Describing Major Music NFT Platforms as Music Products — Part 2: Royal.io

A breakdown of what the recent Diplo Music NFT offering (via Music NFT Platform Royal.io) means for those who own it or want to buy it

musicdatapro
23 min readMay 17, 2022

Introduction

I explore many topics here on my Music Data Pro Medium (blog) but I tend to focus in on the areas of streaming statistics and music metadata under the larger umbrella of music marketing. I did not feel much of a need to explore Music NFTs on this blog, because the topic is so hot and so many people are already writing about them. It’s almost if it’s the only topic of conversation in the music business right now, along with the metaverse.

While I write about more niche music industry trends — for example, I recently explored how DJ mixes are appearing on music streaming services —I can’t ignore building my knowledge base with regards to Music NFTs. In doing that, I kept finding that an explanation of the specific music product offering attached to the Music NFTs was often not very clear, at least to me.

I noticed the lack of clarity just as a few major Music NFT platforms rose in popularity towards the end of 2021 ; this group includes such platforms as Sound, Catalog, RCRDSHP, One Of, and Royal.io.

While I did not intend to cover Music NFTs for Music Data Pro, I felt I could add value to conversation by describing what these platforms offer in consumer and music industry terms. In part 1 of my Music NFT series, I explored trying to figure out how to group and classify Music NFTs offered by the major platforms:

Instead of trying to group Music NFT offerings which are rapidly evolving and diversifying, I think it’s better to evaluate several of the major Music NFT platforms separate of each other, and align the Music NFTs they offer with music industry concepts, consumer products, and concepts of fandom. I’m starting here in Part 2 of “Describing Major Music NFT Platforms as Music Products” with Royal.io, a Music NFT platform which launched in 2021.

Posts in my series on Music NFTs are pretty exhaustive, so for those who have a TL/DR mindset, I have added a bullet point summary of Royal.io’s Music NFT platform at the end of this post, specifically focused on the Music NFT they released with major super producer Diplo.

Royal.io: No, you don’t “own a piece” of the song with their Music NFT offerings

The Diplo Music NFT as presented by Royal.io in late March 2022, made me realize the product terminology used by the major Music NFT platforms does not always align with music industry.

Buyers of music producer Diplo’s Music NFT were sharing on Twitter that they “bought a piece” of his song “Don’t Forget My Love” at the time of the release of his Music NFT. Music NFT releases are known as “drops”.

With the language “I bought a piece of a song” shared in a Tweet, a music business professional may believe that the Diplo NFT offered buyers a fractional share of ownership in either the license to the master audio of the recorded song, or a fractional share of the song’s composition (music publishing). However, this Diplo Music NFT offers a buyer NO share of those components of the song.

The social share for Twitter auto generated for buyers of the Diplo NFT via Royal.io

Granted, Twitter only allows for so many characters and that’s why the social share says “piece of a X song” versus the language on Royal.io website, which is more clear and reads:

Royal tokens give you partial ownership of a song’s streaming royalty rights, plus access to exclusive content and other benefits.

What portion of streaming revenues go to a Diplo Music NFT holder?

The language Royal uses here is broad and not specific to what portion of “streaming royalty rights” exactly a buyer would get. A song stream on a DSP (aka music streaming service such as Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Deezer etc) generates mechanical and performance royalties, plus a flat rate paid out each time a listener streams the song for more than thirty seconds.

I dislike the word “royalty” when it comes to the flat rate paid out for a stream (usually a very small one one hundredth of a U.S. cent), because that word can confuse that income with the royalties paid for the use of the composition and master audio, which are known as performance and mechanical royalties. Songtrust does a great job in the following graph (from their blog post “How Spotify Streams Turn Into Revenues”) of defining the revenue that comes from music streaming. I took their graph and I added where the Royal Music NFT revenue comes from.

A stream generates performance, mechanical and recording royalties. The Royal.io Music NFTs only draw income from the recording royalties generated per stream by each DSP.

A closer view of what part of music streaming is generating the Royal.io Music NFT revenue stream.

