The World's Largest Record Company Is Creating an NFT Super Group (bloomberg.com) 73
The world's largest music company has created a band of four virtual apes. Bloomberg reports: Universal Music, the home to top-selling musicians like Drake and Taylor Swift, is working with collector Jimmy McNelis to convert four of his NFTs into a band called Kingship. Kingship consists of four digital characters -- three bored apes and one mutant ape -- all part of an NFT collection known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The club is one of the most successful NFT stories of the past year; it gave anyone who bought one of the apes full commercial rights to use the image.
10:22PM, one of Universal's labels, has hired a team of crypto artists and animators to turn the two-dimensional apes into three-dimensional beings. The company will record music for Kingship that it releases on streaming services. The "band" will perform and participate in video games, virtual-reality applications and across the constellation of digital experiences known as the metaverse. "You can call it an NFT band, or think of them as characters," Celine Joshua, the head of 10:22, said in an interview this week. "The characters will come to life. The apes will come to life."
As technophiles coalesce around the idea of Web 3.0 -- a decentralized internet -- Joshua has jumped into the world of NFTs. That's how she met McNelis, one of the leading collectors. McNelis acquired hundreds of ape NFTs from Yuga Labs LLC, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and has a collection that he estimates is worth more than $100 million. He was an early buyer of Ethereum, a cryptocurrency. Joshua pitched him on the idea of creating a new group, and picked four characters that she thought would work as a band. That includes a golden ape, another of which just sold at Sotheby's for $3.4 million. Kingship's golden ape is valued at around $190,000 at current prices, according to offer data on OpenSea, the largest marketplace for NFTs.
10:22PM, one of Universal's labels, has hired a team of crypto artists and animators to turn the two-dimensional apes into three-dimensional beings. The company will record music for Kingship that it releases on streaming services. The "band" will perform and participate in video games, virtual-reality applications and across the constellation of digital experiences known as the metaverse. "You can call it an NFT band, or think of them as characters," Celine Joshua, the head of 10:22, said in an interview this week. "The characters will come to life. The apes will come to life."
As technophiles coalesce around the idea of Web 3.0 -- a decentralized internet -- Joshua has jumped into the world of NFTs. That's how she met McNelis, one of the leading collectors. McNelis acquired hundreds of ape NFTs from Yuga Labs LLC, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and has a collection that he estimates is worth more than $100 million. He was an early buyer of Ethereum, a cryptocurrency. Joshua pitched him on the idea of creating a new group, and picked four characters that she thought would work as a band. That includes a golden ape, another of which just sold at Sotheby's for $3.4 million. Kingship's golden ape is valued at around $190,000 at current prices, according to offer data on OpenSea, the largest marketplace for NFTs.
The music is an afterthought (Score:3)
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What's new? It's been done thousands of times already and it always works.
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That is how it has been for almost 20 years. The days of some band playing in a run-down club, and some A&R guy coming there and wanting to sign the band and make them superstars is long gone. Instead, with things like autotune, it is about getting some actors who can sing/play OK, and follow scripts.
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> and follow scripts
Music scripts or political scripts?
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"Hey hey... "
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And a lot of pop bands these days too. They don't write their own music, there are people who write pop songs and sell them to whoever wants to put a band together. Or just recycle some old ones, a lot of hits are actually cover versions of songs that were popular in one part of the world but not where the artist mainly performs.
This could be the superbowl commercial for NFT (Score:3)
Remember the superbowl commercial that burst the dot.com bubble? When people noticed that nobody gives a fuck about their online businesses and the whole thing came crashing down?
Let's ponder for a moment what happens when these "investors" (ok, some would say dupes) notice that nobody gives a fuck about their "NFT apes" band.
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You are probably right; nobody gives a fuck about any of that made up shit.
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Remember when people made up characters in comics/books/movies/tv shows/cartoons and absolutely nobody cared about them?
You are probably right; nobody gives a fuck about any of that made up shit.
Well he's right about one thing:
A lot of people have been duped into paying money to see the same old tired set of characters movie after movie after movie after movie after move...
Me, I'll just wait until they show up on netflix or similar and can watch it under my terms in the comfort of my own house.
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The main difference is probably that nobody but the companies that made these characters had any money invested in them. Kids didn't buy Scoobie-Doo lunchboxes because they saw it as an "investment", they bought it because they thought they're neat and they liked the characters.
Do you honestly want to convince me that these dupes buy those "pieces of art" because they like those apes? C'mon, if that's it, they could do what everyone does: Look at them in a browser for free.
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Yes, some stocks recovered. Most of them just dropped to 0 and stayed there.
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It was enough to make investors pull out in masses and have a whole economy crumble. If that's mild, I don't want to see what you'd consider a disaster.
