The best NFT marketplaces for music are Mint Songs, Royal, Sound.xyz, and Catalog. These marketplaces are special for musicians because they are exclusively, just for musical artists. These marketplaces are valuable because when consumers come to these marketplaces, they are looking to buy music, whereas when consumers go to other marketplaces they could be looking to buy all types of art. Most of these marketplaces are not as big as OpenSea and some of the other marketplaces, but in the coming years, we could see these marketplaces takeover the music industry because of their exclusivity.
Mint Songs is a fairly new platform for musicians and it is connected to the Polygon blockchain. Therefore in order to buy or mint songs, you would need to use Polygon, not Ethereum. Mint Songs requires artists to be invited to their platform in order to post, but there is no minting fee once you are on it. Mint Songs also owns a smaller platform called Factory for all users to post their music NFTs. Factory uses the MetaMask wallet and makes it really easy to mint your music as NFTs. Factory in my opinion is the most user-friendly way for artists to mint their songs.
Royal is a platform started by prominent NFT musician, Justin Blau. Blau accumulated a whopping $11.7 million from just 33 songs that he released as NFTs. Royal has become a platform for more well-known music stars like Nas, The Chainsmokers, and Diplo. It is a platform for artists to share their streaming rights with their biggest supporters, so that the artist and the supporter both benefit from a song's success. Right now, Royal is invite-only for artists, but Blau said that he has plans for it to be open to all users to mint their songs.
Sound.xyz is a marketplace that has been very successful like Royal. Sound.xyz allows non-established artists to make money through NFTs. Many artists like Daniel Allan have blown up and made hundreds of thousands of dollars from releasing their music NFTs in Sound.xyz. Artists also have to apply in order to join Sound.xyz. However, once you are on it, your music has a high likelihood that it will be sold because of the popularity of this marketplace. Some well-known artists that have minted their songs on Sound.xyz include Snoop Dogg, Vic Mensa, and Bobby Smurda.
Catalog is another invite-only marketplace that has been getting a lot of attention recently. What makes Catalog different from other NFT marketplaces is that the music on Catalog is platformless. This means the records on Catalog are decentralized and the market of the song is within the NFT itself. Also, artists get 100% of their royalties and Catalog does not take anything. From an artist’s standpoint that is very appealing.
Written by Kadari Machen
Student of the WUTW Web3 & NFT Accelerator Program 2022
Sources: