MUSIC Cryptic messages
Musicians take on the NFTs craze, too By Bill Forman
When our Founding Fathers
drafted the Constitution, they could scarcely have foreseen the arrival of household assault weapons, Senate filibusters or, in all likelihood, ings of Leon sending a cryptographic video into space and then auctioning off the iPhone it was played on. But all of these things have come to pass, one of the most recent being the Southern rock band teaming up with Elon Musk to shoot a non-fungible token of their self-esteem into the stratosphere. To the credit of all involved, the money raised from the recent launch of SpaceX’s Inspiration4 was donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It also earned tons of publicity for the band — the Billboard magazine headline “Kings of Leon Will Become First Band to Have an NFT Played in Space” was repeated, in various forms, by countless media outlets ust as they were reaching the midpoint of their 2021 tour. This was not Kings of Leon’s maiden voyage into the realm of nonfungible tokens, a form of digitally certified art that’s sold as a part of the cryptocurrency blockchain. Last March, the band rush-released its When You See Yourself album as a collection of digital NFTs, and were hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as the first band to do so. Actually, that wasn’t true — Devon Welsh’s Belave, a virtually unknown indie band, beat them to the punch with the even-more-rushed release of an album called Does the Bird Fly Over Your Head? But Kings of Leon could at least take consolation in the more than $2 million they raked in, a quarter of which they donated to Live Nation’s Global Relief Fund for Live Music Crews. One of the biggest debates, when it comes to non-fungible tokens, centers on the question of ownership. While an NFT “original” contains metadata that proves its authenticity, trademarks and copyrights are not part of the transaction. In fact, the same content can be downloaded by pretty much anyone with a functioning internet connection. So why, you may ask, would anyone
Russian Russian feminist punks Pussy Riot recently issued an NFT that features a digitized copy of co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova’s two-year prison sentence for criticizing Vladamir Putin. COURTESY PHOTO
buy them? There are a number of potential reasons. You may, for instance, want to show your support for the content creator. You might want to impress people by ashing the contents of your digital wallet. Or you may simply have too much money. But the most powerful motivation for buying NFTs is the possibility of reaping huge profits by reselling them. Think of it as the virtual equivalent of ipping foreclosed homes, auctioning autographs on eBay, or clearing shelves of toilet paper so that
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you can ack up the price on ma on during a pandemic. NFTs can also give musicians an opportunity to profit from their work in artistic areas for which they’re less well-known. Grimes, the experimental pop artist who until recently was Musk’s girlfriend, netted $6 million for WarNymph Collection Vol. 1, a digital art series that portrays winged babies oating through space. Space, as it turns out, is a recurring theme in the blockchain art world. Both NASA and the U.S. Space Force
have released their own branded NFTs. And then there’s Chris Torres, the creator of Nyan Cat, who pocketed $600,000 earlier this year for an T of his op Tart bodied cat ying through space and leaving a rainbow trail in its wake. uring the first three months of 1 alone, collectors and venture capitalists reportedly invested more than $2 billion in NFTs. So it’s only natural that these once obscure ob ects of desire have earned their fair share of derision. “Many of the digital collectibles
