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Sound Records Heavy Minting Action in Last Two Months
By: Owen Fernau
In the latest sign that NFTs remain popular with collectors, Sound, a platform for music tokens is singing a very catchy tune.
The number of mints on Sound have 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 mints came in November.
Active wallets for the platform hit a monthly all-time high of 2,719. The platform also paid out $4M to artists since its launch in December 2021.Collectors are doing pretty well, too.
“One artist was like, I’ve made more for my fans this month than I made for myself,” David Greenstein, co-founder at Sound, told The Defiant.
On Sound, fans can buy the NFTs at mint and sell them later, turning a profit if the tokens increase in price. At the same time, artists can collect royalties on the NFT when the tokens trade hands.
Greenstein said Sound and music NFTs enable music fans to collect the NFTs the same way they scoop up vinyl records. People can also listen for free.
“It’s an actual use case,” he said. “Music has always been either active or passive.”
Sound’s early momentum comes at a time when the bottom has fallen out of the NFT market — after hitting an all-time high of over $6B in trading volume in a week in January, volume on the tokens failed to even reach $100M in the last week of November, according to a Dune query.
“The use case of music, NFTs are not necessarily tied to a bear or bull market,” Greenstein said. He is not concerned 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 turning a tidy profit when possible.
Still, Sound’s nice performance is a far cry from mainstream adoption — the streaming behemoth Spotify has 456M 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 surrounding NFTs.
Plus, even in ETH terms and removing an extremely popular outlier which was a Snoop Dogg drop, secondary volume has slipped along with the broader NFT market — it’s still roughly half of its peak in March.
Still, the unproven sustainability hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs like Greenstein and Cooper Turley, who founded a $10M venture fund focused exclusively on music, from going close to all-in on the nascent space.
“Growth is being driven by an emerging class of artists making a career off the back of music NFTs,” Turley told The Defiant.
Looking forward, Greenstein is excited about a new feature called the Activity Feed, which launched last month. At a high level, the feed will function somewhat like how one on a social network like Twitter does — it will show who’s 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% like an NFT site and 70% like a music site,” he said.
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