This piece was updated on 10th Jan 2023

My name is Tom Vek, I’ve been releasing indie-electro-rock since 2004, this is a short article about me releasing some music NFT 1/1 editions.

In 2020 I’m without a record label and like the idea of self-releasing something, with the help of a couple friends I created my 4th album New Symbols, 8 tracks I would describe as a mix of indie-rock crunch-beat electro-synth punk-breakbeat.

However that was 2020 and as we all know, stuff got shut down and the chance of playing the new music live disappeared. I didn’t have the budget to make anything but a couple of DIY music videos. This album didn’t get anywhere near the exposure of my previous albums.

Since I was asked to do my first remix I’ve always super enjoyed the process of reworking existing music. I’ve remixed for Bombay Bicycle Club, Alt-J, Kwes, Foals and others, plus I’ve also reworked a couple of my own tracks and always intended to do more.

So I decided I would remix some tracks, give them a second chance, but which songs? How about all of them? So over the past 18 months I’ve been working on creating re-works of the entire New Symbols album, and, well what comes after “New”? “Newer” of course. This is Newer Symbols:

One thing about self-releasing an album is I’d be free to try out new music platforms. In looking around I discovered music NFTs - Catalog’s awesome deck helped me really get it. I love the idea that digital 1/1s can be valuable, and they can be sold between collectors with the artist getting a cut of all future resales.

The principles of “how digital things can be collectible” are new, exciting and being debated furiously but the decentralized blockchain actually makes it possible.

The general understanding with releasing music NFTs is that, since they are put on the publicly accessible blockchain they can be listened to for free, but you might find the collectors to whom they are extra special, ending up in a better level of income from thousands of micro payments for streams (in fact, in addition to it).

This mindset is new; instead of making things exclusive to experience to be valuable, it’s about sharing widely, but providing ways for it to be deemed valuable to own. Wanting an artifact for the personal impact a song has made is what makes people want to collect it, and if there’s a digital way to do that, it’s such a good thing for musicians.

How valuable should a 1/1 be? Well Catalog have proven that people will pay upwards of $1,000 (prices around 1 ETH) for tracks. After initially launching with a higher price I’ve settled on 0.4 ETH (approx £400 / $500) per track. It might be possible who knows, do I think a one-off edition of a track should be very valuable? Yes! Do I think that valuing music like this will help musicians make more music, definitely yes!

Music NFTs typically celebrate individual tracks. At this time packaging tracks together as an album is up to the artist to work out. Giving each track its moment sounded great to me (I’d always wanted to do that with an album). I decided I would put the tracks out once a week as NFTs and also on streaming services, but I wanted some way to present them as a whole album.

I’m obsessed with how to present digital albums (I’ve been working on album-art platform Sleevenote for a long time). But, an album released in stages doesn’t really have any satisfactory existing models (at the time of writing Spotify and Apple Music “support” pre-releases in different ways infuriatingly). Furthermore, adding new elements like “each track having its own release date” and “collector”, poses some interesting design challenges.

It seemed to me a solution was to make a microsite for the album. A single page website can instantly reflect change (like something being collected) and are easily accessible by anyone. (Microsites for digital releases were in fact a standard proposed by music oracle Ian Rogers way back in 2008.)

Graphically I loved the idea of the tracks literally making up a bigger entity. I came up with the idea of adding 8 icons to the reworked album art, creating a grid, one for each track, sitting around the main album icon:

With help from the awesome Chris from Sleevenote on code, we put it together. On to each track panel we added track information, including the date they would come out (tracks are “unavailable” until the respective date), links to Catalog to collect the NFTs and most importantly a place where a collector’s name would be shown, this was the design at the launch of the project, the first track having gone live:

I believe music NFTs will be embraced if artists create ways to make these new “super” collectors feel special.

I believe that even of the music is “free” that the act of collecting will be compelling to music fans who understand the importance of supporting the artists whose work they love.

As much as I’m excited about it, I know it’s very early, and all part of experiments that artists are trying to get us to the next format post-Spotify, will I be able to find collectors for these tracks? I don’t know, but I love the idea of trying.

