Unsigned Artists Make More Money With Music NFTs Than Spotify

A significant amount of unsigned artists have actually leveraged music NFTs to sustain on their own terms. What if one day, every music artist can make a living without depending on major record labels?

Unsigned Artists are earning more with music NFTs

Take Iman Europe for example, an unsigned singer-songwriter from L.A., California who made 22.2 ETH (almost $60,000) by selling 5 singles and a music video as NFTs. In comparison, she only made roughly $300 a month from streaming on multiple platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

To be clear, Iman already has 4 million listeners across these platforms. However, streaming platforms mostly distribute huge cuts of the revenue back to record labels and distributors. Only a small percentage goes to independent artists. Additionally, according to FreeYourMusic, it takes over 200,000 streams for an artist to make $1000 in Spotify. If this trend continues, more independent artists will embrace music NFT for sure.

In fact, with NFT technology, artists can also easily bypass middlemen in the music industry for funding. This is successfully demonstrated by Daniel Allan, who crowdfunded the costs to making his extended play, Overstimulated, back in Oct 2021. He raised a total of 50 ETH (about $140,000 at the time) through Mirror.xyz. In exchange, backers get to enjoy 50% of Overstimulated’s master royalties.

Is music NFTs the way forward for independent artists? 

For now, it seems so. Delphi Digital recently reported that artists’ popularity on Spotify doesn’t really affect NFT sales on Catalog. From the chart below, sales tend to revolve around 1 ETH regardless of artists’ Spotify streams. This shows that collectors are willing to support less-established artists in Web 3.0.

Given that music NFTs have transformed the lives of independent artists, it is just a matter of time before they reach mass adoption. To learn more about quality indie artists and their works, you can always start with marketplaces such as Sound, Royal, Decent, and Catalog.