On the other hand: Even if you think the idea of Jay-Z selling five-second beatbox videos for millions of dollars and high-fiving Jack Dorsey is pretty awesome, none of this requires a $300 million deal to buy Jay-Z’s company. The most optimistic version of the NFT story is that it allows artists (or anyone) to capture more of the value of the stuff they create than selling it through middlemen, like record labels or streaming services. It’s also currently not available at all, due to the pandemic. It certainly allows musicians - famous ones as well as ones you’ve never heard of - a chance to make money in an industry that currently offers them few options: Streaming music generally only pays out for enormously successful acts, and touring is hard work in the best of times.
Grimes sold $6 million worth of digital art as NFTs /rJ8gsYEdU1Īs long as you’re okay with the purely speculative hype around these kinds of sales and stories - and the understanding that some investors, including people who don’t fully understand what they’re doing, are going to make a lot of money, and some will get burned badly (see: GameStop, and also Cryptokitties, an early NFT gambit/gimmick that was kind of hot in 2018 and then cooled off but may be hot again) - then this all seems … okay? Maybe … good? If they get it out fast enough - while NFT mania booms - it’s easy to imagine many more headlines like these, except you’ll replace “Grimes” with “Beyonce” or whomever:
So you can picture the Jay-Zs of the world selling songs, or snippets of songs, or the digital version of a lyric scribbled on a napkin, as NFTs, in deals that let Square and the artist get part of the deal. Even if none of this makes sense to you, you may have heard about people paying real money - a lot of money - for digital ephemera like cartoon cat GIFs or animated trading cards of NBA players dunking or blocking. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are blockchain-enabled digital pieces of … anything that investors and speculators and collectors are hoovering up at a crazy rate. More intriguingly, given Dorsey’s love of All Things Blockchain, and the current mania over NFTs, it won’t be surprising to see Square + Tidal work on their own NFT scheme. It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with Square + Tidal rollouts in the future: A Square-enabled way for artists to sell T-shirts on tour, or even when they’re not on tour, for instance. He’ll now help lead our entire company, including Seller and the Cash App, as soon as the deal closes. I knew TIDAL was something special as soon as I experienced it, and I’m inspired to work with him. I’m grateful for Jay’s vision, wisdom, and leadership.
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