This year has so far proved to be a very fruitful time within the music NFT ecosystem. The overall interest in the technology is increasing and the communities of music artists and CryptoArt collectors are growing at a rapid pace.
These processes are also reflected in the amount of new music NFT platforms and the variety of offerings, approaches and long-term aims they have. As a result, we have decided to update and extend our list of The Best Music NFT Marketplaces and cover more music NFT-oriented platforms.
Sound
Sound is a music NFT marketplace that provides a suite of web3 native and economic tools for creators, allowing them to customize their offerings and incorporate most of the recent innovations within the NFT world. Artists can publish songs, sell NFTs with a variety of royalty splits, and also build governance structures operated by tokens around their brand.
Sound’s organizational aim is about correcting the issues associated with the economics of the music business and artist attribution, and the platform has received a lot of praise for their “Listening Party” feature – a process that helps artists to debut their new music as a set of unique NFTs, thus allowing them to get early support from collectors that are allowed to comment on a song if they buy the NFT.
Members of the music NFT community consider the “Listening Party” to be a perfect replication of the “I knew this artist before he was famous” moment but also with additional monetization potential.
At this particular moment the Sound platform is focused on continuing to build tools that facilitate the fan-to-artist crowdfunding and help to change course from the traditional DSP monetization.
Type of blockchain: Ethereum
Payment type: Crypto and Fiat
Platform fees: You pay your gas fees
Who is it perfect for?: Independent artists who have a vision and want to take the next step
Secondary sales: No platform commissions on secondary sales
Pianity
Pianity is a music NFT platform built on the environmentally friendly Arweave technology that consumes up to 100 times less energy than ETH. The sole focus of Pianity is about showcasing artists’ limited edition tracks and exclusive collections.
The goal of the marketplace is all about trying to solve the problematic issues in music artist payouts, and the platform is currently operating in a unique way – it redistributes around 50% of the earnings to all active users on a weekly basis, having already attracted over 20k active users.
There are also other advantages in place as you don’t have any minting cost or gas fees, whereas 20% of the primary sale goes to the platform itself.
Type of blockchain: Arweave
Payment types: Both Crypto and Fiat currencies
Platform fees: 20% of the primary sale
Who is it perfect for?: Artists looking to get a deeper fanbase connection and funding through granting access to exclusive, scarce items
Secondary sales: 8% of resale value always goes to the creator
Nina
Nina is an open source protocol which can be defined as a digital infrastructure built to buy, sell and stream music online. The way the protocol works is very simple – after a one-time transaction fee, which depends on the size of the uploaded file, artists can upload permanent music releases to the blockchain-based platform and fully customize the price, edition size and secondary resale creator commission percentage.
In a nutshell, Nina is a highly customizable tool that allows you to even simply host music, sell digital editions or build a patronage mechanism by providing unique content.
Type of blockchain: Solana + Arweave for data storage
Payment types: ETH, USDC
Platform fees: Just the first initialization one-off fee which depends on the size of the files
Who is it perfect for?: More tech savvy creators that want to host their music without a particular preference for a single platform
Secondary sales: Nina takes a 1,5% resale commission
Decent
Decent is a music NFT platform focused on crowdfunding and community building around musical art. The main focus of the platform lies in promoting the NFTs that are collateralized by musician’s royalties.
Artists are given a toolset that allows them to upload tracks and choose the royalty percentage and duration of the fan “commitment period”. Fans are then encouraged to buy the NFT and thus obtain a right to a certain royalty share for a certain period of time, determined by the artist.
Furthermore, Decent introduced an interesting economic structure on their platform – the royalties received by the collectors are earning interest for the duration of the commitment period, by being locked in Decent’s time-locked wallet smart contracts. As a consequence of that, the expected value of the accrued royalties can rise if the artist increases in popularity what would eventually drive secondary sales of artists’ NFTs up or down.
After the royalty period has commenced – fans receive a free NFT that grants access to the artist’s community, representing an extra communal value even after you are not the holder of the original token.
Type of blockchain: ETH
Payment types: ETH, USDC
Platform fees: You pay around 0.05 – 0.2ETH ($50-$220) to mint an NFT
Who is it perfect for?: Creators looking to build an active community around their art and make their fans financially involved
Secondary sales: Customizable
Async Art
Async Art is a digital art platform built around the concept of programmable and generative art. The platform initially started by focusing on digital paintings only, but has recently incorporated the generative music side as well, becoming a marketplace with a unique concept within the field of music NFTs.
The way it operated originally was by focusing on digital paintings split into so called “Layers” that you can buy, use and program to affect the overall image. What happens is that over time the art evolves by reacting to the user’s actions, price changes and other processes happening on the platform.
The same exact concept was also applied with the introduction of the generative music side that represented a curated gallery of 17 interactive music pieces that are broken into many individual layers and sounds called “Stems”.
Each Stem has multiple variants to choose from and various additional layers are always updating the appearance of the music and artwork, making it a communal forever evolving audiovisual art.
