3LAU joined the cryptocurrency game this week, selling one of his entire albums for 33 unique NFTs. Moreover, it generated over $11 million in sales on Ethereum. He’s wanted to get into finance his whole life, and this is his chance.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) represent something unique, which in his case is audio content. This means buyers can redeem their NFTs for limited edition vinyls, unreleased music, and a chance to collaborate with Justin. These tokens aren’t mutually interchangeable and could be a new wave of crypto adoption.
At this time, it looks like the NFT industry made over $100 million in sales last month. I’ve watched the rise and fall of each crypto coin, and am curious to see how this pans out. Grimes has gotten on the NFT train and sold $6 million worth of digital art. Even Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park recently sold clips of a song on Zora.
“Humans inherently, whether we will like to admit it or not, want to own things. I think that’s part of the human experience is owning things. When you own things, it’s a connection, and it’s like you have reason for being. [There’s] something unique about ownership. And I think that at the end of the day, yeah, you can watch it all you want. But can you sell it?”
Ronin the Collector, to TechCrunch
The idea behind this perplexing trend is supposedly simple. It’s to have buyers purchase ownership of a digital good living on a blockchain. For Justin, he wants to introduce a new component to the market which ultimately leads to new buyers. Founder of Decrypt, Matthew Liu says these are new ways to engage and interact with their audiences during COVID.