Best NFT Marketplaces For Music – How To Sell Music as NFT?

April 25, 2022

What you'll learn 👉

NFTs and musicians

NFT world helped a lot of artists to reach out to the public directly instead of using a middle man. Many painters, photographers, designers all reaped the benefits of it thanks to their NFT’s that are on the graphical side. If you are a famous painter that makes millions of dollars already, NFT may not mean anything to you, but if you do not make decent returns, then NFT became the market where they could get the profits directly from the consumer.

Music is no different. Most big names could make enough money without a need for NFT, this has been the case for decades now, even centuries. However, many musicians and singers ended up not making decent returns because they are not at the top of the charts. This caused many of them to turn to NFT space and take advantage of it.

Normally record labels pay a small amount to the musician who owns the rights, and streaming platforms like Spotify pay these artists even less. This means if you are not a world-famous artist, all you make is a tiny amount that is not enough and you need to find extra jobs everywhere you go.

Thanks to NFT space, musicians could sell the royalty rights to their investors and can make a lot more money even before a single is out. While record labels and streaming platforms pay very little, one NFT that is worth %50 of royalties on a single could make more than what these musicians used to make, and they still get to keep the other %50 of the royalties anyway. This profitable venture opened up the door for many musicians who didn’t make hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Obviously, these people will not be as rich as Drake or Ariana Grande, or Taylor Swift. However, instead of needing to go on small budget tours to make enough to barely pay the bills, they can now have a chat app (discord, telegram, slack, anything they want) and connect with their fans while making more money and all within the confines of their home. This started a whole new era for low-income musicians and can be a great path for the rest of them to come.

So, which of the NFT Marketplaces are the best for music sales?

AirNFTs

The benefits of the BSC network on NFT are clear. It is faster, cheaper and also it is still highly popular. This makes AirNFT one of the best NFT markets for musicians who are starting in this world for the first time. The low cost of entrance is a key factor to attract customers and creators.

The biggest downside to AirNFT is the volume they have. Both AIRT (their native token) and the marketplace volume are low compared to most NFT markets we know. If you used Opensea before, you know how much money exchanges hands each day there, whereas here we are talking about a lot less.

This shouldn’t sway you away since you could list it somewhere else if you can’t find a buyer here, and since it is BSC, the fee you have to pay is minimal.

NFT Tone

The most important warning about NFT Tone is the difference between their product and token. Tone token is their native token and it is not even in the top 6000 of CMC rankings. That should tell you all you need to know about it and why you should stay away from it if you can.

However, the product is quite different, they are connecting with many famous musicians and building a marketplace that would be shared by known names. It still doesn’t change much since we haven’t seen the product yet, but good marketing is almost always an important first step.

The Musician Marketplace

An up-and-coming marketplace. Musicians Marketplace is more of a custom-made request website instead of being partners on a musician’s work. You could request musicians to make custom-made songs for you. From songwriters to singers to producers, there are all kinds of people you could hire to work on your custom song as well.

This is obviously a little bit different, but it is certainly a good idea to NFT the result. This allows you to own your very first music all by yourself without needing to know anything about making music. None of the work could be done by you, and you would still have %100 rights to it. You could then list it in any streaming service, put it up on youtube, or just listen to it over and over again as we all do for our favorite songs.

Async Art

Async offers both graphic arts and music as well. Unfortunately, the volume is quite low for the musical part of the website. While the art part gets a lot of attention and a big amount of sales, the musical part is not getting that attention and lacks the offers as well.

There are not that many musicians selling and the ones who do are selling for too high prices as well due to lack of competition. Unless you come here by clicking on a musician’s link, it would not be suggested to check it for potential gems.

Illust Space

Illust is a bit different concept than regular marketplaces. It is an augmented reality space where you see these arts placed in the real world. Imagine pokemon go, but instead of pokemon, you see art wherever you go and you can check them.

They could be on sale as well, so you could purchase these and either keep them at their place or move them to somewhere else if you want to. This concept works with music as well, you could buy music that is playing somewhere, and can either listen to it as a fan or buy it as an investor as well. Certainly a unique approach to NFT space.