Music producer / artist 3LAU and founder of Royal.io agreed with me that maybe some clarification is needed regarding how their Music NFTs generate income.

Trying to get clarity on what kind of “streaming royalties” Royal.io offers — it’s a very small portion of the revenue generated by streaming of the master audio of the song

I understand Royal.io’s model. As a fan I like the idea of being able to invest in an artist’s success, display my fandom through owning the Music NFT, and generate revenue from streaming of a specific song.

2,110 Music NFTs related to Diplo’s “Don’t Forget My Love” song were sold upon launch of the offering, across three product tiers, Gold (2000 available at $99), Platinum (100 at $999), and Diamond (10 at $9999).

Royal.io calls these Music NFT’s “Limited Digital Assets” or LDAs but I am not sure that means anything relatable to other Music NFT products. They are tokens that offer you the right to a percentage of streaming revenue from a specific song if you are holding them at the time the artist decides to payout. These tokens can also be resold at any time to another buyer. There is also digital fan club access is bundled with the three Music NFT product tiers, with Diamond NFT holders receiving one guest list pass to a Diplo concert once a year. These benefits seem very small and are just add ons to the main Music NFT product.

Royal.io’s Diplo page says roughly $400,000 was generated in sales from the “Don’t Forget My Love” song Music NFT. It is unclear what percentage of that $400K Royal.io takes. Diplo is not an emerging artist, and is of course a superstar and a major income earner. As a fan, I would not be too concerned about delivering a Diplo a payday off of buying one of his Music NFTs — I know he’s got quite the income.

Instead, I wonder if buyers of the Diplo Music NFT would repeatedly be streaming the song that generates revenues into their NFT. I think that’s a strong possibility.

The Royal.io Music NFT model could tilt streaming service algorithms to favor tracks where there is a strong audience interest in their success, because of revenue bearing Music NFT ownership related to those tracks.

Music NFT Contracts

If a musical artist proposes to sell “a part of a song” as part of their Music NFT offering, it follows that there should be some legal contract in place, as they are selling intellectual property. Water & Music (aka W&M), the music industry research collective, put together a general NFT legal contract builder for those who would like to offer an NFT to a buyer.

The W&M Contract Builder can not yet handle commercial uses of Music NFTs, such as the case where a Music NFT generates a recording royalty that is to be paid out during a specific period, as Royal.io’s Music NFTs are set up to do. Here’s what the Contract Builder will tell someone who tries to make a contract for a Music NFT where a buyer would actually “own a piece of a song”.

The Water & Music Music NFT Contract is very useful, but for non-commercial uses of Music NFTs

I believe any buyer contract related to a Music NFT should come with a separate document / buyers guide which steps you through the legalese of the contract, in order to clearly explain to a buyer what they really are entitled to as a Music NFT holder.

The Royal Music NFT contract

On that note of the need for legal explainers / terminology sheets, I poured over the Royal.io Music NFT contract, which follows.

Royal.io Diplo Music NFT contract

While of course I’m not a lawyer, I did my best to translate the contract for potential buyers and NFT holders. After my review, it is my take that a few important details about the Music NFT offering seem to be missing in the Royal.io Music NFT contract.

First, the streaming revenue related to the song — what the contract is calling “streaming royalties” — there is no definition of which specific music streaming services would be generating this income. Would Royal leave out income made by views of the song’s official music video on YouTube? Is SoundCloud revenue excluded but Spotify revenue included? What countries (territories) are covered in the collection?

“Streaming Royalties” generated by the master audio is a catch all term. The contract does say that Royal will take the share from the music distributor gathering streaming royalties, with the distribution company being selected by the artist. Music distributors take their own % of the streaming revenue, usually 15% of streaming revenues. Some record labels have direct delivery partnerships with the major music streaming services (aka DSPs), and completely forgo a distributor. Clarity on what party is delivering the streaming revenues and what % is taken by this party before the remaining revenues would be delivered to Music NFT holders would be nice to know, but in my opinion the absence of that information is not a deal breaker.

