NFTs for film composers, an easy to follow guide!

You have probably seen these three letters together in recent months: N F T. They stand for Non Fungible Token and define an item that cannot be exchanged for two halves of the same and still retain its value (like gold, or Bitcoins would). Think of it as a digital collectible (like a pokemon card), that doesn’t have value per-se but becomes valuable because there’s demand and it is minted in limited quantities. Also NFTs exist in the blockchain.

So, you might be wondering, what does all of this have to do with film music? Well, first of all NFTs are huge in the art community at the moment. Graphic artists such as Beeple have made 7-figures earnings from selling just one digital artwork. And on top of that NFTs allow creators to collect royalties with each subsequent sale. This gave quite a few notable personalities—Kings of Leon and Deadmau5 just to name a couple—of the music business the idea of selling their music as NFTs along with additional content.

“Brilliant”, you might say, “let’s jump on this boat then!” Wait a second, there are a few caveats. 1} minting an NFT isn’t the easiest task, especially for the technologically faint of heart; 2} it can be expensive minting one and you’ll need a specific cryptocurrency (Ethereum) to do so; and 3} there is no guarantee you’ll sell them, let alone make millions $ out of them…

So to help fellow film composers I decided to go through the whole process of making NFTs linking them to music I composed for film. In this guide I’ll document step by step and hopefully provide an useful how-to walkthrough. Without further ado I give you NFTs for film composers, an easy to follow guide!

Preparing your assets

After doing some research I have become quite confident no-one has ever sold a feature film soundtrack album as NFT yet. This made me think it is an interesting angle to use. With that in mind my next step was to figure out a way to make it a package as interesting as possible. For me this translated in 3 essential features:

Make it visually appealing

NFT collections are easy to browse in one’s wallet (more on cryptocurrency wallets later), as such their visual component seems to be one of the main selling points among buyers. Therefore I advice walking the extra mile to create an artwork that both resonates with the music you are selling while also speaking the language of the many visual artists selling NFTs out there (and the buyers by consequence). So I had little doubt about it, it needed to be an animated GIF. You could animate the album artwork even if you don’t have animation skills using one of the tons of mobile apps available for this task. I decided to walk one step further and made a digitally hand drawn version of the artwork (see it above). Before moving to the next point I’d like to stress this is not a necessary step, you could just use an unaltered picture of your album artwork if you wish to do so.

Make it news-worthy

The likelihood to sell your NFTs if proportioned to the amount of exposure you bring to them. Having a strong social following seems to be one of the main factors in those six+ figures sales involving more or less famous graphic artists. But I think this can extend even further: find a reason to bring your NFTs to the attention of the press and you could get access to many more potential buyers.

In my case I am trying to achieve the above in 2 ways

1. I am coupling accompanying of my NFTs with a strong claim: I stole the lyrics of one of the tracks! This is actually true and no one knows who I stole them from, that is until someone will buy the NFT and unlock my signed confession of theft. Try to think in contemporary conceptual art terms and come up with interesting ideas.
2. I named my NFTs “The World’s First Soundtrack Album NFTs”. After doing a research I realised no one had minted a soundtrack album NFT yet. What better way to make mine unique?! My hope is that this will also make it more appealing for buyers. Although this record is now claimed (sorry) you can come up with many “world’s first” ideas, such as first horror soundtrack album NFT, and the like.

Speaking about creating an appealing package for buyers you might also want to…

Bundle it with fresh content

My NFTs unlock many additional items, such as high definition pictures / videos of the artwork, and the album music files. I also included a 20-minutes track that I never released before and that will exclusively be available with the NFT. Giving exclusive, never before seen (or heard) content is a great way to make your NFT desirable. Make it a unique and desirable package. Think out of the box, what would your fans like to get? Is it an alternate mix of a famous cue of yours? Is it separate stems? Or maybe screening/concert tickets or a Kontakt instrument of your conception as used on your score?

Minting your NFTs

Once you have prepared all your assets comes the moment of transforming it all into a Non Fungible Token. This is where things got a bit complicated but hopefully my experience with it will make your life easier, so here we go.

Get a wallet

In order to mint an NFT you need to have some Ethereum (a cryptocurrency). This is true because NFTs ownership is secured by the Ethereum blockchain (in other words the Ethereum technology is used to keep an unquestionable tab on the token’s owner at all times). The only way to use Ethereum for any kind of purchase is by keeping them in what is intuitively called a “Wallet”.

Crypto wallets come in many shapes and variants. The main categories are

Hardware wallets

Physical devices that can hold your assets. They are considered among the most secure but are a bit on the expensive side if you are only using them for small sums in my opinion. Ledger and Trezor seem to be the most commonly used of this kind out there at the moment.

Software wallets

These need to be installed on your computer and have a strong user base. Exodus seems to be one of the most reliable.

Mobile app wallet

Mobile wallets merge the easiness of use and portability of the app experience. This is why I decided to go with this option to start with. I can always change along the way should I ever become a crypto-gazillionaire! And so I researched and found a few possible options that seemed to be up my alley. The initial contenders were MetaMask, Rainbow and Coinbase. I downloaded and installed them all. But when it came to the actual purchasing of Ethereum things became quite frustrating. Most of the wallets seemed to be incompatible with my bank account/payment cards. The whole experience was very stressful as it reminded me how new and unknown all of this is for most. After countless attempts I finally managed to buy Ethereum with the wallet that I ended up using: Coinbase. Not only was it the only one that didn’t conflict with my banking but I was also reassured by the thousands good ratings the wallet has on the App store!

