How a Collection of 1M Music NFTs Could Mint the Next Platinum Record

MIAMI — Electronic music producer deadmau5 and rock band Portugal. The Man are looking to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), not music streaming services, to sell their next platinum record.

The artists’ newest song “this is fine” is being sold exclusively as a collection of 1 million NFTs on the Mintbase NFT marketplace, which runs on the Near blockchain, with tokens going on sale Thursday.

Some 250,000 of these NFTs will be sold at Miami’s Art Basel festival for $1.29 a piece. The remaining NFTs will be sold as a mix of singles and bundled units and will come with additional rewards that have yet to be announced. A Mintbase representative told CoinDesk it has listed 68,000 tokens on its site as of Thursday morning.

In a rarity for a music landscape dominated by platforms like Apple Music and Spotify, the artists’ election to circumvent streaming services, and the largely unfavorable revenue sharing that accompanies them, is indicative of how musicians have been willing to experiment with blockchain to disrupt industry standards.

From concert ticketing to music streaming to NFT marketplaces, artists have used digital collectibles for utility largely similar to social tokens, where creators can continuously reward their token holders after an initial purchase is made. (Portugal. The Man has already experimented with social tokens, minting its PTM coin on social token platform Rally in January.)

Read more: Latest Music Act to Launch a Social Token: Portugal. The Man

Deadmau5 has been a collaborator in numerous crypto-related projects as of late, having backed a music-streaming DAO as well as a physical NFT installation with artist Gregory Siff at a Colorado music festival in November.

“It’s about adoption. It’s about adopting this way of doing things for artists, and it’s also about public adoption and companies working together to adopt technology that’s going to make this easier for everyone,” deadmau5 told CoinDesk in a statement. “It’s not about me working to better my bank account, it’s about all artists working to gain more control of their work.”