Often record deals with artists require streaming revenue be applied first to the costs the artist and label have incurred in terms of recording and marketing their releases. There’s no transparency regarding what other parties, like record labels and music distributors, may be getting the streaming revenue first before payouts can occur and to what % extent of that pool those parties get in the future.

Royal says 80% of the streaming revenue from the song will go to Diplo, so maybe record labels and distributors are paid out of that 80% pool.

The remaining 20% will be split across the 2,110 Music NFT holders, and not evenly, but dependent on what level of Music NFT they are holding.

The three levels of Music NFT related to Diplo’s song “Don’t Forget My Love”

Royal.io calls the three NFT tiers’ specific revenue payout percentages from streaming “% ownership per token”. But again, Music NFT holders aren’t owning anything they only are receiving a percentage of streaming revenue collected over a non-disclosed period, without a pre-determined payout date.

Second, the Music NFT contract does not include or refer to the specific ISRC code associated with the master audio that will generate streaming revenue. The Royal contract associated with Diplo’s “Don’t Forget My Love” NFT only refers to the title of the song and not the ISRC code. An ISRC code is a unique 12 character code that refers to a unique piece of audio that is a specific recording of a song that a listener would stream.

There are several remix versions of the Diplo song and it is clear to me, those are not what Royal is referring to in the contract. However there are various versions of the original Diplo song — including an “Extended” mix available on Beatport . I imagine that version is being excluded from streaming revenue, but Beatport does have a streaming service now.

The correct ISRC code for the single version of the “Don’t Forget My Love” song, which clocks in at 3 minutes and 19 seconds, is USZ4V2200009. There are “mixed” versions of the Diplo song that are included in DJ mixes on streaming services and because those versions have audio that varies slightly from the original, they are assigned their own ISRC. For instance, the ISRC USA2P2207223 refers to a version of “Don’t Forget My Love” that appears on a DJ mix on Apple Music.

The various versions of the “original mix” of Diplo’s “Don’t Forget My Love” appear in DJ mixes. Streams of the songs within DJ mixes would likely be excluded from streaming revenue, as they have a different ISRC code than the original unmixed song.

It would be incredibly useful to a buyer to know what specific piece of master audio is generating the streaming revenues associated with the contract. This could be easily documented if the contract had ISRC (or ISRCs) attached to the song title mentioned.

The contract notes that the Music NFT buyer waives any right to audit Royal or the artist so an NFT holder will never know if they are really getting their .004% (Gold NFT level) to .7% share (Diamond NFT Level) of streaming revenue. The buyer will have to trust Royal and the artist, which I guess for sake of not making this too legally complicated is ok. Yet if they say it’s X revenue and it’s really Y revenue there’s no way to keep track since they did not attach your NFT purchase to an ISRC to demonstrate what song revenue they are specifically tracking. An ISRC is also the code a streaming service uses to keep track of streaming revenue associated with a specific version of a song: “How many streams of X track carrying the specific ISRC code”.

Third, in the contract there is no mention of when the revenues from streaming would be paid out to the Royal NFT holder. Furthermore, there is no defined period “From date X to date Y” to define when the distributor is tallying up streaming revenues.

It feels weird to me that there is no mention of the payout schedule in the contract. The FAQ on the Royal.io site says “The time to payout will vary depending on the artist.”

There’s an incentive to hold on to this Music NFT until a payout occurs. Which leads me to this question: Will everyone want to sell their Diplo Music NFT after the first payout? Or will the NFT increase in value as a payout date approaches?

Estimating the Diplo Music NFT payout amounts

Speaking of that first payout, let’s do some fuzzy math to see where the payout would be today because at the time of writing this post (initial draft, late April 2022) the song has been streamed over 20 million times on Spotify alone since it’s early February 2022 release. On Youtube, the music video and audio have generated a smaller 3.5 million views (which can also be counted as listens / streams) as of April 20th, 2022.

The Diplo NFT lowest tier, Gold, sold to buyers at $99 US dollars, offers each holder a .004% share of streaming revenue associated with the title “Don’t Forget My Love”. Spotify pays out $.003 USD per stream. At 20 million streams on Spotify as of late April, that’s $60,000 in streaming revenue.

