Throwback Thursday – Remember When We All Agreed a Monkey Was the Future of Music

Throwback Thursday tends to reach for the good stuff. A classic twelve inch, a legendary warehouse, a night at Fabric when you still queued down the alley in the rain and didn’t mind. This week we are going somewhere else. We are going back to the brief, demented period when serious music industry people stood at microphones and explained, without laughing, that the future of recorded music was a picture of a monkey in a striped jumper. (we won’t post it, we are sure someone still owns it and will sue us, so we made a lovely AI version instead)

NFTs. Non-fungible tokens. JPEGs with receipts. For roughly eighteen months between early 2021 and the back end of 2022, this was the single most important topic in the entire music industry. Panel after panel. Keynote after keynote. Think piece upon think piece about the revolution, the restoration of artist agency, the end of the label industrial complex, the rise of the super fan as stakeholder. This time, we were told, it’s different.

Reader, it was not.

Let us set the scene. Beeple sells a collage at Christie’s for sixty nine million dollars in March 2021. Kings of Leon release an album as an NFT and net around two million. Grimes offloads digital illustrations for roughly five point eight million, reportedly in about twenty minutes. 3LAU bundles his back catalogue into a token drop and pulls in eleven point six million. Every manager with an artist and a press release starts asking about wallets and drops, often while pronouncing none of it correctly. The phrase “digital scarcity” is uttered at industry breakfasts by people who two weeks earlier could not have told you what Ethereum was, and who now confidently pronounce it as the saviour of the working musician.

Then the labels arrive, because of course they do. Warner Music Group, under the direction of its Web3 lead Oana Ruxandra, becomes the most enthusiastic major by a comfortable margin, piling into Dapper Labs (the NBA TopShot people), into Roblox at forty five dollars a share, into Wave, into Blockparty, into Authentic Artists, into Genies, into Splinterlands and POAPs and a company called The Sandbox, which the United States Securities and Exchange Commission would later allege was trading an unregistered security. Sony puts money into a thirty million dollar round for NFT marketplace Makersplace, which promptly mints not one but two Baby Shark collections, a sentence I am genuinely aghast to type. Universal, not to be outdone, creates a virtual band called Kingship made entirely of Bored Apes which, as of the last time anyone looked, has not released any music but did manage to shift five thousand NFT key cards. To something. For something. I am not sure anyone knows.

The celebrity roster was its own comedy. Justin Bieber paid around one point three million dollars for Bored Ape number 3001, a cartoon monkey looking utterly bored, which was fair because within two years its floor price had collapsed by well over ninety percent. Madonna bought one. Eminem, Snoop, Paris Hilton, Post Malone, Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Williams, Neymar. Snoop went so deep he turned a character into a whole brand identity. Jack Dorsey auctioned the first tweet ever sent as an NFT for two point nine million dollars. When the buyer tried to resell it a year later, the top bid came in at around two hundred and eighty dollars. Not two hundred and eighty thousand. Two hundred and eighty. The tweet, to be clear, remained visible on Twitter for anyone to read, free, without permission, for the entire duration.

And this was the part everyone kept missing. The thing you were buying existed. You could right click it. You could screenshot it. You could, in the case of the tweet, simply read it. What you owned was not the thing, but an entry in a database saying you had paid for the thing, secured by a technology that burned through enough electricity to power small nations while assuring everyone it was the saviour of creator rights. You were buying a receipt. An extremely, extravagantly overpriced receipt.

Inside electronic music specifically, the evangelism got biblical. Conference panels framed it as the end of Spotify’s stranglehold. Producers who had spent a decade railing against streaming royalty rates spent an afternoon rewriting LinkedIn bios to include “Web3,” bought ENS domains, discovered the word “community” as though it were newly minted, and began replying to strangers’ tweets with “gm.” Sound.xyz, Royal, Mint Songs, Catalog, OneOf, Async, Serenade. Every week a new platform with a manifesto, a Discord, a roadmap, and absolutely no organic audience. As David Turner argued brilliantly at the time in his Penny Fractions newsletter, the entire premise was arse about. The technology demanded a wallet before it demanded a listener. Which is, when you stop to think about it, a near perfect inversion of why anyone has ever loved a record.

The absurdities multiplied. A company called HitPiece started selling NFTs of songs without asking the artists, a move so breathtakingly cheeky the entire industry managed to find common cause against it for about a week. Limewire, the thing most of us used to download dodgy music in 1999, reanimated itself as a Web3 brand and raised ten point four million dollars in a token sale. Napster did the same, releasing a lite paper about its Web3 relaunch that read like a hostage note written by somebody’s nephew. Melania Trump sold NFTs. Logan Paul ran CryptoZoo, which turned out, according to subsequent lawsuits, to be the scam everyone had said it was at the time. A token called Pak’s The Merge fetched ninety one point eight million dollars, which remains, technically, the largest NFT sale in history, and which approximately no one outside of crypto Twitter can remember without looking it up.

Then the music stopped. Not gradually, either. TerraUSD and Luna collapsed in May 2022. Three Arrows Capital folded. FTX went spectacularly in November. By August 2022, OpenSea trading volume had fallen ninety nine percent in ninety days. The average NFT sale price, once a headline engine, collapsed into the low three figures and then, in many collections, below the price of a round at a London pub. Instagram quietly unplugged its NFT integration in early 2023. Meta did the same. Microsoft, Disney and Facebook all pulled back from the metaverse, that word rapidly becoming the single most efficient marker of a panel speaker you should no longer listen to.

And the shame. The beautiful, ripe, delicious shame. The managers and label executives who had taken to podcasts in 2021 to describe NFTs as the most significant innovation since the MP3 went terribly, suddenly, quiet. Keynote speakers stopped keynoting. Consultancies that had “Web3” in their taglines discreetly rebranded with “AI.” The word on the street became “Web2.5,” an industry retcon so transparent it deserves its own dictionary entry, meaning roughly “the bit we said was rubbish turns out to be how things should work.” Steve Aoki, who at one stage claimed he had earned more from NFTs in a single year than from a decade of his music career, stopped posting about them. Certain Bored Apes once owned by household names are now listed for less than the cost of dinner at Hakkasan. Universal’s Kingship still exists, technically, in the same way a light left on in an empty office exists.

Music tech in the 2020s so far has offered us two great projects. The first was finding new ways to sell functionless MP3s to people who could already stream the actual songs. The second is wasting colossal amounts of energy to produce cheap soundalikes that nobody asked for. Compared to the second, the first is starting to look quaint.

Was any of it useful? The honest answer is yes, a little. Ticketing experiments produced some workable ideas. A handful of artist communities formed that still exist, even if they no longer talk about their wallets in public. Pak sold a lot of receipts. But the trillion dollar promise, the end of the label, the emancipation of the artist, the creation of a true ownership economy for music fans, turned out to be what it looked like from the first day. A venture capital exit strategy dressed up in rave flyers.

Throwback Thursday, then. Pour one out. Right click save the memory. And next time someone in a hoodie tells you, with the glint of the newly converted in their eye, that this time, really, genuinely, everything is about to change forever, ask them a single question.

Can I just ‘Right Click It?’

by Damion Pell

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