NFT Startup Candy Digital Taps Getty Images for music and photos from the 70s

When Candy Digital launched in 2021, the NFT company came out swinging with its official line of Major League Baseball collectibles. Hitting the road again, this time with Getty Images, the company is now searching for its next potential hit.

After sifting through the Getty’s extensive archive of stock photos, Candy has curated a collection of images centered on some of the most influential musicians of the 70s and the photographers who captured them, including rock icons such as Elvis Presley, John Lennon and James Brown.

The collection will be launched via an open edition planned for 21 March. The launch comes after a partnership between Candy and Getty originally unveiled May last.

The firm has launched several collections related to sports and entertainment recently – securing licenses with companies such as Netflix and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) – but pressing Getty is aimed at appealing to fans of music and photography – a new market, Candy CEO Scott Lawin told Decrypt.

“We’re very excited about the fact that we’re talking to a different kind of audience,” he said. “The way we’ve thought about our partnerships, it really creates opportunities for people to not only go deep into a category they love, but also discover and collect across different types of content and IP.”

While academic research has proposed that sports fans are more likely to own digital assets, Lawin described the partnership with Getty as a long-term relationship that Candy will seek to build on over time, noting that Getty’s archives contain millions of images — some decades old and spanning across a wide range of subjects.

A distinct aspect of the collection is that it is organized around six photographers, such as David Redfern and Fin Costello, as opposed to musical talents such as the Rolling Stones or Jimi Hendrix. And instead of being limited to a certain number, the collectibles priced from $25 to $200 gain their scarcity through a months-long window of availability.

Candy burst onto the Web3 scene at a time when the digital asset industry was booming, but its fortunes have changed over time amid a general decline in consumer appetite for crypto and NFTs.

The company was founded in June 2021 by Michael Rubin, executive chairman of sports franchise company Fanatics, in combination with NFT founder Gary Vaynerchuk and Galaxy Digital founder and CEO Mike Novogratz. Fanatics was the majority owner of the company.

A handful of months after its launch, Candy claimed a valuation of $1.5 billion in October 2021 after the firm said it had raised $100 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners and Softbank’s Vision Fund 2.

However, the NFT firm has not been spared the chills of the crypto winter, layoff more than a third of the 100 workers last November, as first reported by Sportico. Other NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea have also been forced to make job cuts, along with Dapper Labs, the creators of NBA top shot and NFL all day.

This January, Fanatics passed away, selling its 60% stake in Candy to a group of investors led by Galaxy Digital, including ConsenSys Mesh and equity fund 10T Holdings. (Disclosure: ConsenSys Mesh is one of 22 investors in Decrypt.)

In a Fanatics memo seen by Decryptwrote Rubin that NFTs are unlikely to succeed as a standalone business amid an “imploding NFT market that has seen sharp declines in both transaction volumes and prices for standalone NFTs.”

Regardless of the two parties’ differing views on digital collectibles, Lawin said Fanatics was a “fantastic partner to start with, especially because we leaned first into the sports space,” adding that the sale was a natural shift in a challenging market .

NFTs are unique digital tokens used to convey ownership of an object, often digital art. While most NFTs can be traded on a variety of marketplaces, Candy’s is limited to the firm’s marketplace built on Palm – an Ethereum sidechain. However, Lawin described the restriction as something that will likely change over time.

“Part of our road map [is] to allow our customers to take care of their assets and potentially trade them on different marketplaces,” said Lawin. “It’s not going to be a flip of a switch. It’s going to be something that we spend a lot of time internally with our technology partners, our communities and our IP partners to get right.”