.004% of $60,000 is $2.40. Per stream payout rates vary wildly per music service but let’s say all services are equal in payout for sake of this estimation. With Spotify holding 30% market share of (paid subscription) streaming services that $2.40 generated is 30% of $8 total from all streaming services. So we can estimate a Diplo “Don’t Forget My Love” Gold Music NFT holder will be paid $8 from streaming revenue generated between it’s February release through mid to late April 2022.

The Diplo NFT highest tier, Diamond, sold for $9,999, offers a .7% of share of streaming revenue from the song. .7% of $60,000 is $420. If we make the same assumptions about Spotify’s share of streaming market and do some fuzzy math, let’s say the total streaming revenue generated by the Diplo “Don’t Forget My Love” Diamond Music NFT is $1400 for this February to late April period. If a holder of this NFT were to be paid out in late April 2022, they have already covered 14% of their purchase cost.

How long would it take for streaming revenue to equal the original Music NFT Purchase price?

Will “Don’t Forget My Love” make another 20 million streams over the following months, by June 2022? It peaked at #4 on February 26th on Billboard’s top Dance Electronic streaming and sales chart. It’s hard to predict how the song will do over the long term but it’s not currently on Billboard’s Hot 200 singles chart. It is appearing at #9 on Billboard’s Hot Dance / Electronic chart for the week of April 23rd, 2022. It may take another year, or two, to get to a $1400 payout for a Diplo Diamond Music NFT holder, or a $8 payout for a Gold Music NFT holder.

Note: In the three and half weeks since I originally drafted this post and returned to it to edit, “Don’t Forget My Love” gained an additional 5 million streams on Spotify, so now it’s at 25 million streams. So it’s totally plausible that in 4 more months, another 20 million streams could be gained, and those same payouts could come for holders. I estimate a Diamond Music NFT holder would see enough streaming revenue to pay off the initial purchase price of $10,000 after 140 million Spotify streams of the Diplo song. (Again I’m using the Spotify streaming # to estimate how the song financially performed on all streaming services in total, with Spotify being 30% of the music subscription market).

Will the velocity of streaming of Diplo’s “Don’t Forget My Love” continue, where there are 5 million new Spotify streams of the song each month to get the streaming number to 140 million streams? If the velocity of streaming continues at the same speed, then it would take 7 months for the Diamond Music NFTs to pay out the same amount of revenue equal to their initial price.

The timing of streaming revenue payouts is important to understand in relation to when a Royal NFT holder would want to sell it

When I say timing on payouts is crucial, for example, I can’t imagine a new buyer wanting the Diplo Diamond Music NFT after the current owner just got a $1400 payout. (I’m hypothetically saying that there was a payout recently, and that would be the amount for late April 2022).

The value of the Diplo Music NFT may fall after a payout. Conversely, it may follow that the value of a Diplo Music NFT may rise in advance of a promised payout date.

The resale market for Diplo’s Music NFT: Limited availability and some wild pricing

The Royal.io Music NFTs are available for resale and can be purchased on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. This is important for fans who may have missed the initial “drop” (release) and want to hold the Music NFT of their favorite artist, Diplo.

While the Royal.io Music NFTs can be purchased at a fixed price with a credit card upon the initial offering (drop), to buy one on the secondary market a buyer will need to use cryptocurrencies to purchase them. And the seller will be paid in cryptocurrency and it will be up to them to handle any fees in exchanging their payout back to $ US dollars.

There were about 65 of the Diplo “Don’t Forget My Love” Music NFTs available for resale as of early May, or only 3% of the 2110 total initially sold across the three tiers, Gold, Platinum and Diamond. It is a pretty strong indicator that buyers feel good about owning and holding the Diplo Music NFT, either for clout’s sake, or their feeling the NFT will pay out strong streaming revenues, or that the price of the Music NFT will go up over time.

