Hey! Hi! Hello! I’ve got a few new music NFT thoughts I want to share with you guys. I feel like every few weeks I’m realizing a few different things, but the one thing I’ve consistently been able to say is that there’s no one way to get it in this web3 shit, and I hope what I share with y’all presents more and more possible ways you can.

tl;dr: I’ve collaborated with the metal band September Mourning on remixing their song Wake the Dead, available as an NFT on Sound. Mint yours now before they’re gone.

I remember getting into web3 and while talking to folks who make music about how to enter the space, the common answer was “find a visual artist to work with” and this meant to find an animator and make what was effectively background music for an animation…but this didn’t prioritize music. Presented below is an NFT by my partner in Koodos, Monday, where he worked with a 3D artist to create a series of animations set to his music. We were so caught up in web3 but 3D that we didn’t really consider how to move music. OpenSea had an audio upload option already, featuring artwork and Catalog came around in 2021 with cover art based uploading as well. I think those were the big options for just presenting a song as an NFT straight up, but we didn’t even know it was there. I specify cover art because the earlier versions of Zora only allowed for audio standalone without cover art. They found the light.

Something I think we’ve been pushing toward for a while as music creatives, especially in rap web3, is working together more. One of the earliest examples of a collaboration that I think everyone really got behind was Dubai Way by Allan Kingdom, Luca Maxim & MoRuf that dropped on catalog.

I think this is where we started to see collaboration start to become a bit more of a conversation. With the rise of PartyBid toward the end of 2021 in the music sphere, we understood supporting each other by working as a community to collect works, but it took a little bit before we really got into collaboration. It’s become commonplace now and I love to see it.

I also believe that collaboration can work for artists of traditional music stature looking to enter web3. I was on Mint Podcast talking about how artists with traditional music following can easily and effectively enter web3 by collaborating with artists who are already in the realm.

Most ideally, I believe that a mix of all of the above is the most versatile key to making true magic. I worked with Emily Lazar of the band September Mourning on remixing a song of theirs that dropped on Sound.

September Mourning is a transmedia project that spans across a comic book and a band of the same name, with their vocalist, Emily, representing the main character September in live shows. Able to take visual and musical reference from one location and work on a collab really takes advantage of both worlds.

In the not so far away future, audiovisual collectives will form and they will work together to provide the full experience. Instead of being creative agencies taking on clients, they will be working toward creating the best possible work as a crew. This is the future I imagine. I think a lot about Royalty, the gang behind Childish Gambino, Atlanta and more, and how a group of folks with similar vision can create really focused and high quality work. I even have an audiovisual collective in web3, we just haven’t done anything yet so I’ll let you know when in another post.

As someone who notoriously hates working with others, I think it is undeniable that collaboration can open up a lot of doors you may not have been able to open alone. If you’re unsure where to go, try hitting someone up to see if they’re interested in working together.