Why Yellowheart’s Kings of Leon Drop Matters
The Kings of Leon’s upcoming NFT drop represents an important tipping point for the NFT space and the music industry at-large. Below, I discuss my thoughts on it.
With the Kings of Leon’s “NFTYourself” collection dropping tonight, NFTs have taken their first major step to widespread acceptance beyond the art space. Until recently, the bulk of press coverage on non-fungible tokens, or “NFTs,” has been in the context of “crypto art,” which refers to art placed on the blockchain in the form of a cryptographic token. Like Bitcoin, this token exists as a database entry on the blockchain it’s tied to, but unlike Bitcoin, it’s entirely unique. In other words, it can’t be exchanged for another of the exact same type, hence the term “non-fungible token.”
It’s this property, together with the fact that like everything that’s placed on the blockchain, NFTs are immutable or “unable to be changed once they’re live,” which makes them truly revolutionary in the context of creative work.
Now(truly since 2017), anything that any artist in any niche imaginable makes can be represented by a unique blockchain ID, making it provably scarce. As mentioned above, until this week, the bulk of NFT-related activity was occurring with visual art, i.e., paintings, pixel art, and photographs. Today, however, the Kings of Leon plan to do a massive NFT drop via the Yellowheart platform, which represents a true tipping point for pushing the space out to other niches and closer to full, widespread acceptance.
First, simply because they’re such a well-known band, their upcoming drop has already been covered by several well-known mainstream media outlets, such as Rolling Stone, The Guardian, iHeartRadio, and Variety. In crypto, we already know why NFTs matter, but the sort of pull that bands like the Kings of Leon have is key for the NFT niche to reach beyond the crypto-sphere of acceptance since such news sources are widely read by people from all walks of life. Given the media frenzy leading up to tonight, I expect the Kings of Leon’s drop to be wildly successful and lead to numerous other musicians following suit.
The reason why is simple.
While they aren’t the first musicians to join the NFT-bandwagon, they are the first with millions of dedicated fans and numerous mainstream awards to do so. The effect of a group like that putting their newest album up for sale directly to their fans can’t be overstated.
Just as Beeple took NFT art on its first major step towards widespread adoption when his work titled, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” was accepted to the prestigious Christie’s auction house, the success of the Kings of Leon’s drop will prove to other mainstream musicians that launching their own NFTs can be both a lucrative venture as well as the proof-of-concept for “social tokens.”
3LAU led the way in this respect, but in many ways, he was already a fixture on the NFT scene at the time. The Kings of Leon’s foray into NFTs represents the first, non-crypto native example of social tokens in action.
If you’re not familiar with what a social token is, imagine buying a cryptocurrency that gives you access to your favorite musician’s album, while also giving you a VIP, backstage pass to their next concert. That’s the gist of social tokens. If you think of Bitcoin as provably-scarce gold that you can buy instantly, then you can think of social tokens as provably scarce access to your favorite artists that you can buy instantly. The golden tickets, which will be auctioned off tonight, represent that access to the Kings of Leon since they will give each one of their holders “four front row tickets to any Kings of Leon show in the world, a private concierge and a luxury SUV for the night, and the pièce de résistance, a private meet-and-greet with the band.” Through the usage of smart contracts, triggering the sale of all of those items at once in an instant is made possible. Essentially, the act of purchasing the ticket tells the smart contract, which is a piece of autonomous software that sits on the Ethereum blockchain, to trigger the sale of both the digital ticket itself and all of the physical goods involved. Think of an escrow, except without the involvement of any banks at all.
Instead, the buyer is the fan and the seller is the musician.
It’s that simple.
As we countdown the hours to the drop, when the time finally comes, I expect the 18 golden tickets to go for staggeringly high prices, since they’ll be auctioned off for 56 hours starting at 12 EST/6PM CET and the drop itself has been advertised all over the internet. If you’re like me and you’re a big fan of both what NFTs do for creatives as well as the Kings of Leon, then I’ll see you there, where I’ll be buying one of their digital album NFTs, which entitles each holder to a digital download of the album, its respective art, and a limited edition physical “Golden Eye” vinyl.
2021 has truly been a revolutionary year and I’m happy to be a part of the crypto movement and to have seen how far we’ve already come. Perhaps the Kings of Leon’s drop will finally herald the start of a new age of disintermediation for music and perhaps not. Radical disruption can often take time to fully coalesce and they didn’t only release the album on the blockchain. Once the blockchain becomes the only location where a well-known artist’s album can be found, then we’ll really be on our way, so to speak.
In any case, as the year rolls on, expect big things, including the launch of a dedicated NFT content platform, where I plan to write about artists, musicians, and more as the space evolves. Until then, reach out to me anytime on Twitter, where I’m always available, and remember, the crypto revolution goes beyond just money.
It’s about the decentralization of everything.
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