1 of the only 10 total Diplo Diamond Music NFTs that exist was resold in late March 2022 for 3.3 ETH Ethereum crypto. At the time of the sale, that equaled roughly $9670 dollars, about $300 below the initial sale price of $9999. The price of Ethereum crypto to the dollar wavers so the Music NFTs can fluctuate in price when tied to a crypto currency. Another reason to hold Music NFTs is the idea that as crypto currency values rise, the NFTs rise in price. Though crypto currencies have been falling in value as compared to US dollar while I have been writing and editing this post. And a Music NFT could always be repriced by its reseller at anytime so that they can make up for the lost crypto value.

The Diplo Music NFT which dropped at the end of March for $9999 was worth about 2.9 ETH at the time. On April 24th, 2.9 ETH would only be worth $8472 due to the recent decline in ETH value over time.

Some Diplo Gold NFT holders are already listing their NFTs for resale at ten times the initial purchase price of $99. I found this one holder EF3170 listing theirs at .4 ETH which was roughly $1100 in US dollars on April 25th, 2022.

The OpenSea user E3170 was selling their Diplo Gold NFT for TEN TIMES the initial price of the offering. They then slashed the price in half, and eventually pulled their NFT from resale on the OpenSea marketplace.

I’m not sure why a secondary Music NFT buyer would want to purchase a NFT worth 10 times it’s initial value. Maybe the reseller figures the name value associated with Diplo will be enough to attract a buyer. There are 2,000 of the Diplo Gold level Music NFTs (again originally sold at $99) and at the time of writing (May 10, 2022) only 60 are available for resale on OpenSea.

In early May 2022, about 30 of these Diplo Gold Music NFTs available for resale (out of the 2000 originally offered) were reasonably priced at about $120 or .05 ETH. According to my fuzzy math, a holder of this NFT would be generating about $8 in streaming revenue for every 20 million Spotify streams. It would take about 300 million Spotify streams of the song to make up the $120 purchase price, and the buyer would have to hold the NFT through the entire period of 300 million streams to recognize the streaming revenue. Again it’s unclear as to when Royal.io will pay out streaming revenue to an NFT holder.

Another 10 available Diplo Gold NFTs were recently priced at .1 ETH on OpenSea, which is just more than double the value of the original sale price.

There were 5 Gold NFTs priced at over .5 ETH on OpenSea recently which is 10 times the original offering price, valued at about $1200! I’m not sure why a buyer would overpay 10 times when 30 of the exact same Music NFT product were available at $120. Someone please give me the rationale!

It gets crazier!!! OpenSea user tom49coffee listed his Diplo Gold NFT of “Don’t Forget My Love” at 3.7 ETH or $8727 at the current ETH to US dollar exchange rate as of May 10th. That’s 87 times the original sale value of the NFT. And again you can still buy this same exact NFT for about $120 or only 0.20 times the original sale value.

Why has OpenSea user tom49coffee listed a $99 Music NFT at almost $9000 ?!
Dances makes some great points about the Diplo Royal.io NFT and why there will be a secondary market for them

Issues with listing and pricing Royal Music NFTs for resale

A Diplo Music NFT holder who wants to resell their NFT on OpenSea will pay a service fee of 2.5% of the listing price they choose to offer it for on the marketplace. Meanwhile, according to the Royal.io contract, Diplo will take 7.5% of the resale price once the Music NFT is sold to a new buyer. This is what OpenSea calls the “Creator Fee”. Therefore, Diplo will continue to generate revenue beyond the initial $400,000 earned in the primary sale of the Music NFTs.

Meanwhile, the reseller needs to consider these service and creator fees and price them into their Music NFT offer price to extract the right value they would like from a sale. And there are potentially more fees to consider with the resale of the Royal Music NFTs.

I mentioned earlier that Ethereum coin has been falling in value as compared to the US dollar, with a dramatic drop in late April into early mid May 2022. A Diplo Music NFT priced at .1 ETH for resale in April would have been worth $350 and by mid May, $200. Someone listing their Diplo Music NFT can reprice their listing to reflect this slump in the value of ETH. In this case they could reprice the NFT from .1 ETH to .175 ETH to keep the original dollar value the same as the original list price, $350. Unfortunately, with the Royal.io NFT’s (including the Diplo NFT) there is no way to lower the resale price without cancelling the listing, and then re-listing it again at a lower price as OpenSea considers the Royal.io NFT’s as fixed price items and has special rules around listing these items.