Quick tip: if you are planning on minting 1 NFT I advice to get at least 100$ on your wallet to make sure you have enough funds. Worse case scenario you’ll keep a bit of funds on it if you end up spending less. Having too little funds will result in having to abort the minting halfway through and potentially waste time and money.

Choose a minting platform (and a marketplace)

When it comes to the minting and selling you’ll encounter once more many options. Some are by-invitation-only, like Foundation or SuperRare. Some other are open to all. At the end of the day they all work roughly the same, the main thing to keep in mind is that unless you bring your public to the platform it is unlikely you’ll make any sale, whichever platform your NFTs are on.

I chose Rarible for mine and found the whole experience with them enjoyable. Find a step-by-step guide minting on Rarible further down below. Keep in mind that the average cost for minting 1 NFT on Rarible (a single NFT or a multiple NFT that is, more down below) is between $50 and $100 depending on how busy the blockchain is at the time of minting. This is what is referred to as “gas price” and can be tracked thanks to dedicated browser extensions.

Additional content location

When you offer additional files with your NFTs (look for “unlockables” below) you will need to upload them on your preferred file hosting service and provide a link to download the files in the NFT itself. Since NFTs are potentially for ethernity there is a rising concern that the average cloud platforms might not withstand the test of time and are therefore not ideal. For this reason the Interplanetary File System or IPFS was created. You could host your own node (just like a server) for free, but would need to keep the machine with the node forever turned on. I did use Pinata, a service based on IPFS that is free for the first 1GB of data (more than enough for an album with artworks and additional items). However this is totally up to you, and you CAN still use dropbox/similar if you want.

Step-by-step minting on Rarible

1. Clicking on the “Create” button will get you started, but I’d advice to click on “Connect your wallet” first, as doing it at a later stage could make you loose your progress on the minting, resulting on you having to set it up from scratch (this happened to me, no biggie, but annoying).
2. The first option you’ll encounter is “Single” or “Multiple”. Make your choice depending on how rare you want your NFTs to be. For mine I did one “Single” and one “Multiple” (I made 100 available of the latter kind). The former costed me around $80, the latter $50. I suspect the price variation was solely due to gas price fluctuations.
3. On the next page you’ll be able to setup / upload the actual contents/info for your NFTs. “Upload file” is where you select the main file linked to your NFT. I choose the artworks for that but you can make it audio files or video instead.
4. Sales on Rarible are auction based but by enabling the “Instant sale price” button you would give buyers the option to get an NFT right away for a set price.
5. Enable “Unlock once purchased” and you’ll be able to include links to additional content that will unlock… you guessed it, once purchased.
6. The “Choose collection” option is still a bit obscure to me, but let me just say that choosing “Create” would incur in additional costs, so I’d advice to leave “Rarible” selected.
7. “Name” and “Description” is what prospective buyers will see on the listing page so make sure you are both clear and concise.
8. “Royalties” sets the percent you’ll receive with each subsequent sale. The average amount seems to be 10%, so that’s what I went with.
9. If you are minting NFTs of the multiple kind you’ll have the “Number of copies” option. Make it a number that you feel is keeping the NFT rare enough while making it worthwhile for you at the desired starting price.
10. The “Properties” option is… well… I have no idea; even after researching for a good 20 minutes I remain oblivious, do get in touch if you know what that is for, or just leave it empty!
11. Finally the “Create” button will start the minting process, so make sure everything is in order and mint away!

Now all that is left is clicking on the three little point beside your NFT on Rarible and click on “Change price” to set your auction starting price. Remember that you can later change this to a lower price, but not increase it. So make sure you think carefully what you’d like to make your NFTs available for before setting it up!

A couple of important notes

I do not endorse any of the mentioned services and platforms. I used these after doing some research but can’t guarantee for any of them. There is a margin of risk when navigating these uncharted waters. Keep it in mind and only proceed if you are ready to take the risk.

Furthermore I found out there is an ongoing discussion about the potentially off-the-chart environmental impact of NFTs. Judging from the contrasting information that can be found online I don’t feel 100% sure that it is the case. However, some are already researching for better, leaner NFTs that will be more environmental friendly. I’d advice to keep an eye on the topic and also not to over-mint.

Was it worth?

If you got all the way to the conclusion of this article you might be wondering, was it worth? Have you made millions selling your NFTs? The short answer is NO. This experience set me back by circa $150 and took the good part of 2 days of my life, with no sales are in sight for now. But again it’s only been a few days and things might change in the future. I will keep you updated here and on socials. However the takeaway here is the following: NFTs are still huge at the moment and could result in making easy money, however the bubble could burst eventually, and any sale depends on your reach and fan-base. Do not expect miraculous earning and only walk this path if you are prepared to burn a small sum of money.

I hope this was useful. By the way, if you would like to get your hands on The World’s First Soundtrack Album NFT, you can do so here! ?