“Party Like It’s 1999,” sang Prince Rogers Nelson, because on June 1, 1999, a new computer software service would forever change how music was distributed, consumed, and even written. Napster was a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that quickly gained popularity among music fans—since its launch in May 1999, it had gathered over 20 million users by March 2000—looking for a way to share and download music online for free. The cataloging software, created by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, searched your computer’s hard drive, listed all the MP3 music files contained in it, and allowed anyone else using the service to share and play those files.

Napster’s popularity was short-lived as its ultimate demise resulted from its legal troubles stemming from cybercrime: file sharing and piracy. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the company’s computer software facilitated copyright infringement and filed a lawsuit against Napster. Napster was ultimately shut down in 2001. Nevertheless, Napster’s technology had a profound impact on the music industry by paving the way for other P2P file-sharing services, which helped to popularize the idea of downloading music online, which gave rise to the concept of the first virtual currency for peer-to-peer systems: Karma. Karma was introduced in 2003 as a way to pay for P2P file-sharing services.

Magic internet money—Karma

The co-founder of the first internet money—way ahead of Bitcoin (BTC)—was a virtual currency called Karma, designed by Dr. Emin Gun Sirer, who is also the founder and CEO of Ava Labs. Dr. Sirer explained that the emergence of the internet and, subsequently, the World Wide Web marked a pivotal shift from isolated, local computing to global-scale computing:

“Architecturally, we transitioned from standalone computers to a ‘client-server architecture,’ which enabled us to connect to remote services operated by others to leverage their programs and capabilities. This new paradigm gave rise to digital services that catered to the entire world, created millions of jobs, and solidified the U.S.’s position as a global economic leader.”

Dr. Sirer added, “I built a system called Karma for ensuring that people who participate in peer-to-peer file sharing networks don’t just leech. They don’t just take resources from the network, but they also donate resources. So everybody was downloading files, nobody was putting up files for upload. And so my solution to this was, what if there was some magic Internet money that nobody controlled that you needed to use to download files? And if you ran out of it, then that would put an end to your leeching ways and you would now put up some files to get your Karma back.”

Ava Labs is a software company founded in 2018 that is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, whose mission is to tokenize the world’s assets on the Avalanche public blockchain and other blockchain ecosystems. This includes tokenizing the music industry with music NFTs.

Music NFTs

Dr. Sirer explains that blockchains represent the next phase in the evolution of networked computer systems by facilitating many-to-many communication over a shared ledger. This allows multiple computers to collaborate, achieve consensus, act in unison, and build shared services in the network. In turn, this enables the development of unique, secure tokenized assets, such as music NFTs, among many other innovative applications.

By harnessing the power of blockchain technology, which records the copyrights to ownership of the music that cannot be changed, the Avaissance program music NFTs give musicians a new universe of creative and financial options. They expand the range of music they can make by allowing them to sell music NFTs directly to fans via an NFT marketplace. Dr. Sirer points out that there are different types of tokens.

A real-world asset

A token can be the direct or indirect representation of a traditional asset. For example, numerous musicians are currently publishing complete songs and albums as music NFTs or selling their fans NFT concert tickets. While music NFTs offer exciting opportunities for artists, they raise copyright and intellectual property concerns. When artists tokenize their music, they must ensure they have the right to do so. Smart contracts, a key component of music NFTs, automate the payment of royalties to creators each time their tokenized music is resold. This feature is a game-changer in an industry where musicians often lose out on resale profits. Smart contracts simplify the process of compensating musicians, but it also raises questions about how different types of music royalties should be calculated and distributed fairly.

A virtual item

A token can represent a piece of digital art, including a musician’s album cover, poster, and show photographs; a collectible in the form of a musician’s autograph; a gaming skin; videos of virtual concerts or tracks; virtual artist meet and greet experiences; and more. These digital assets can be tokenized into music NFTs to be traded for a profit. These can be varied in function and form as well. They can range from simple non-programmable pictures of the musician, a common use of NFTs, to complex assets, some used in virtual concerts, that can encode all sorts of functions and features of the asset directly inside the asset itself.

Pay-for-use

Public blockchains constitute shared computing resources that must be allocated efficiently. A token is the perfect mechanism to meter resource consumption and prioritize important activities. Such tokens are sometimes known as “gas tokens.” For example, BTC is the gas token of the Bitcoin blockchain, ETH for Ethereum, AVAX for Avalanche, and so on. Without gas or transaction costs, a single user or small group of users could potentially overwhelm the blockchain, similar to a denial of service attack, making the blockchain unusable.

Musical entertainment in the metaverse

Sebastien Borget, COO and co-founder of The Sandbox, a culture and entertainment platform based on the Ethereum network, explained that he established a new web3 arena for musical entertainment in the metaverse called ShowCity that is home to The Voice and other TV shows. ShowCity is also home to music industry heavyweights such as Snoop Dog, Steve Aoki, Chainsmokers, and Warner Music Group—the first major music firm to enter into the metaverse with its top recording artists like Bruno Mars, Twenty-One Pilots, Ed Sheeran, Madonna, Metallica to hold virtual concerts and other musical experiences.

ShowCity offers musicians exclusive digital and physical perks—such as tickets to live tapings of The Voice—if they purchase a LAND in ShowCity in exchange for The Sandbox (SAND), which was deemed a security by the US Securities and Exchange Commission last year.

Musicians create avatars, digital versions of themselves, to hold virtual concerts, selling millions of dollars in tickets and NFT merchandise. All items acquired in The Sandbox are 100% owned by the musicians themselves, creating revenue opportunities.

Sebastien Borget indicated that ShowCity brings the open metaverse one step forward in the direction of sustainable fan-owned and community-driven musical entertainment initiatives with its partnerships with non-profit foundations supporting social, environmental, and climate causes.

Potential legal challenges to the tokenization of music

As musicians are turning to tokenization of their music, holding metaverse concerts, issuing collectible NFTs, and collectors are investing in music NFTs, they should bear in mind that the tokenization of the music industry comes with potential legal challenges and financial quagmires. These include issues concerning copyright, taxation, security classification of gas tokens, AML concerns for metaverse land sales, sanctions compliance, artist royalty, environmental footprint challenges to music NFT and metaverse platforms, and other matters that could complicate the music NFT landscape.

Jonathan Cutler, senior manager at Washington National Tax, Deloitte Tax LLP, said that,

“The final digital asset reporting regulations, published at the end of June, keep NFTs in scope for Form 1099-DA reporting. The rules include a reporting threshold of $600 for sales of ‘specified’ NFTs—NFTs that are indivisible, unique, and do not reference certain excluded property. Where sales exceed $600, a digital asset broker may report the NFT sales on a single Form 1099-DA for the year rather than separate forms for each sale. These regulations make no comment on treatment of certain NFTs as collectibles for tax purposes. The April draft Form 1099-DA, which is pending redraft for the final rules, also included no reference to collectibles.”