Onchain music provides a new way for musicians to connect with their fans and monetize their music. Selling NFT songs is an additional revenue stream for artists, but it´s also a paradigm shift in the artist-fan relationship.

When a song is sold as an NFT, it creates an irrefutable bond between the artist and the NFT owner. When artists sell a song as an NFT, they are not selling the rights to the song, rather a (often limited) digital collectible of the song. Unlike a VISA purchase that uses an intermediary between buyer and seller (and protects the buyer from being contacted by the seller), one of the points of selling NFTs is to allow the seller to know who the buyer is and contact them in the future. This immutable connection allows artists to reward NFT owners with for example early access to concert tickets, bypassing the chaos often associated with traditional ticket sales.

Concert a Taylor Swift concert. Loyal, long-time "Swifities" find themselves competing with casual attendees and scalpers, leading to frustration and disappointment. Had Swift utitlized NFT technology, she could have easily identified and rewarded her earliest and most devoted fans, ensuring they had priority access to her shows.

Another business model emerging with onchain music is the encoding of music rights on the blockchain, allowing artists to sell future streaming royalites to fans or investors. anotherblock encodes not songs but music rights as NFTS. Rihanna sold a portion of streaming royalties for the song "B** Better Have Money", as did the Canadian artist known as The Weeknd. Blockchain makes it easier to fractionalize music rights, which also allows smaller investors a chance to participate in a market previously unavailable to them. I can't afford the streaming rights to a Childish Gambino song, but maybe I can afford .001% of one.

While we are not going back to a world where we only listen to songs we buy the NFTs too, the future holds some intriguing responsibilities. When an investor buys the streaming rights to a song, they have to rely on a centralized intermediary to make good on the payment. In the future, we may see the development of an onchain Spotify-like streaming app where NFT streaming rights owners can listen to, buy, and be rewarded directly and instantaneously for each play of the songs they own the rights to.

As the technology evolves, onchain music has the potential to provide artists with new ways to connect with their audience and give provide them with the opportunity to support, engage and profit from their favorite musicians.