Take a listen and look out for any collectors of my 1/1s as they come out here:

https://newersymbols.tomvek.com/

Thanks for reading,

Tom

This piece was updated on 10th Jan 2023

My name is Tom Vek, I’ve been releasing indie-electro-rock since 2004, this is a short article about me releasing some music NFT 1/1 editions.

In 2020 I’m without a record label and like the idea of self-releasing something, with the help of a couple friends I created my 4th album New Symbols, 8 tracks I would describe as a mix of indie-rock crunch-beat electro-synth punk-breakbeat.

However that was 2020 and as we all know, stuff got shut down and the chance of playing the new music live disappeared. I didn’t have the budget to make anything but a couple of DIY music videos. This album didn’t get anywhere near the exposure of my previous albums.

Since I was asked to do my first remix I’ve always super enjoyed the process of reworking existing music. I’ve remixed for Bombay Bicycle Club, Alt-J, Kwes, Foals and others, plus I’ve also reworked a couple of my own tracks and always intended to do more.

So I decided I would remix some tracks, give them a second chance, but which songs? How about all of them? So over the past 18 months I’ve been working on creating re-works of the entire New Symbols album, and, well what comes after “New”? “Newer” of course. This is Newer Symbols:

One thing about self-releasing an album is I’d be free to try out new music platforms. In looking around I discovered music NFTs - Catalog’s awesome deck helped me really get it. I love the idea that digital 1/1s can be valuable, and they can be sold between collectors with the artist getting a cut of all future resales.

The principles of “how digital things can be collectible” are new, exciting and being debated furiously but the decentralized blockchain actually makes it possible.

The general understanding with releasing music NFTs is that, since they are put on the publicly accessible blockchain they can be listened to for free, but you might find the collectors to whom they are extra special, ending up in a better level of income from thousands of micro payments for streams (in fact, in addition to it).

This mindset is new; instead of making things exclusive to experience to be valuable, it’s about sharing widely, but providing ways for it to be deemed valuable to own. Wanting an artifact for the personal impact a song has made is what makes people want to collect it, and if there’s a digital way to do that, it’s such a good thing for musicians.

How valuable should a 1/1 be? Well Catalog have proven that people will pay upwards of $1,000 (prices around 1 ETH) for tracks. After initially launching with a higher price I’ve settled on 0.4 ETH (approx £400 / $500) per track. It might be possible who knows, do I think a one-off edition of a track should be very valuable? Yes! Do I think that valuing music like this will help musicians make more music, definitely yes!

Music NFTs typically celebrate individual tracks. At this time packaging tracks together as an album is up to the artist to work out. Giving each track its moment sounded great to me (I’d always wanted to do that with an album). I decided I would put the tracks out once a week as NFTs and also on streaming services, but I wanted some way to present them as a whole album.

I’m obsessed with how to present digital albums (I’ve been working on album-art platform Sleevenote for a long time). But, an album released in stages doesn’t really have any satisfactory existing models (at the time of writing Spotify and Apple Music “support” pre-releases in different ways infuriatingly). Furthermore, adding new elements like “each track having its own release date” and “collector”, poses some interesting design challenges.

It seemed to me a solution was to make a microsite for the album. A single page website can instantly reflect change (like something being collected) and are easily accessible by anyone. (Microsites for digital releases were in fact a standard proposed by music oracle Ian Rogers way back in 2008.)

Graphically I loved the idea of the tracks literally making up a bigger entity. I came up with the idea of adding 8 icons to the reworked album art, creating a grid, one for each track, sitting around the main album icon:

With help from the awesome Chris from Sleevenote on code, we put it together. On to each track panel we added track information, including the date they would come out (tracks are “unavailable” until the respective date), links to Catalog to collect the NFTs and most importantly a place where a collector’s name would be shown, this was the design at the launch of the project, the first track having gone live:

I believe music NFTs will be embraced if artists create ways to make these new “super” collectors feel special.

I believe that even of the music is “free” that the act of collecting will be compelling to music fans who understand the importance of supporting the artists whose work they love.

As much as I’m excited about it, I know it’s very early, and all part of experiments that artists are trying to get us to the next format post-Spotify, will I be able to find collectors for these tracks? I don’t know, but I love the idea of trying.

Take a listen and look out for any collectors of my 1/1s as they come out here:

https://newersymbols.tomvek.com/

Thanks for reading,

Tom