90 Time December 6/December 13, 2021
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The L.A.-based artist Daniel Allan has found success by selling music NFTsat a venue. There are more than 230
people in Allan’s Discord group—an
ascendant messaging app—and 87 in-
vestors in his upcoming album, from
whom Allan solicits feedback and even
creative collaboration. “Before, your
fan base couldn’t be in the label meet-
ings with you. But now we all are the
label together,” says Haleek Maul, an-
other successful NFT musician.
NFT records will likely never re-
place the streaming powerhouses with
their ease of use. The space also has
high barriers to entry, prioritizing art-
ists who are tech-savvy, extroverted
and constantly releasing content. But
NFTs have already started to trans-
form the lives of artists whom the pre-
vious system was failing. “For a lot of
my career, I felt there was a certain
type of music I had to make but didn’t
connect with,” Allan says. “This has
given me full creative control.” decades. “I don’t think this creates
rich artists,” Allan says. “What this
does is create a musical middle class.”Who is spending thousands of dol-
lars on records that used to be 99¢ on
iTunes? Many of the early buyers of
music NFTs are crypto enthusiasts who
are financially invested in seeing these
spaces succeed. But many others are
simply music fans who want to show
their support the way they might have
previously by buying a band’s T-shirtiT’s bruTally hard for mosT musi-
cians to make money in the streaming
era. Artists get paid fractions of pen-
nies per stream, with many struggling
to find sizable audiences at all: data
from 2019 and 2020 shows that 90% of
streams go to the top 1% of artists. Even
a moderately successful artist like Dan-
iel Allan—whose songs got millions
of plays in 2020—only received a few
hundred bucks a month from stream-
ing, requiring him to take on jobs like
mixing and mastering to pay the bills.
But over the past half year, Allan
has turned to a different model that al-
lows him both economic and creative
freedom: NFTs. Allan has been sell-
ing digital copies of his electronic pop
songs as NFTs—non fungible tokens—
for thousands of dollars each. He spent
months cultivating relationships with
NFT enthusiasts, built a community
of devout fans online and then lever-
aged this popularity to raise 50 ETH
($140,000 on the day of trading) in a
one-day crowd campaign to fund his
upcoming album, Overstimulated. The
campaign auctioned off 50% of Allan’s
share of future master royalties—with
the half he’s keeping a far better deal
than most major-label artists receive—
while giving him a hefty advance and
creative autonomy. With that sale and
the other songs he sells individually
on the NFT music platform Catalog—
which doesn’t require him to surrender
his songs’ actual rights—Allan says he
now makes 85% of his living off NFTs.
Hundreds of musicians are follow-
ing Allan into this world. On Catalog,
133 artists have sold over 300 records
for more than $1 million. In the collec-
tive Songcamp, dozens of musicians
from across the world are forming
teams to crank out music and multi-
media creations. Altogether, the goal
of these NFT-based musicians isn’t
to top the charts, but to push tech-
nological bounds and carve out a liv-
ing outside of a label system that has
dominated the music industry for
Independent
musicians find a
lifeline in NFTs
BY ANDREW R. CHOW