The next big thing in NFTs: Sell them for peanuts

Would you buy an NFT for $ 1000? How about for $ 10?

With the last one dizzying losses in the crypto markethave speculators fled the once frothy NFT market, and took with them what was left of their money. Floor prices for top collections have crashed to the ground. Now there are some in the industry who produce original digital art– in contrast to collectibles of PFP (profile picture) such as Bored Apes and CryptoPunks – one tries to create a grassroots, sustainable business model that has a low entry and is not dependent on speculation.

A deceptively simple idea that is gaining momentum: selling NFTs is what it is cheap.

Take Mike Pollard, who in 2021 began working in a marketplace for affordable music NFTs called Ninanow in beta, which he describes as a kind of “crypto bandcamp.”

“The models used to sell NFTs, such as auctions and bonding curves, along with the high fees on platforms like Ethereum, made it necessary to sell NFTs at high prices,” he told me.

Nina, on the other hand, allows musicians to sell tracks at prices they set, without input from rent-seeking intermediaries. The result, Pollard said, is that the tracks cost around $ 10.

Of course, there are still sellers with an oversized sense of their contribution to the art world. “An artist was trying to sell a track for $ 1 million,” he said. “It did not sell.”

By and large, Nina’s artisans are trying to create a more rational marketplace for their unique digital creations.

Pollard claims that Nina challenges the approach that suits everyone, taken by platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, which price tracks equally no matter how much work is put into them. (Needless to say, on these services you pay to access a copy of a song, not to own the “original.”)

Nina, Pollard explained, “allows artists to find economic models that suit their audience.” It also suits the fans, who are not intimidated by volatility or high transaction fees; Nina is built on the Solana network with a lower fee.

Jordan Garbis av BeetsDAOwhich started as a music NFT collector group, had a similar revelation. “We just want to return to normal expectations of price and experience,” he told me.

Garbis and BeetsDAO help build Echo, a user-owned music streaming service built around a Discord-like interface that lets artists interact with fans. (Disclosure: Garbis is one strategic investor in Decrypt.) Exclusive tracks and various other benefits will be awarded to fans for engagement with the platform; Garbis believes that a large supply of these tokens (“almost infinite”), and a genuinely appealing use case that discourages resale, will keep them affordable.

“It should look and feel more like owning music does today,” Garbis said. “Which means millions of plays and hundreds of thousands of unique fan relationships.”

Each of these relationships can generate a trickle of revenue that in the long run can constitute a sustainable business.

Another advantage of selling NFTs cheaply, Garbis claims, is that it is more inclusive. He said that in the past the desire to keep drops exclusive and command (or actually create) a high price unnecessarily limited the artists’ popularity.

And when it comes to the other big corner of the NFT originals, digital art, it’s an even bigger problem. Digital art is more easily reproducible than music, which can make digital artwork NFTs more enticing to speculators looking for a big resale. It works when the hype is high; not so much when the market collapses.

Asynchronous Art, an NFT marketplace run by a small staff, gives fans a way to create a kind of grassroots community around the artists they love. It offers NFTs of music tracks and original artwork – much of it psychedelic, weird, distinctive – for as low as $ 10. It’s a way to supplement an artist’s income – a friendly service disguised as a prestigious item. And it’s a model that actually works, said Achilleas Saradaris, Async’s founder and drummer in the band HMLTD (formerly “Happy Meal Ltd”).

Saradaris flipped through photos of one of the site’s featured artists, noting that each one sold, but only for a few dollars.

“You can think of it as a vinyl record – something you buy without, necessarily, hope of reselling it,” he said. “This artist just likes to scribble, and I like his scribbling too, so I host his NFTs so he can keep scribbling.”

In particular, Saradaris did not try to talk up any notion of benefits or advantages. Instead, the pitch of these NFTs is an emotional appeal. “We produce value out of thin air,” he said. “It’s alchemy.”

In fact, Saradaris, along with Pollard and Garbis, readily recognize that what they offer is qualitatively different from the product offered by Web2 titans such as Spotify and YouTube, and they know they have no hope of competing on a large scale with these companies – at least in the short term.

Instead, their pitch to the fans is to support music and art of good will, in exchange for a sense of ownership or patronage.

Whether this succeeds in moving the NFT market into a sustainable future will depend on how much goodwill the fans really have.

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