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Why would NASDAQ hit zero because a couple of dot.com hype bubbles go poof? You do know that NASDAQ also lists real companies, yes?
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So what? By far not everything that is in any way related to technology or even computers in general had necessarily a lot to do with dot.com.
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> If that's mild, I don't want to see what you'd consider a disaster.
Having a senile president tank your economy really skews your perspective. Now that the US lost energy independence, inflation is kicking in and the shelves are bare... everything before it seems less dramatic than is did at the time.
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Ah yes, no thread can be complete without your political drivel.
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No response like: "that's a lie" or "here's a snopes article refuting your claim" or "you're a racist"?
When it comes to the 7 stages of grief it looks like you're coming out of anger but still between depression and acceptance. Progress is progress though, so keep up the good work.
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More indifference. I simply don't really care too much about either side of The Party, I just wish we could keep that pointless bickering out of threads that deal with more relevant things than the question which mob gang gets to fleece me.
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You're an apathetic fool who deserves to be fleeced. If you allow someone to be voted in who stops drilling and shuts down pipelines, then you deserve expensive gas. If you vote for someone that doesn't care about the economy and shuts down essential workers through mandates, then you deserve bare shelves.
You seem to be part of your own problem.
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Yeah, let's vote for the other crook next time, that's really going to improve everything.
You know, every time I watch US elections, I get reminded of that idiocy machine in Zak McCracken, where you can only switch from on to on. Oh, this crook really let us down, we'll vote the other one in next time, that's gonna show them! That's gonna send a message.
Bullshit. The only message this sends is that your dumb enough to believe that one side is actually on your side.
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Go all in and exercise your 2A rights then.
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Why? I win, no matter what crooks are in business.
You have to understand that there is always someone who wins, independent of what gang runs the streets. My problem is that I still have a conscience. I think it's wrong that people get fleeced and pillaged, no matter what they do, because they can't escape it.
But a few more of your posts and I can put that to rest, imagining that you're one of the ones that gets fleeced and pillaged.
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Boredom.
People are just bored of your incessant spam.
It is no more relevant than the swastikas, or "the beating of..." posts.
(yes, I know I am feeding a troll by responding)
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Having a senile president tank your economy really skews your perspective.
It's OK, we voted him out in November. Problem solved.
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Most companies don't last very long, internet based or not.
Plenty of very well known non-internet based companies have failed in the last 20 years as well including:
Circuit City (1949-2009)
Blockbuster (1985 – 2010)
Polaroid (1937 – 2001)
Toys R Us (1948 – 2017)
Borders (1971 – 2011)
TOWER RECORDS (1960 – 2004)
GENERAL MOTORS (1908 – 2009)
KODAK (1889-2012)
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You will notice that few of them are like the dot.com boom-bust companies who often had a tradition since 1900 (that's 7pm for you Americans). The lowest tenure I find in your list is a company that lasted 25 years, in the dot.com hype we had companies fold that had a lifespan of about that many days that were valued at billions over night, only to be valued at 0 a night later.
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It depends how they paid for them. If it was with real money they might be upset. If it was with crypto money that they mined using stolen electricity and which will be worthless in a few months anyway, it might be a worthwhile gamble.
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"Remember the superbowl commercial that burst the dot.com bubble?"
So true. Is the internet even still around? I guess we could check on Google.
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A bubble burst doesn't mean that every single company that existed vanished over night. You'll notice that the black Friday of 1929 also didn't kill off every single US company in existence.
Only a fair lot of them.
The world is getting stupid(er). (Score:4, Insightful)
So far that seem to be low on its list of accomplishments.
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It does - unfortunately it also spreads stupidity, hate, lies, vitriol and conspiracy even better.
So they invented... (Score:4, Insightful)
...Gorillaz?
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Their last killer album was Demon Days in 2005. Maybe it was before that designers time, but Universal Music would definitely be aware of the similarity.
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More literally (apes) and with much lower quality art. Albarn and Hewlett must be laughing at this...but warming up their lawyers just in case.
So, you pay to own something you don't really own? (Score:2)
Can someone explain NFTs to me? Seriously, I don't understand how this is a thing.
You pay some money so a blockchain attributes something to you... but there's nothing physical involved. And how do "rights" work? Is it there legal backing for this method of attributing rights to even virtual assets?
It all seems like such a big scam. Please tell me I'm missing something.
Re:So, you pay to own something you don't really o (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, people pay real money for virtual items in video games all the time. Just think of it like that, but stupider.