Type of blockchain: ETH
Payment types: Fiat Currency + ETH
Platform fees: 20% of the primary sale and 1% of all secondary sales
Who is it perfect for?: Creators that want to experiment and be a part of the collective generative art process
Secondary sales: 10% to the creator
Catalog
Catalog is one of the music NFT platforms that also focuses on creating a more equitable music system. The marketplace itself represents a digital record shop and a music community which is built on sales and resales of one-off exclusive digital records.
The way it works is that artists actually collect 100% of their initial sales and can set the secondary sale fees themselves. On top of that Catalog offers an interesting option where the creator can also allocate a secondary sale fee to the new owner as well, thus creating a number of token holders that will be forever earning from the resales of the NFT together with the artist themselves.
Type of blockchain: Ethereum
Payment types: ETH
Platform fees: No fees
Who is it perfect for?: Artists interested in building a fanbase community over their art
Secondary sales: Customizable
Glass
Glass is an innovative and one-of-a-kind music NFT platform due to the fact that it specializes in sales of artists’ music videos as NFTs. At the moment Glass is extremely selective in their music video curation and favors bigger caliber artists in order to continue building a strong brand.
The platform is built on both ETH and Solana and stores the videos via Arweave which implies a number of direct and indirect costs related to the minting process. The way it works at Glass is that you pay a certain small upfront Arweave cost and cover the cost of minting yourself.
That cost could change drastically depending on the size of the video and which blockchain is used. The marketplaces takes 10% of the primary sale and allows for the NFTs to be sold as both auctions and series.
Type of blockchain: Ethereum + Solana
Payment types: ETH + fiat currency
Platform fees: 10% of the primary sale
Who is it perfect for?: Artists interested in monetizing their music videos
Secondary sales: Customizable
Mint Songs
Mint Songs is a music NFT platform that has received a lot of praise for its custom-tailored approach where each individual campaign is produced specifically according to the artist’s vision, needs and specifics. The platform itself is community curated and focuses on exclusive 1/1 NFT sales.
These NFTs are sold at auctions and can incorporate customizable revenue splits for the collectors that purchase the token. In order to join as an artist you must be invited by an existing artist or collector that is part of the Mint Songs platform, and even though the platform has 0% fees, the gas fee burden to mint the NFT is fully on the shoulders of the artist.
One of the latest innovations of the platform is an introduction of the new “link in bio” app that portrays artists’ NFT drops and collections.
Type of blockchain: Ethereum + Polygon + Powered by Zora Protocol
Payment types: Fiat currency and Crypto
Platform fees: 0% fees
Who is it perfect for?: Artists that want to build a custom-tailored NFT campaign
Secondary sales: Customizable
RCRDSHP
RCRDSHP is pronounced as “record shop” and is a platform that focuses on a music listening and music collecting experience purely within the realm of Electronic Dance Music.
This focus is not a surprise, given that around 70% of all music NFT releases were within the Electronic genre label. The vision of the marketplace is about further revolutionizing a tech-friendly electronic music scene, and they do it by issuing digital packs that are later sold as NFTs.
The packs themselves include exclusive sounds, video clips, visuals, behind-the-scenes content and other exclusive offerings from the artist. Another solid feature of the platform is the focus to appease collectors across the purchasing power spectrum – the offerings on the platform range from little $5 pieces to luxurious exclusive drops by big artists.
Since the launch of the platform in August 2021 collectors paid more than $600k to artists only within the first six months.
Type of blockchain: FLOW
Payment types: Fiat currency, BTC, ETH
Platform fees: Primary sale fee (depends on the size of the pack)
Who is it perfect for?: Electronic Music artists looking to obtain alternative funding
Secondary sales: Customizable
SoundMint
SoundMint is another platform that focuses on a generative combination of musical stems and visual layers that blend themselves into audiovisual pieces. The way that the platform operates is that all of the components are made by artists that are featured on the platform, but are blended together by the SoundMint complex algorithm, creating a highly sophisticated generative art process on the platform.
Type of blockchain: Solana
Payment types: Fiat currency and Crypto
Platform fees: Primary sale fee
Sturdy Exchange
Sturdy Exchange provides a music NFT curated experience for the music token collectors. The platform assists all artists with their releases and is currently extremely selective with their invitations.
The unique selling point of Sturdy Exchange is that they implement fully customizable royalty structures for every individual drop and allow you to pay via fiat currency and a simple bank transfer.
Type of blockchain: FLOW
Payment types: Fiat currency and Crypto
Platform fees: % fee on both primary and secondary sales
Who is it perfect for?: Artists that want to build a custom tailored NFT campaign
Secondary sales: Customizable
Zora
Zora is an NFT marketplace protocol much like Nina. The protocol ensures instant cross-platform royalty payments and markets itself as a very gas efficient protocol with zero fees.
Zora has its own primary marketplace where users can list NFTs, even though most NFTs sold on its protocol do take place on third party sites. Zora’s toolkit for NFT creation has been hailed and used by a number of crypto organizations like publishing startup Mirror and a collective FWB.
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