“To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker,entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.” Kevin Kelly Any artist relies on having fans, and having a large swathe of diehard fans, ready to buy whatever you produce, is a goal most would love to achieve. Back in 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote an essay on how the Internet would make this more achievable for artists in any discipline, simply because it opened up a global audience. However, while creative people waited for fans with spending power to arrive, the online took a slightly different direction to the one they hoped for. Social media platforms, all of them centralized, was seen as a great way to connect with fans. Throw up a Facebook page, promote your work, and fans would find you. It did work, for a while, but then the SM platforms spotted an opportunity, you could say, a trick they were missing, and started using algorithms that decided what fans saw, changing the relationship between them and the artists. What’s more, the SM platforms were keeping a lot of the revenue they gleaned for themselves. The Tide Is Turning Now that tide is turning and returning to Kelly’s vision, and NFTs have proved to be the vehicles for change. That’s because non-fungible tokens enable artists to sell directly to fans without a third party taking a cut.  It’s true that many will continue to use centralized social media platforms for promotion and to connect with fans, but the advent of NFTs and a crypto=based economy is giving them other options to make money. But, it’s not that easy to understand what NFTs are. Just ask a person in the street. The chances are that you might find one or two that know what an NFT is, while others might have an idea they are connected to Bitcoin, while others will never have heard of them. Those inside the crypto community might be surprised that a new sector that has such a big buzz around it, and one where a lot of money is being invested, has had so little impact on the wider public. But then the same could be said of cryptocurrencies. A Better Economic Environment For Artists However, the lack of public engagement with NFTs is not an insurmountable issue. The NFT craze is in its infancy, which means it has a way to go to mature, and as it evolves and expands, the size of the audience will grow as well. In this respect, NFTs are still a profitable venture for creators. After all, NFT sales were valued at $2 billion in the first quarter of 2021, according to Cloudwards.net. First, NFTs are created on a blockchain. This also means that even the owner of an NFT marketplace cannot charge whatever they want for an NFT, because the artist is in control. Of course, the marketplaces will get a fee, and that creates a competitive environment for the creators who will look for those offering a strong sales performance and lower fees, or other incentives. Second, NFTs allow for more finely tuned pricing tiers. For example, the hugely popular NBA Top Shots cards can be bought for thousands of dollars, or a few dollars. The same can be seen in CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, and any of the other series. The third way in which NFTs help artists make more money is in the relationship with the user. Unlike buying say a painting at auction, where the auctioneer takes a fee from both buyer and seller, the person who buys an NFT pays very little to acquire a work. That’s because of the crypto factor! There’s very little marketing spend in the crypto market, and neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum has marketing budgets, yet millions of people own them. The same applies to NFT projects. points out that the NBA Top Shots cards, “generated $200M in gross sales within a month while spending very little on marketing.” That’s because sales are significantly based on peer-to-peer marketing, which in turn is boosted by the community of fans that flock to collectible NFTs, and generate excitement about them. Plus,there is a feeling amongst these fans, who are also owners, that they have skin in the game, and the game has a real buzz. Chris Dixon There are still many ways for creators to build a fan base via NFTs, and boost their finances without the interference of intermediaries. Those platforms that impose distribution and monetization on creators are likely to find that they are challenged. Artists now have more choices, and as Chris Dixon says, when crypto and NFTs offer a new way to make money, that is probably the choice artists will take.

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