Artist who tokenized album for $11M explains why the NFT boom isn't like the ICO craze

The market for non-fungible tokens, digital collectibles, and tokenized music is hitting the mainstream. On Thursday, Beeple's NFT-powered suite of 5,000 images sold for a staggering $69 million, making it the third-highest figure paid for work by a living artist. Indeed, the sale sent shockwaves across the broader press, cementing NFT's place in the mainstream consciousness.

The market has been growing at a fast clip, with weekly users on NFT platforms soaring from around 20,000 at the beginning of the year to nearly 200,000 this week, according to data from The Block. 

On this episode of The Scoop, The Block's Frank Chaparro and Ryan Todd unpack the market's recent headlines with DJ and music producer 3Lau.

Performing artist 3Lau has long been focused on the intersection of music and crypto. Recently, he tokenized an album in a move that netted the Long Island native more than $11 million.

In this episode of The Scoop, the group discusses how tokenization will usurp record labels and put more money in the pockets of artists, his plans for helping more artists get involved in NFTs, and what makes this current crypto boom cycle different from the initial coin offering rally. 

"You have these middlemen that have capitalized on artists' emotions and their lack of financial savviness," he said, describing the record labels and managing companies that capture much of the value from a musician's work.

Through NFTs, artists can now engage directly with their audiences. 

"Beeple is an example of that as someone who makes amazing stuff. Will there be speculation in the short term? Yes. Will there be innovation in the long term? Yes," he said, adding:

"But in the end, just like with any market, there is a period of price discovery and that's what we're going through right now. The difference between this and what happened with the ICO boom in 2017: back then, people were buying ideas that could barely be delivered upon. Now people are buying things that give them emotions."

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