the risk is that the more acts who do them, the incrementally less interesting they become.

That said, there are still ones that stand above the soup of mediocrity here. Metal and hard rock, in particular, have been throwing up interesting uses of NFTs, tying into a wider trend in the genre of artists using digital technology to forge even tighter connections with fans. It’s been seen best in how metal acts are using social media – and how quickly they embraced the boom in livestreaming last year. 

The core power of metal, however, is in the real-world connections it enables between fans – most obviously at shows. So it is entirely fitting that Avenged Sevenfold’s own NFT gambit leans more heavily on the tangible than the digitally abstract. 

They had already tested the water – and fan interest – by creating a series of free NFTs that came with previously unreleased music and special artwork by Cam Rackam. 

Back in May, the band released 101 NTFs (under the title of Into The Ether) but a mere seven of them were classed as having “gold eyes” (there was also one purple eyes, three animated eyes, 15 red eyes, 25 blue eyes and 50 black eyes). No one was quite sure what these colour categorisations meant at the time but all was eventually revealed in July when the band posted about it on their Instagram. “Gold NFT owners: A new utility has been released,” they said. “Swipe to see the trait.”

Frontman M Shadows spoke on the Danny Wimmer Presents Twitch channel about how the band were slowly introducing fans to the idea of NFTs – and teased the benefits they would get from them. He also said the longer-term goal is to give real-world rewards to fans who buy NFTs from them, including the ability to skip queues at gigs, get free merchandise, meet-and-greets and free tickets to shows. 

These all seem like a sensible and measured way to go about it – getting fans slowly used to the idea and then steadily increasing the types of rewards they get. There was, in the desperate initial race to jump on the NFT bandwagon, a tendency to fire out something unnecessarily complex and confusing that might have got headlines but had little actual impact. 

A more measured approach that favours the tangible over the intangible seems to be the wisest way to move here. Sevenfold? These are NFTs that go up to 11. Eventually.