Nifty Gateway

Nifty is one of the most famous NFT marketplaces in the space. They are owned by the Gemini corporation which was founded by the Winklevii twins. It is certainly a big enough marketplace to have both good volume and also a good amount of NFT on sale as well.

They are still lacking the navigation for music-specific offers, but you could find famous people like Gramatik sharing their music and videos and selling them as well. Certainly in its infancy right now, but Nifty is big enough to have a good chance of increasing famous people participating.

MakersPlace

Not all songs are simple, some require a lot more material and this could make them more costly as well. From samples to different instruments and even just sounds, from different singers to multiple end product workers. Makersplace offers a variety of these.

You could find so many samples to use in your own song, you can find many voices and sounds all in one place. If you are a sound engineer, Makersplace is a dream come true for you. Obviously, you could find tens of thousands of free packs for your beats, but nothing feels like actually owning that sample and having a unique sound in your music.

Do not be alarmed if all of your NFT searches come back with a graphic as well, Makersplace has a known habit of listing music with art displayed together with it as well. So you are both buying the NFT artwork and music together.

OneOf

Did you ever wonder what would happen if you owned Whitney Houston’s work as an NFT? Well, OneOf gets as close as possible with it and shares the NFT version even if not the rights for it. An NFT marketplace specifically made for musicians, Oneof is a place where creators could come together and build collections and sell their songs and albums.

Lacking the “rights” part of the deal or the royalty income is certainly a lacking feature for investors. However, it is not a deal-breaker for many and people still find it quite valuable to purchase these NFT’s from such big names.

TuneGO

Being a business before becoming NFT marketplace, TuneGo built a reputation in the music industry long before they got into crypto. With an invitation-only exclusive marketplace, they certainly reached a lot of people and created a demand. So far no big-name got into NFT themselves, but TuneGo and their musical artists do share some consistent stream of music for all the investors who are interested.

You could also sign up as an artist yourself and get your music in front of thousands of people as well. Having this kind of expertise in the musical world before they started the marketplace certainly gave them a big advantage against many music-only NFT marketplace competitions they have.

NFT Genius

NFT Genius is the company behind the big NFT collections such as Bitcoin Origins, Ballerz, Tezos Origins, and gaia. They have raised 4 million dollars from known names such as Mark Cuban for building the music marketplace part of their website. It is not available as of yet, but with such big names and with the great background so far, they certainly look like a great upcoming marketplace for the NFT music world.

What do I need to understand before I start minting my first NFT?

You might be the creator or you could be minted from a collection, but even at zero point to creation, it requires a gas fee. This means if you create your own music, you will have to still spend money on it to turn it into NFT form. Doesn’t mean that it needs to be sold, you can store it on your wallet yourself, but you will still need to spend a gas fee for creation.

If you are an investor, you need to know that there are different types of musical NFT formats.

One shares the royalties of that song with you, so you could make a return on that investment, and another that just sells the rights to say you own it but the royalties are still contracted to the original creator. So make sure you know what type of NFT you are getting and not be disappointed when you do not see royalty income piling up.

So which NFT Marketplace should I choose?

So far Musical NFT’s are not as famous as artwork ones. This makes it a bit more difficult to find proper places that offer them in their marketplace. So far the ones that focus on music are not known enough to have too much work, and the ones that are big do not focus on music too much.

Since it is not a one-stop shop, we would suggest checking all of them and listening to all the offers. This way you could get to decide which one you would like to invest in or simply just own, by hearing it yourself. If you limit yourself to just one, then all the music in other marketplaces will be closed off for you, which is not necessary.

The business of doing business with NFTs

The NFT world is brand new. It is not completely understood by the public all too well. Even a recent South Park two-part movie joked about the NFT world heavily and mocked the value of it. This doesn’t mean that you should stay away from it because it is such a new and sometimes even a confusing topic. NFT’s are a different way of signing a contract.

Normally if a painter creates new art, in order to sell that painting they would have to sign it over on paper and probably use a witness or even notary. NFT simply makes this a faster and cheaper process that can be done globally.

As every NFT doubter would say, “what if I click save as button and steal it?”, you could reply with “you could do that to images of Mona Lisa as well, doesn’t make you the owner of it”. It will be a concept not understood by many, while profitable to a few. You will have to decide which one you want to be.