Napster
I never used Napster when I was just a fledgling on the internet. I had other go-to p2p file sharing sites (see the previous slide), but I was well aware when the company found itself in legal trouble because, well, all that obvious copyright infringement.
So—surprise, surprise—a Web3 firm bought Napster in May, planning to turn the brand into a blockchain-based site. What will Napster’s brand, which is known more for allowing users to pirate artists’ songs, gain in the process? Well, crypto investment group Hivemind wants to make Napster “bring blockchain to artists and fans.”
Which of course makes it sound like this is just going to be another NFT project. We’ve had these kinds of promises before (again, see the previous slide), but while there’s been some adoption among a few big names in the music industry like Kings of Leon or Deadmau5, most of the big NFT sales have become based on the digital receipts for derivative pieces of objectively ugly artworks. At the same time, the demand for NFTs overall has cooled dramatically.
Which doesn’t necessarily mean that artists won’t have a use for NFTs, or that they don’t have the capacity to take an axe to the music industry. But what exactly is the purpose of designating a singular point of contact for NFT based music? It’s not to become some new, decentralized breaker of chains for music artists, but to become the new industry itself.
