Web3 presents an exciting new opportunity for musicians to expand their reach beyond conventional channels and take control of their revenue. By minting NFTs on the blockchain, bands and performers can create unique digital items for collectors to own or sell, earning revenue with each transaction.
The same modern streaming platforms that make digital distribution possible also pay fractions of a penny with each play. Thankfully, artists are finding new ways to engage directly with fans by selling exclusive tracks, assets, and collectibles. There’s just one problem — understanding how to tokenize music without falling into the same pitfalls that plagued the old ways of digital distribution (or discovering all-new ones). Thankfully, the process is far less complicated than even the biggest names in music might realize.
As the music industry completes its migration toward digital services and streaming, one question continues to arise: How do artists get paid?
From NFT (non-fungible token) art galleries featuring the late Kobe Bryant, to digital trading cards, to the renaming of the Staples Center to Crypto.com Arena — blockchain technology in sports is here to stay. The opportunities within this exciting space are only continuing to grow.
If you’ve zoned out a time or two while “visionaries” and crypto bros drill into mining, minting, and public ledgers, we understand. To most of us, the bits and bytes of rewiring the internet are like highway construction. We don’t care how it’s done. We want to know where it will take us.
The NFT (non-fungible token) space over the last twelve months has been anything but boring. In fact, it has seen more than its fair share of twists and turns and ups and downs — and many got more than a bit lost in all the action.
Sports cards have been a staple of sports fandom since at least 1909, the year American Tobacco stashed its first cards as freebies in cigarette and tobacco packs. The industry has grown significantly since those early days, and technology has matured alongside it. Now, the blockchain provides the perfect meeting point for the two.
Today, we are revealing a set of NFT utility data and insights after comparing trading volumes from OpenSea’s top 100 collections of all-time with those over an analysis period of 30 days, from October 15, 2022 to November 15, 2022. Analyzing each collection to determine how utility types are evolving, these data uncovered a growing interest in NFT utility types beyond PFPs (profile pictures), particularly content, events, and rewards distribution.
We had the pleasure of working with AirCatch.io last year and, now, the opportunity to pick the brain of one of their Co-Founders, Aaron Stein. AirCatch is self-described as making sending and receiving NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as easy and useful as email, and we couldn't agree more. From a brand perspective, AirCatch believes that NFTs offer many untapped opportunities to delight audiences and their mission is to remove the technological barriers that limit wide-scale adoption, AirCatch releases the potential of Web3 technologies. With AirCatch's technology, brands can instantly reward fans, strengthen communities and give everyone a chance to own a piece of their favorite creations. Our CMO, Ben Plomion, marveled, "AirCatch developed a proprietary technology to remove some of the frictions associated with NFT distribution and ownership. We put their technology to work at a Web3 conference and AirCatch made it super easy to send NFTs to 300+ participants." Read on to hear about how Aaron views the Web3 space.
Sports and cryptocurrency are a match made in marketing heaven. Sports and their attendant franchises have long enjoyed mainstream popularity in cultures the world over, and they’ve monetized that popularity with plenty of multifaceted merchandising. Crypto, on the other hand, grants the venerable institution of sports access to new revenue streams that are particularly attractive to younger, more tech-savvy fans. The complementary nature of these two sectors makes it only natural that they should find success by their powers combined. From the dozens of sports crypto projects on the market, we’ve picked out five of the most successful to highlight how they hit their impressive results and what lessons you can take to inform your own crypto play.