Basic mechanics of generating musical NFTs: rarity, blind box minting and burning

In some generative music NFT projects, if the goal is to reproduce the financial success of visual type projects, let’s analyze which features and elements of visual PFP projects can be well carried over to music projects.

On a technical level, much of this adoption is justified and is already being done. For example, a common element in visual PFP projects is assigning a relative rarity to different visual or character elements (eg clothing, hair color) that may be incorporated into the final artwork. Rarity is a key factor for cryptocurrency enthusiasts to compare and price their NFTs with each other, and there is even a small industry around cryptocurrency brands helping to generate rarity tables for their series of NFTs . Many generative music NFT projects such as SoundArts (above) have implemented a rarity-based approach, whereby developers assign each merged audio track (stem) a rarity rating to demonstrate the generative creation process for that collection of musical NFTs.

Another mechanism that many generative music NFT projects have carried over from the visual world is blind-box minting , where collectors first buy an NFT without knowing the exact combination of features or rarity of the NFT they will get. For example, artist Julian Mudd’s Muddy collection allows collectors to mint a total of 1,000 generative NFTs around his song “Growing Pains”, each NFT having 1 There are thousands of possibilities, and collectors can only know all the details after purchasing, and determine which unique derivative combination it is. (A static original version of “Growing Pains” is available on Spotify and other streamers.)

Typically, blind-box minting projects trigger a “disclosure” of basic rarity information after all NFTs have been minted or the minting period has ended (whichever occurs first). According to this design, the blind box minting process is very similar to buying a loot box in a video game, or a lottery ticket in real life.

“I think there’s a weird sense of excitement about not knowing what you’re getting when you mint coins. That feeling — we mint the same price, but what I’m drawing might be worth more — digs out that we like to gamble psychological mechanisms,” Patrick Price (aka Patty G) said in an interview. He is the founder of the upcoming project 3Q Collectibles , which works with producers who produce the underlying merged audio tracks that create the basis for generative audio NFTs with built-in rarity rankings.

In the field of generative music NFTs, we are starting to see the emergence of a third mechanism: giving collectors the ability to burn tokens (that is, completely and irreversibly destroy them from the supply) to reduce the number of original assets, for the purpose of “creation” “Collections create additional scarcity. As a piece of performance art, digital artist Pak has launched a dedicated website burn.art , where any collector can burn any NFT Development they own in exchange for the token $ASH, which can then be used to further exchange for Pak’s own collection of NFTs.

The flagship generation NFT project EulerBeats in the music field designed the airdrop like this: 27 one-to-one creation “LPs”. According to the terms of service of the project , each Genesis LP has 120 copies (or “prints”), which are sold according to the bonding curve (i.e., the price is automatically increased with each sale), 8% of the print sales go to the Genesis LP holder, 2% Goes to EulerBeats, and the remaining 90% goes to the combustion reserve. Further gamification architecture design provides an opportunity for NFT owners to burn the original print in exchange for 90% of that print’s current value.

Social, Cultural and Legal Challenges

For generative/PFP music NFT projects, while the above strategy is technically feasible, whether the paradigm is socially, culturally, and legally envisioned at scale is another matter entirely.

Assessing the potential market for generative/PFP music NFT collections, not only financially, but also philosophically: why do people enjoy listening to and sharing music in the first place ? As an innate social art form, music is arguably more valuable the more you share it — so, do people necessarily want to own a unique piece of music, or do they all want to share and experience the same piece of music ? When it seems like you can mass-produce multiple different versions of music with the push of a button (even though the artist may have put a lot more effort behind the scenes to build the system), will the relationship of fans to music change? How does the traditional top-down notion of celebrity branding — where fans follow artists because they have unique personalities and voices that cannot be replicated — map subtly onto a decentralized infrastructure?

lack of social utility

In general, one of the strongest psychological draws of generative/PFP projects is the ability to bring collectors together under some sort of umbrella community. SoundArts founder Paris Blohm told us in an interview: “Generating PFP is a perfect example of both commonality and uniqueness.” Taking BAYC as an example, Brian Nguyen, founding member of SoundArts, added: “We are all Apes, but we are It has its own identity in this community.”

In our database, many music-generating NFT projects tend to view NFT ownership as a similar intrinsic community element as a way to access and govern their specific DAO ( Holly+ , Mudd DAO , BeetsDAO , and BleepsDAO are a few important cases) . “We see the possibility of building a new kind of fan club by generating NFTs, where NFT holders can receive future airdrops from artists to watch their performances,” experimental music/art structures So Lab X , Sound Obsessed and IN X SPACE co-founder Kalam Ali told us in an interview, “It’s a new format for an artist or a band to release a massive series of NFTs and then build a fan base based on the NFTs the fans have.