Cancelling the listing incurs a fee for the reseller. Honestly, I had to spend a more than 15 minutes reading through OpenSea’s FAQ on selling and buying pages to understand where all the potential fees could be incurred in transferring a Royal.io Music NFT from a holder (reseller) to a new buyer.

Education for buyers evaluating Royal.io NFTs off platform, on the secondary market, is somewhat lacking

Since the Diplo NFT Royal sold out across all three tiers after it’s March 2022 drop, today the web page for this NFT drop on Royal’s website links interested buyers to the resale market on OpenSea where a small number of these Diplo Music NFTs are listed for resale, some at the extraordinary prices I displayed earlier.

Royal.io’s website points buyers of sold Music NFT drops directly to the secondary market at OpenSea

I feel that since Royal’s Diplo webpage takes interested buyers to OpenSea where users have listed their NFTs at various resale prices attached to Ethereum coin, there should be education on Royal’s page about how to buy the Diplo NFT on the secondary market. Education could include how to evaluate how various OpenSea users have priced their Music NFTs. For example, an instruction that says “look for the Gold NFT that has the lowest price”.

Consider also that Royal’s website has a detailed “How Can I Sell My Token” support page replete with thorough instructions, but does not have education about “How Can I Buy Royal Music NFTs on the Secondary Market” other than just a link to OpenSea, without offering any best practices or specific instructions.

Meanwhile, Royal.io co-founder Naithan Jones eschews mentioning crypto on the Royal website completely. Yet in order to buy a Royal Music NFT on the secondary market or resell it, yes, you will need to be (well) educated about crypto.

I’m not sure this is a good thing!

Skipping over “web3”, “crypto” and “NFT” when these are key components to access the Royal.io Music NFT offerings makes absolutely no sense to me. And I find the lack of education about OpenSea and how it relates to Royal.io to be problematic.

The few web3 platforms I have interacted with, and the related NFT offerings I have gotten involved with, honestly have been painful experiences as I try to navigate crypto wallets, fees, and the various currencies that are certainly NOT easily interchangeable.

The more education on these topics a Music NFT platform can offer, the better as more consumers and music fans begin to show interest in the offerings. And I also believe Royal.io can do more on the front of educating buyers on music industry concepts such as “ownership of a song” as that term does not actually align with the Royal Music NFT offering ; the Royal Music NFT holders in fact do not hold “any portion of a song” which would infer they held the license to the master audio or a portion of the composition.

I chose to evaluate Royal.io’s streaming revenue bearing Music NFT offerings because they are noted as one of the top 5 Music NFT platforms, and have major artists like Diplo, which obviously creates a wider interest in the NFT from a larger pool of music fans. There are other Music NFT platforms that offer buyers a portion of streaming revenues related to specific songs, and the product offerings and business models continue to evolve around this “streaming revenue” category of Music NFT. For instance, the Decent platform just launched and is very similar to Royal, but their platform has particular nuances in the streaming revenue bearing NFT that actually make it very different than Royal.io.

Decent Music NFT platform uses the term “Own” just like Royal.io — I find that word to be misleading

Next in my series, I will evaluate the Music NFT platform Sound which has burgeoning music community of both musical artists and collectors. According to Coopathroopa, Music NFT specialist, Sound’s Music NFT offering falls under the category of “Editions”, but that term to me doesn’t relate to an actual music product or music business model, so I have some more research to do to align Sound to music industry concepts.

