TL; DR
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Right now you can get a royalty share of Justin Bieber’s latest single “Company” by buying an NFT that costs less than a t-shirt at his merchandise table.
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For the initial buyers to break even, “Company” needs a whopping 1.4 billion streams, which would take about 65 years if streams continued at their current rate.
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By selling these NFTs to the public and promising future income to the holders, the argument can be made that these NFTs are unregistered securities (think: unregulated stocks).
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Regardless, we remain hopeful that the royalty incentives and regulatory side of things can be resolved over time.
Full story
If blockchain technology is good at one thing, it is lowering the barrier to entry for investment.
Can’t afford a whole Bitcoin? No problem. You can start slowly with say 0.001 BTC (~$25) instead?
(That’s something you can’t do with stocks).
And lately we’ve seen similar fractional investment structures coming into the music world (via NFTs).
For example:
Right now you can get a royalty share of Justin Bieber’s latest single “Company” by buying an NFT that costs less than a t-shirt at his merchandise table.
Here are the details:
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Each NFT costs $28 each
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A total of 2,000 NFTs have been released
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Each NFT earns 0.0005% royalty when Business is streamed
Each time “Company” is played → NFT holders are paid.
It’s pretty neat! And it seems the buying public agrees: The entire collection sold out almost immediately, bringing in sales of $56,000.
All that said. There are a few glaring issues here…
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For the initial buyers to break even, “Company” needs a whopping 1.4 billion streams, which would take about 65 years if streams continued at their current rate.
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This is a big one – by selling these NFTs to the public and promising future income to the holders, the argument can be made that these NFTs are unregistered securities (think: unregulated stocks).
…that’s why you can’t buy them when you’re in the US.
Regardless, we remain hopeful that the royalty incentives and regulatory side of things can be resolved over time.
The latter may be a utopia, but…
A world where music artists can fund their growth through fan revenue sharing, rather than predatory big-label deals, is one we’d love to live in!