Would you buy an NFT for $1,000? How about $10?
with recent Shocking losses in the crypto marketbookmakers have ran away The once frothy NFT market, taking what was left of their money with them. floor prices The top collection has crashed to earth. Now some people in the industry are producing original digital art– Unlike collectible PFP (profile picture) collections such as Bored Apps and Cryptopunks – are striving to create a grassroots, sustainable business model that has a low bar for entry and does not rely on speculation.
A Deceptively Simple Idea Is Gaining Steam: Selling NFTs That Are Cheap,
Take Mike Pollard, who in 2021 began working on a marketplace for reasonably priced music NFTs called NinaNow in beta, what he describes as a “crypto bandcamp” of sorts.
“The models being used to sell NFTs, such as auctions and bonding curves, as well as the high fees on platforms such as Ethereum, have made it necessary to sell NFTs at higher prices,” he told me.
Nina, in contrast, allows musicians to sell tracks at prices set by them, without the input of hired middlemen. The result, Pollard said, is that the tracks go for about $10.
Of course, there are still vendors who have a broader sense of their contribution to the art world. “An artist tried to sell a track for $1 million,” he said. “It didn’t sell.”
Overall, Nina’s artisans are striving to create a more rational market for one-of-a-kind digital creations.
Pollard argues that Nina challenges the one-size-fits-all approach taken by platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, which track value equally, no matter how much work they put in. (And needless to say, on those services you’re paying to access a copy of a song, not to own the “original”.)
“Allows artists to find economic models suited to their audiences,” Nina explained to Pollard. It is also suitable for fans that are not affected by volatility or high transaction fees; Nina is built on the low-fee Solana network.
Jordan Garbis BeatsDAOWhich one? started As a music NFT collectors group, there was a similar epiphany. “We want to return to normal expectations of price and experience,” he told me.
Garbis and BeatsDAO are helping to create Echo, a user-owned music-streaming service built around a Discord-esque interface that allows artists to interact with fans. (Disclosure: Garbis is a strategic investor In decrypt.) Exclusive tracks and various other facilities will be provided to the fans to connect with the platform; Garbis believes that a vast (“nearly infinite”) supply of these tokens, and a truly attractive use case that discourages resale, will keep them affordable.
“It should look and feel like it owns the music today,” Garbis said. “Which means millions of plays, and hundreds of thousands of unique fan connections.”
Each of those relationships can generate a trickle of income that can amount to a long-term business, over the long term.
Another benefit of selling NFTs cheaply, Garbis argues, is that it is more inclusive. He stated that the desire to keep the first drops exclusive and order (or indeed hypothetical) a high price unnecessarily limited the popularity of the cast.
And when it comes to NFT origins, that other major corner of digital artwork, there’s an even bigger problem. Digital art is more easily reproducible than music, which could make digital artwork NFTs more attractive to speculators looking for large resale. It works when the hype is high; Not so much when the market is falling.
asynchronous artNFT Bazaar, a small staff-run boutique, offers fans a way to build a kind of grassroots community around their favorite artists. It offers NFTs of music tracks and original artworks — most of it psychedelic, oddball, idiosyncratic — for as little as $10. It’s a way to supplement an artist’s income—a friendly favor dressed up as a prestige item. And it’s a model that’s really working, said Achilles Saradaris, founder of Async and a drummer in the band HMLTD (formerly “Happy Meal Limited”).
Sardars flicked through images of one of the site’s featured artists, noting that each sold out, but for only a few bucks.
“You can think of it like a vinyl record – something you buy without necessarily having to expect to resell it,” he said. “This artist just loves scribbling, and I love his scribbles too, so I host his NFTs so he can continue scribbling.”
In particular, the chieftains did not attempt to speak to any notion of perks or utility. Instead, the pitch of these NFTs is emotional appeal. “We are producing value out of thin air,” he said. “It’s alchemy.”
Indeed, as with Pollard and Garbis, Saradaris readily admits that what they are offering is qualitatively different from that offered by Web2 titans such as Spotify and YouTube, and they know they have to work with these companies. There is no hope of competing on a large scale—at least in the short run.
Instead their pitch for fans is to support music and art in good faith in exchange for a sense of ownership or patronage.
Whether it succeeds in propelling the NFT market into a sustainable future will depend on how much fanfare really is.
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