I Was Almost Part-owner Of A Grammy Winning Artist's Song Today

The exact offer I was considering was the following: $250 for 0.0857% of the royalties earned from the song "Ultra Black" by Nas, a Grammy winning rapper and entrepreneur.

In fact, today, everybody had that same offer, granted they had an Internet connection. The buyers options were the following:

• 0.0143% ownership of the song for $50, with supply capped at 500 units.

• 0.0857% for $250, 250 units of supply.

• 2.14% for $2500, 10 units of supply.

If you do the math, that's 50% of the song's equity that Nas decided to sell to his fans.

This direct and permissionless artist-to-fan transaction could not have happened prior to NFT's.

"Units" and "NFT's" are synonymous in this case. Half of the pie of the song's royalties were sliced and Nas was offering them for sale in three different sizes. The owners of these tokens would then get the royalties deposited to their digital wallet recurrently, proportional to the wallet's token holdings.

This is an example of how scarcity can be represented in the digital world.

NFT's are just that: representations of digital scarcity. There was no proven way to do that before blockchains. The amount of possible representations of scarcity on the Internet are truly endless and I'm sure there's one project out there that none of us have even thought about.

The music industry today is dominated by record labels and distributors which take a hefty middle-men's cut and often over-influence the artist's work. Chance The Rapper, Radiohead and Prince are some examples of artists that have long struggled with this legacy business model.

So back to this essay's title: why didn't I buy the NFT?

Because just like me, 130.000 other people were also trying to log on to the site at the exact same time of the offering, causing the site's servers to crash.

The drop did not happen today because the demand was unexpectedly large!

So the drop got delayed by a week.

This says a lot about the fan's excitement in having a direct stake with their favorite artists. This time with real ownership and equity, not just merch.

Expect more disruption in the music industry these coming years.

The technology and incentives are already here.