gm !! You are a trooper … Not just for sticking with web3 music through its ups and downs, but really for existing as a human being. It’s no joke.
Sometimes we dive into the specifics in this newsletter, but today I wanted to back off and talk a little bit more about the macro. Hopefully this helps us contextualize where the music NFT space is at right now—and maybe gives us a little motivation as to why we continue to build when money and opportunity is hard to come by lately.
Let’s start with some numbers. Sound.xyz lists on its website that it has generated over $5 million for artists from fans. Of course, Sound isn’t the only web3 music platform and there’s plenty of revenue not covered by that number—so let’s say that across mints, secondary sales, conferences, and all, that we’re operating in a $7 million lifetime market. Say that our space has been around for 18 months weighted a little more heavily during the bear market, so *let’s just say* we’re left with a $4 million annual market for music NFTs. Great.
For some scale, the whole U.S. music industry is considered to be around a $26 billion market. Very roughly, that makes music NFTs around 1/4350, or 0.022% of the overall market for music. The NFT market is a $17 billion market. Some would argue that each of these indicate an opportunity.
I tried to find examples of markets around our size to give a more fair comparison—honestly neither Google nor ChatGPT gave me much help, but I did find out the global home brewing market is a $19.1 MM market. So if you think of the money people spend each year on home brewing beer, then divide that by five, that’s about how large the web3 space is.
With these estimates, I’m trying to make the numbers easier to wrap our heads around. The whole point is to make this feel familiar: we’re creating the mental infrastructure of an economic environment to then build strategy on top of.
We can also look at the biggest projects to understand how large our market is. Violetta Zironi’s Moonshot gave us a sense for the space last year when it sold out to 800 collectors. Remember back then? We had 8,888 PFP collections selling out like they were nothing, but to whom? It was a breath of fresh air to see how much work it took for her to reach her audience—it gave a counter-narrative to the hype. Fast forward to now, and there’s a lot more truth in her numbers than most of the other projects that were around at the time (and her success has been replicated by other folks).
So. $4 MM in revenue a year coming from a group of ~1500 total people (is that an accurate guess? @ me on twitter) comes out to $2.7K a person.
Well, what can we take from there? First off, $2,700 is an absurd amount to expect the average individual to pay on music NFTs in a given year. This indicates an imbalanced market, and with what we know about the NFT space, it tends to mean we have plenty of whales in music NFTs that account for the majority of market activity.
That’s not bad! In fact, whales have this problem even more than we do—they’ve got more invested. Want to make friends fast? Create some returns for these whales. Then reinvest that money in other dope artists/ projects/ companies and proliferate.
See what I’m trying to do here? Rather than worry about the next drop, we need to keep growing our business skills—We have to be systematic and procedural so we can build more space on the other side for our passion work.
If we want to collectively succeed in growing this market, we’re going to have to learn to unlock larger audiences and streams of revenue for ourselves and each other. At what point do we all start getting more creative?
wavNEWS 📰
To kick us off, Yahoo Finance (of all places!) has delivered an incredibly coherent take on the use cases of music NFTs.
Seriously—send this article to anyone (your dad, your ex-girlfriend) who keeps asking you why you’re spending so much time talking to strangers on the internet. From one tech bubble castoff to another, Yahoo, we appreciate you.
We told you Sound was launching a mobile app, and here it is! This is what we said about it last week, because our coverage hasn’t changed:
“With similar features to its existing platform, this app allows users to play music they have saved or collected, as well as create playlists. It will also give Sound more robust analytics on user data than they can get from their website—helping them make better-informed decisions on purchasing and listening trends, as well as other behaviors within the app.”
Decent can now be used directly in Coinbase and Coinbase Wallet browsers.
Reveel introduces Swap & Bridge, simplifying cross-chain transactions.
wavLIST 🎶
Fresh wavs & what we’re listening to this week from the WRLD:
TAROT’s Riff x Lens genesis "Iridescent" on Riff fka Beats. Enjoy this feel-good summer vibe—an exclusive FREE mint on Lens.
Community of music lovers DANC3’s first tape “Mixtape (CRAZY)” on Sound, mixed by serboy & curated by arella.
wavALPHA 👀
Upcoming drops & projects that you need to know about:
On Tuesday, May 23rd at 5pm EST, The Fund drop their Sound genesis of song ”Pray To Me,” featuring AI Grimes vocals. They feel confident that they were able to blend the hyper futuristic with organic human textures to create something that couldn’t otherwise exist. A symbiosis. Technological and biological harmony. Humachine.
On Friday, May 26th at 3pm EST, MADI releases her song “CUFFED”—It’s one of the four singles leading up to her sophomore album “ANGEL OF SADNESS”, self produced and written by her. The whole project is a set of love songs, not only to people but to her head and heart.
On Monday, June 5th at 3pm EST, Mija drops the official remix of her song "Groove" by new supergroup Body Ocean on Sound. Body Ocean is a new dance supergroup from international artists Jeremy (The Upbeats) and Nik (Noisia).
wavTIPs 💡
It’s almost summer, when the hard work pays off and we all hopefully get some well-earned rest and relaxation. Relish in the grind for another few weeks because come June, it’s party time!
Oh, and get some sleep … We’re all gonna need it <3
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Thanks to our contributing writer Fred Riko & our curator & editor-in-chief Violetta!
It’s all about the wavs we make with friends along the way.
-wavWRLD 🌊🌐🌱
Disclosure: Writer Fred Riko & Curator/ Editor Violetta Hyland may occasionally own the NFTs of certain artists mentioned & certain platforms/ protocols highlighted. Their wallet holdings & activity can be viewed openly on the blockchain. We prioritize featuring wavWRLD members & contributors.