The global music industry continues to thrive, with revenues rising for the seventh straight year to $25.9 billion. Paid subscription streaming has been a key driver of overall growth, accounting for 65% of recorded music revenue. Even so, the industry relies on record labels to control the distribution of an artists’ music, their tour dates, and decide their marketing budgets. They take a lion-share of their signed musicians’ earnings, making the top record labels wildly profitable. For example, Warner Music group, the second largest record label, profited $2.76 billion in 2022 a 21.02% increase year-over-year.
Global music industry revenues from 1999 to 2021 ($US billions)
However, music artists have been particularly critical of the unfair power dynamics between record labels and musicians, leaving the artist without rights to their own recordings. The label controls where the music is played, when it’s played, and how it’s used commercially, making it the quintessential element of a musician’s career. Artistic expression in the music industry has thus become a thing of the past, with record labels even deciding the tone of an artist’s music for maximal revenue generation.
Artists from across generations and genres including Prince, Meek Mill, Taylor Swift, Johnny Cash and Nipsey Hussle have had high profile feuds and battles with their record labels and contracts.
NFTs have the power to democratize the music industry, offering access to new means of distribution that enables artists to take control of their intellectual property, cutting out the middleman entirely.
Let’s say an artist wants to sell their album as an NFT, so that any holder of that NFT can listen to the audio files of the tracks within the album, transfer the token to another wallet, or sell it on the secondary market. Unlockable content, such as exclusive tracks an also be included while releasing an album through NFTs, which incentivizes secondary market activity. That album becomes an asset in itself; since secondary royalties are written into a smart contract of the token, the artist can consistently profit off their music. Italian X-Factor finalist Violetta Zironi recently released her debut NFT album, partnering with with multi platinum songwriter Michael Ochs.
Violetta Zironi’s ‘Moonshot’ was released as an NFT collection, with Zironi retaining 10% in royalties off every secondary sale. (Contract address: 0x70be4e3761188d0a8c525e54bb81c4ea97712de4)
SimpleHash’s NFTs by Contract endpoint can retrieve all the metadata associated with NFTs in the ‘Moonshot’ collection.
Here’s a snippet of the response containing one ‘Moonshot’ NFT when passing its contract address into the NFTs by Contract endpoint:
{
"next": "[<https://api.simplehash.com/api/v0/nfts/ethereum/0x70be4e3761188d0a8c525e54bb81c4ea97712de4?cursor=ZXZtLTEuMHg3MGJlNGUzNzYxMTg4ZDBhOGM1MjVlNTRiYjgxYzRlYTk3NzEyZGU0LjAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDA0OV9fbmV4dA>](<https://api.simplehash.com/api/v0/nfts/ethereum/0x70be4e3761188d0a8c525e54bb81c4ea97712de4?cursor=ZXZtLTEuMHg3MGJlNGUzNzYxMTg4ZDBhOGM1MjVlNTRiYjgxYzRlYTk3NzEyZGU0LjAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDA0OV9fbmV4dA>)",
"previous": null,
"nfts": [
{
"chain": "ethereum",
"contract_address": "0x70bE4E3761188d0a8c525E54bB81c4Ea97712de4",
"token_id": "0",
"name": "Moonshot #0 - Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always - ULTRA-RARE DIAMOND EDITION",
"description": "This rare, 1 of 1 token can only be obtained by collecting 9 Moonshot tokens with each of the different frames.\\n\\nMOONSHOT is a music NFT collection based on 5 songs written by Violetta Zironi and 2500 unique, hand-drawn artworks by Giuseppe Zironi (Violetta's dad), a renowned Disney illustrator for over 30 years.\\n\\nThe songs were co-written by Violetta with multi platinum songwriter Michael Ochs, and produced with 2x Grammy winning producer Matt Rollings.\\n\\nFind out more about the music here:\\n[Violetta Zironi](<https://www.violettazironi.com/>)\\n\\nEach song was inspired by a real life situation that occurred in Violetta’s life. Each artwork was inspired by the songs.\\n\\nThe music will take you somewhere you’ve never been, but yet feels familiar.\\n\\n---\\n\\nA Nifty Music drop.\\n\\nFind out more about us:\\n[Nifty Music](<https://niftymusic.app/>)",
"image_url": "[<https://cdn.simplehash.com/assets/2cdbb1c976ad0b2513c391ce251289202241ea6fad982ee710ff1638a492b60c.png>](<https://cdn.simplehash.com/assets/2cdbb1c976ad0b2513c391ce251289202241ea6fad982ee710ff1638a492b60c.png>)",
"video_url": null,
"audio_url": "[<https://cdn.simplehash.com/assets/778115db83d0df76da9cf0ff1e60dd769b92da4c31f0201168f3babeb6d68a10.mp3>](<https://cdn.simplehash.com/assets/778115db83d0df76da9cf0ff1e60dd769b92da4c31f0201168f3babeb6d68a10.mp3>)",
"model_url": null,
"previews": {
"image_small_url": "[<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KATGyF9UcyOkOXkhIghahtVfZMiEp_FKYnkE849bDHPjWyOWt0oRCGveqSfv6tw0eiOJ0C_VMMnb3syS8-T22acVuQ3Na91yUQ=s250>](<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KATGyF9UcyOkOXkhIghahtVfZMiEp_FKYnkE849bDHPjWyOWt0oRCGveqSfv6tw0eiOJ0C_VMMnb3syS8-T22acVuQ3Na91yUQ=s250>)",
"image_medium_url": "[<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KATGyF9UcyOkOXkhIghahtVfZMiEp_FKYnkE849bDHPjWyOWt0oRCGveqSfv6tw0eiOJ0C_VMMnb3syS8-T22acVuQ3Na91yUQ>](<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KATGyF9UcyOkOXkhIghahtVfZMiEp_FKYnkE849bDHPjWyOWt0oRCGveqSfv6tw0eiOJ0C_VMMnb3syS8-T22acVuQ3Na91yUQ>)",
"image_large_url": "[<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KATGyF9UcyOkOXkhIghahtVfZMiEp_FKYnkE849bDHPjWyOWt0oRCGveqSfv6tw0eiOJ0C_VMMnb3syS8-T22acVuQ3Na91yUQ=s1000>](<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KATGyF9UcyOkOXkhIghahtVfZMiEp_FKYnkE849bDHPjWyOWt0oRCGveqSfv6tw0eiOJ0C_VMMnb3syS8-T22acVuQ3Na91yUQ=s1000>)",
"image_opengraph_url": "[<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KATGyF9UcyOkOXkhIghahtVfZMiEp_FKYnkE849bDHPjWyOWt0oRCGveqSfv6tw0eiOJ0C_VMMnb3syS8-T22acVuQ3Na91yUQ=k-w1200-s2400-rj>](<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KATGyF9UcyOkOXkhIghahtVfZMiEp_FKYnkE849bDHPjWyOWt0oRCGveqSfv6tw0eiOJ0C_VMMnb3syS8-T22acVuQ3Na91yUQ=k-w1200-s2400-rj>)",
"blurhash": "UGK-I3=*loMyvOr_XSjEF%OU#mw3y:TDrqR*"
},
"background_color": null,
"external_url": "[<https://niftymusic.app/violetta-zironi/moonshot>](<https://niftymusic.app/violetta-zironi/moonshot>)",
"extra_metadata": {
"edition": 0,
"date": 1650810633069,
"attributes": [
{
"trait_type": "Frame",
"value": "Diamond"
},
{
"trait_type": "Background",
"value": "OG"
},
{
"trait_type": "Signature",
"value": "None"
},
{
"trait_type": "Song",
"value": "Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always"
},
{
"trait_type": "Artist",
"value": "Violetta Zironi"
}
],
"image_original_url": "ipfs://QmQY8H8ESYs9mYWaBSpV88NrSxRnMUjYNqXJ7yWpecVUki/0.png",
"animation_original_url": "ipfs://QmUWKwkBRTJcSLN7FmpBuyiKPK1n1XYmsx3eB4HmEwTg9g/01%20Never,%20Rarely,%20Sometimes,%20Always_RH-6*%28eq%2011-18%29%2096Khz%2024Bit.mp3"
},
"created_date": "2022-04-15T17:01:01",
"status": "minted",
"token_count": 1,
"owner_count": 1,
"owners": [
{
"owner_address": "0xd8F5bA4b9b6f29b9b4AcA3cDc3b46BF5BCc9B7eD",
"quantity": 1,
"first_acquired_date": "2022-04-28T08:51:00",
"last_acquired_date": "2022-04-28T08:51:00"
}
As you can see, all NFT metadata, including the original audio URL, as well as the album art with different image preview sizes are laid out for any developer to easily integrate within their applications.
Artists like Zironi can create immersive token-gated experiences that showcase contents of their NFT albums, using SimpleHash’s infrastructure.
More-so, the artist can choose to provide further value to their holders with perks, such as presales to their events (physical or virtual), discounts towards merchandise, or special access to locked content.