Mints Double on Music NFT Platform as Collectors Shrug Off Bear Market
Sound Records Heavy Minting Action in the last two months
In the latest sign that NFTs are still popular with collectors, Sound, a platform for music tokens, is singing a very catchy tune.
The number of mints on the Sound has doubled in each of the last two months. At 12,080, according to a Dune Analytics query, over a third of the platform’s total of 30,562 coins arrived in November.
Active wallets for the platform reached a monthly all-time high of 2,719. The platform has also paid out $4 million to artists since its launch in December 2021. Collectors are doing pretty well too.
“One artist said I’ve made more for my fans this month than I’ve made for myself,” David Greensteinco-founder at Sound, told The Defiant.
On Sound, fans can buy the NFTs at mint and sell them later, making money if the tokens increase in price. At the same time, artists can collect royalties on NFT when the tokens change hands.
Vinyl records
Greenstein said audio and music NFTs allow music fans to collect NFTs the same way they pick up vinyl records. People can also listen for free.
“It’s an actual use case,” he said. “Music has always been active or passive.”
The sound’s early momentum comes at a time when the bottom has fallen out of the NFT market – after reaching an all-time high of over $6B in trading volume in one week in January, the volume of tokens failed to reach $100M in the last week of November, according to a Dune inquiry.
“The use case for music, NFTs are not necessarily tied to a bear or bull market,” Greenstein said. He’s not worried about the supply of tracks — musicians generally don’t think about markets when they make music.
“The demand side of things is really the most fascinating part of this,” he said. Greenstein believes collectors find value in connecting with like-minded fans, supporting artists they love and making money whenever possible.
Mainstream adoption
Still, Sound’s fine performance is far from mainstream adoption—streaming behemoth Spotify has 456 million monthly active users, according to Statista. And crypto-skeptics like Liron Shapira, a former investor in Coinbase, have gained traction with criticism of hyped business models around NFTs.
Additionally, even in the case of ETH and removing an extremely popular outlier that was a Snoop Dogg drop, secondary volume has fallen along with the broader NFT market – it’s still about half of its peak in March.
Still, that unproven sustainability hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs like Greenstein and Cooper Turley, who founded a $10 million venture fund focused solely on music, from going close to all-in on the nascent space.
“Growth is being driven by an emerging class of artists making careers off the back of music NFTs,” Turley told The Defiant.
Listening
Looking forward, Greenstein is excited about a new feature called Activity Feed, which launched last month. At a high level, the feed will work a bit like one on a social network like Twitter – it will show who is collecting and listening to what on Sound.
The co-founder hopes he can position Sound as a music platform, as much as one for NFTs. “I always said I wanted it to feel like 30% an NFT site and 70% a music site,” he said.
