Upcoming Muse NFT album will be the first new format added to the charts in years

The upcoming Muse NFT album will be the last album-eligible album format since 2015. Prior to this album concept, album streams were the last format accepted by international charts. Nonfungible token (NFT) albums are now eligible for both the UK and Australian charts.

The will of the people iis the British rock band’s ninth studio album and will be released on 26 August. It will be the flagship “Digital Pressing” album from Web3 marketplace Serenade.

Serenade created digital prints as a “breaking new, limited edition and collectible” music format released via non-fungible token technology. The marketplace uses this new format to accommodate community connectivity and product scarcity.

Max Shand, CEO and Founder of Serenade, told Cointelegraph, “Digital Press allows the music industry to easily embed NFTs into existing workflows and creative processes without having to fund new projects or design new ways of working. If you want to innovate in the music industry, innovate around the album cycle, because that’s how the industry works.”

The marketplace partnered with the Brit Awards, an annual British pop music awards show, in February this year by hosting their NFT collection, which retailed for £10 ($12.25) each.

This is certainly not the first case of NFT involvement in the music industry or with chart-topping musicians. So what makes this so groundbreaking?

In the past, NFTs have often been collected in album releases or other types of music-related promotions. Until now, there has not been a full album release like NFT. NFT albums as a chart format existed before this launch, although the Muse album will be the first to fall under these standards.

More specifically, the Digital Pressing format introduced by Serenade offers a new standard for royalty management. In the official press release, Serenade highlighted that “living on the blockchain and offering web3 features such as verifiable ownership and the ability to trade on secondary markets, a digital pressing will also earn accurate, perpetual royalties for artists, rights holders and content owners. ”

Related: Ticketmaster scouts productization of corporate NFTs beyond ticket sales

Music industry insiders see this as another step towards “the future of music”.

While this may be a new number one for international music industry charts, it’s no surprise that it will be introduced by Muse. The band was one of the first major artists in the industry to use NFTs in their creative outputs.

In fact, Muse frontman Matt Bellamy dropped a solo track as NFT earlier this month. In September 2020, the band collaborated with the infamous CryptoKitties project, and later in July 2021, the brand released its own NFT collection on Nifty Gateway.

Shand told Cointelegraph that working with Muse for this release was easy, “Muse was an obvious choice to be the first artist to offer fans digital pressing, as they are innovative and have a die-hard audience of complete fans who have always showed an appetite for collecting great merchandise from the band.”