The upcoming Muse NFT album will be the latest chart-eligible album format since 2015. Prior to this album concept, the last format to be accepted by international charts was album streams. Nonfungible token (NFT) albums are now eligible for both United Kingdom and Australian charts.
‘Will of the People’ is the British rock band’s 9th studio album and will be released on August 26th. It will be the flagship “Digital Pressing” album from the Web3 marketplace Serenade.
Serenade created digital pressings as a “brand new, limited edition and collectible” music format released via non-fungible token technology. The marketplace is using this new format to cater to community connectivity and product scarcity.
Max Shand, the CEO and founder of Serenade, told Cointelegraph, “Digital pressings allow the music industry to easily slot NFTs into existing workflows and creative processes without having to fund new projects or design new ways of working. If you want to innovate in the music industry, innovate around the album cycle because this is how the industry operates.”
The marketplace cooperated with the Brit Awards, an annual U.K. pop music award show, in February of this year by hosting their NFT collection, which sold for £10 each.
Certainly, this is not the first instance of NFT involvement in the music industry or with chart-topping musicians. So what makes this so groundbreaking?
In the past, NFTs have often been bundled into album releases or other types of music-related campaigns. Until now, there has not been a release of an entire album as an NFT. NFT albums as a chart format existed prior to this launch, though the Muse album will be the first to fall under such standards.
More specifically, the Digital Pressing format introduced by Serenade offers a new standard of royalty management. In the official press release Serenade highlighted that, “living on the blockchain and offering web3 capabilities such as verifiable ownership and the ability to trade on secondary markets, a Digital Pressing will also accrue accurate, perpetual royalties for artists, copyright holders and content owners.”
Related: Ticketmaster scouts productization of enterprise NFTs beyond ticketing
Many in the music industry insiders see this as another step toward the “future of music”.
While this may be a new first for international music industry charts, it is no surprise it will be introduced by Muse. The band was one of the initial major artists in the industry to utilize NFTs in their creative outputs.
In fact, the lead singer of Muse, Matt Bellamy, dropped a solo track as an NFT earlier this month. In September 2020 the band collaborated with the infamous CryptoKitties project, and later in July 2021, the brand released its own NFT collection on Nifty Gateway.
Shand told Cointelegraph that working with Muse for this release was a no-brainer, “Muse was an obvious choice to be the first artist to offer fans a digital pressing, as they’re innovative and have a die-hard audience of completist fans who have always displayed an appetite to collect great merchandise from the band.”
