The Mona Lisa Effect
Trust Us, You’ll Want To Read This One.
Out of all the blogs we’ve written, this may be one of the most insightful.
We’ve covered everything from fashion and entertainment to the future of tech and consumer behaviors - this one marries them all.
Amongst all the madness surrounding NFTs at the moment, there has been a recent progression into their scalability for real world use. You see, the art-side behind NFTs are really only scratching the surface, and theoretically speaking this should be looked upon as a proof of concept and certainly not anywhere near the final destination of NFTs.
Mona Lisa by Lil Pump Feat. Soulja Boy
Now we’re talking.
In case you haven’t heard, ‘Mona Lisa’, a new song yet to debut by Lil Pump featuring Soulja Boy, was recently deployed through a smart contract, allowing users to ‘invest’ in the song via NFT format. The concept is then as follows: depending on your investment amount (max $50k, min $100), you’re essentially receiving equity in the song that opens you up for royalty kickbacks.
Pretty cool, right? We aren’t the only ones, 1,319 others thought the same thing after helping the project close at it’s target amount of $500,000.
What Does This Mean For Music?
It means alot. The concept of this project highlights that the revolutionary-like shift of creators maintaining their independence is still strong and ever growing. Your favorite rapper who blew up on soundcloud doesn’t need to wait for that record label anymore, you’re now a part of the creative process by directly financing the project.
For the rest of the project’s existence, as an investor you’ll be receiving kickbacks through the means of quarterly payments. You’re now a co-owner of the song, a piece of the intellectual property now belongs to you. You’re given the ability to hold onto it and keep receiving quarterly payments, or you can sell it on to someone who wants their name (or wallet address), embedded in musical history.
The Future Is Crowd Funded.
Just like we’ve seen through Kickstarter and GoFundMe, we’re expecting to see musicians and producers take action and shift the control into their own hands. Specifically highlighting breakdowns of musical projects in invoice-like fashion; everything from studio recording costs, to songwriting and press team costs.
Then it’s up to us, the public, to decide on whether we like the idea of this or not. No need for record labels to act as agency-like bodies to decide what gets made and what doesn’t. It quite literally is: power to the people.