I’ve Entered the NFT Space
Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are distinct pieces of digital media that are verifiably scarce and unique. Powered by blockchain technology, NFTs are already reshaping the landscape of digital art. - Sotheby's
News of me joining the NFT community is late! Anyone following my YouTube Videos on the subject will know I have been in the space for some time now; I have simply neglected to update my website on the subject. I began exploring the concept during the summer of 2020 and decided to create an AEPL account on Rarible to begin minting my first experiments. Following the minting of my first NFT in the shape of my score for “Fragments” a short sci-fi film I had recently completed for film director Andrea Ratti, I successfully ran a giveaway promotional campaign aimed at my YouTube audience to see if anything would stick. More recently, I recorded exclusive video content in which I breakdown each of my film music cues for my album “Cinematic”, this video is included alongside the music files and lifetime promotional offers at the AEPL Store. So yeah, I’ve not released a ton, but my toes are most certainly wet in the NFT space.
So what is a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) anyway? Sotheby’s (yep, even they are talking about it) perhaps break the concept down perfectly in their article “NFTs: Redefining Digital Ownership and Scarcity”, here they explain…
A non-fungible asset is a unique asset that cannot be exchanged equally for an asset of like kind.
Original ownership, scarcity, and uniqueness are hard to determine online, muddying the waters of how precisely to value works created in the digital realm. This has made it difficult for digital artists to establish and maintain monetized creative businesses. It has created opportunities for creative theft and plagiarism. Perhaps most detrimental, it has made it harder for people and would-be collectors to value digital art in a similar way we value physical art.
NFTs are a paradigm shift for digital art and other forms of online media. They allow for online assets to have verifiable scarcity and ownership that cannot be manipulated. They bring the elements that endow physical art and assets with value into the digital realm. Along the way, they open up the doors for valuable digital art and create opportunities for artists that never before existed.
How do NFTs establish digital scarcity and ownership? The reason we refer to these assets as non-fungible tokens rather than non-fungible assets (or even digital non-fungible assets) is because they are uniquely made possible by blockchain technology
It was weird how the concept seemed to present itself to me just as I began voicing concerns over the new digital age and of media consumption and what that meant for ownership. While the concept at first kind of baffled me as there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a physical asset (something I’m concerned with coming from the “old world”). That being said, it did make sense in our current paradigm of naughts and ones and various blinking lights, aka… The digital age.
I thought to myself if it was the case that people would collect trading cards, magazines, video games, vinyl, CDs, Betamax tapes, VHSs, laser disks, minidisks, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays and much, much more; why would they not collect and build a digital library in the form of an NFT? Something they own. I mean I’ve bought music, films and TV shows on iTunes for years (despite not owning the content, I simply own a lifetime licence to access the content), I have also bought music from Bandcamp, a place where you do own the files, but in many ways, the principle remains the same, where is the physical? Rare assets tend to hold and grow in value, that is proven time and time again. Just sample some of the prices on Discogs for rare vinyl, or look at pricing on old band merchandise, you will be surprised.
I want to keep this focused on music, but there is a good example in the software sphere here too… A developer could sell software as an NFT, the end-user uses said software until they are done with it at which point they can sell it on, even for a potentially higher price should the supply and demand be great enough or if they had progressed the software in some way. Video game mods specifically come to mind… To sweeten the deal, the developer can obtain a percentage royalty on the resale transactions of their product forever; and there is no reason this can’t be extended to bands and artists in the Audio NFT space.
We are new here and there is a lot of noise in the space, it means artists are screaming in a river of blood to be heard now which unfortunately seems to have always been the case in a global art market, but it does pose a little hope for us starving artists and an opportunity to redefine ownership once again.
-MWB-