Royal.io Diplo Music NFT Summary: Major Takeaways

The Diplo Music NFT contract by Royal.io — Things to note

  • The Diplo Music NFT holders are NOT entitled to any ownership related to the Diplo song “Don’t Forget My Love”. They do not get a percentage of ownership of the song’s composition (music publishing) or overall master audio license. They instead will gain a portion of what is known as “recording royalties” (see Songtrust definition of term here) or more simply put, “streaming revenues” generated by listeners streaming the song on major streaming services, like Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music.
  • The contract does NOT mention the specific piece of audio, which could be defined using an ISRC code, that will generate these streaming revenues. This is important to note because there are several versions of the Diplo song “Don’t Forget My Love”. Will all versions of the song be generating the streaming revenue? Or is it just the main single version of the song?
  • The contract does not detail what specific streaming services would generate these revenues, or in what territories streaming revenues are being collected. Are some streaming services, like YouTube, excluded? Are streaming revenues exclusively generated in North America?
  • There is no specific time period detailed in terms of when Diplo’s music distributor would be collecting streaming revenue for holders — example — we collected streaming revenues from X date to Y date. Did the streaming revenue collection begin after the Diplo NFT drop in late March? Or when the song was released in late February? Will there ever be a close date on the collection of streaming revenue or blackout dates?
  • There is no pre-determined streaming revenue pay out date, or frequency of payouts mentioned in the contract (example, Music NFT holders will be paid out every 6 months)
  • Diplo Music NFT holders are not assured a disclosure of the streaming revenue or overall streaming statistics for the Diplo song associated with the NFT. A Music NFT holder can find publicly displayed stream counts only on YouTube, SoundCloud and Spotify for the song. However, they will not be guaranteed a report on the success of the song on streaming, nor may they audit Royal.io or Diplo for revenue information.

Streaming revenue ** Estimates ** related to the Diplo Music NFT offering:

  • Diplo Gold NFT holders (purchase price $99) would have made $8 by the end of April 2022 if all streaming revenue was tallied up from the release of the song in late February (Estimate — given roughly 20 million streams of the Diplo song attached to the Music NFT, over that period on Spotify, a pay out rate of $.003 per stream on all streaming platforms, with Spotify accounting for 30% of the music subscription market and .004% of the overall revenue generated).
  • It would take 300 million Spotify streams to generate $120 for the Diplo Gold Music NFT holders (slightly above purchase price). Given the current velocity of streaming of the Diplo song, “Don’t Forget My Love”, I estimate the song would reach that streaming number in 10–14 months from late April 2022.
  • Diplo Diamond NFT holders (purchase price $9999) would have made $1400 by the end of April 2022 (same estimation method except it’s .7% of the overall revenue generated)
  • It would take 140 million Spotify streams of the song to generate $10,000 for the Diplo Diamond NFT holders. Given the current velocity of streaming of the Diplo song, “Don’t Forget My Love”, I estimate the song would reach that streaming number in 7 months from late April 2022.

Diplo Music NFT in the secondary market

  • As of early May 2022, only 3% of the 2,110 Diplo Music NFTs were available for sale on the secondary market at NFT marketplace OpenSea — about 65 in total
  • These NFTs available for resale are priced in Ethereum coin, a crypto currency that has been experiencing wild fluctuations as of the past several months.
  • 60 of these listed for resale are Diplo Gold Music NFTs that were initially bought for $99
  • The Diplo Gold Music NFTs for resale are priced on OpenSea starting at $120 (0.2x increase in initial sale price) up to almost $9000 (90x initial sale price), yet these Gold Music NFTs are all exactly the same product and have the same value as far as generating future streaming revenues.
  • Therefore, a Diplo fan that missed out on the initial Royal.io drop of Diplo’s Music NFTs should shop very carefully on OpenSea for the lowest priced NFT in the tier they desire to buy.
  • Those selling their Diplo Music NFT will have to cover a 7.5% of sale price fee paid back to Diplo, and 2.5% sellers fee. OpenSea handles the delivery of these fees.
  • Sellers can NOT change the price of their Diplo Music NFT resale offering without de-listing the Music NFT, and re-listing at a new price, all on done on OpenSea. They will face “cancellation fees” to do the de-list the NFT. However, as Ethereum coin has been dropping in value as compared to the US dollar, it could make sense for a seller to go through this process to reprice their NFT.

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musicdatapro

Music Data Pro by Chuck Fishman: in depth about music marketing + data — specifically marketing musical artists on streaming services, streaming + radio.