The value of NFTs is avoiding reality-temporarily. (Score:1)
There are many groups who have a vested interest in promoting NFTs as real enough for fools to spend money for, but unlikely to ever be real enough to attract sustained attention from government agencies interested in financial transactions. A quick assessment includes:
First Mover Ponzi Scheme Profits!
Money laundering as a service! [MLaaS]
Bubble opportunities for money managers fresh out of innovative financial instruments to dump untaxed billionaire profits into! Er, invest. Yeah, it's an investment.
As
Wish I had mod points (Score:1)
Re:The value of NFTs is avoiding reality-temporari (Score:5, Funny)
Money laundering as a service! [MLaaS]
The acronym for money laundering as a service is actually HSBC.
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Money laundry with some ugly ass generated characters to pretend it's something legitimate
Re:So, you pay to own something you don't really o (Score:4, Insightful)
Money laundry with some ugly ass generated characters to pretend it's something legitimate
Any art purchase could be classified the same way. I think Picasso's painting are ugly as fuck. I honestly don't understand how they are so valuable, beyond the obvious "they are valuable because everyone is convinced they are valuable because some smarty-pants said they were valuable". They certainly don't have the intrinsic value to justify the price. It's not like he painted using fairy farts and magic dust.
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When the artist makes art, it wants to express what's on it's mind on the piece, be beauty, be neat colors or the horrifying or some message etc..
But things that are literally automatically generated don't have an unique thought behind it, other than "the author is a greedy fuck trying to get money as easily as possible"
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When the artist makes art, it wants to express what's on it's mind on the piece, be beauty, be neat colors or the horrifying or some message etc..
Some. But are you declaring that to be a universal truth? No possibility that an artist is just cranking out paintings for a paycheck?
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Is it there legal backing for this method of attributing rights to even virtual assets?
Uh, yeah.. A patent, after all, is just a piece of paper granting you rights to an "idea". That's probably not the right word, but hopefully you understand the point. When you patent an invention, you are patenting the "knowledge" or "design" required to make that particular thing. Two kinds of patents. Mechanical and Design. The latter is, really at the core, ownership of something very intangible.. but still quite real.
If you're being more specific and asking about blockchain ownership transfers..
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One example of this would be a unique item in a video game. It doesn't have much value outside the video game(or blockchain) but holds it's value within the community that it exists in. Blockchain technology allows for a digital tracking or ser
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What this does is prevent your unique item from being stolen/duplicated
People can indeed steal/duplicate your rights to name the star located at -32.65342, 156.2345, 81.27703
Your "unique" star-naming rights can only prevent dupes in Alice's ledger. Which is hilariously meaningless and the opposite of unique when you realize it's no different than when someone bought the same star in Bob's ledger.
Or Carol's, or the other infinite ledges that follow.
The only interesting thing that's happened is how desperately we're grasping for new layers of imaginary value. The gymnastics are
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"It doesn't have much value outside the video game(or blockchain) but holds it's value within the community that it exists in.
How you got modded insightful when you clearly didn't even read and then redundantly ranted for no apparent reason is beyond me.
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It's a digital version of 'naming a star', or a Franklin Mint "Certificate of Authenticity".
It's all about provenance, is it authorized by the original artist? (Banksy vs 420$weedfan$69) Is the signing authority recognized? (Sotheby's vs Joey's house of pancakes & NFTs) and will the blockchain it's on exist in ten years? (Ethereum vs safeelonmoonshibcoinsafe)
I would gladly buy an NFT to support my favorite artists (Don Hertzfeldt of 'Rejected' fame for example) if it were proven it was from him, and he
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I think of it this way: an NFT is just a named bitcoin. You own it in the sense that you own a encryption key that allows it to be transferred. This is no different than any other individual bitcoin.
It has extra value in that people might want to pay for its 'name.' In this sense, it's similar to a vanity license plate.
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Also note that the people selling NFTs are the same people who have experience selling paintings in the fine art galleries. That is, they are very good salespeople at making their 'victims' feel good about spending lots of money on something of doubtful value.
If I developed that skill, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. I much prefer to make practical things, or things people actually enjoy.
They hired what? (Score:2)
crypto artists and animators
These people draw and animate ciphers? Or do they beautify block chains?
Never, ever (Score:2)
May Universal Music burn in Hell. Not Drake or Taylor Swift. I don't know them, so I can't say one way or the other. But Universal I know. They're garbage.
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Not Drake or Taylor Swift. I don't know them,
I'm glad you clarified that you didn't know Taylor Swift. I was unsure you see...
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I know her brother, Tom.
Stop linking paywalled content (Score:1)
I'm super glad you're paying to read Bloomberg, NYT etc. but this is marketing if you only link paywalled sites.
let me out (Score:2)
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
Future's made of virtual insanity (Score:2)