OneOf's Lin Dai: NFTs are a 'fourth pillar' of artist income

Ashton Addison: Most people see NFTs as digital art. How do you see the landscape, and where does OneOf fit?▶ 01:13

Lin Dai: NFTs are lines of code that create a digital certificate of authenticity. That can be applied to any number of digital items, or even physical ones, so the underlying technology could fundamentally change how we authenticate and transfer value. Art was the easy first use case. Physical art has high value for collectors, and an NFT is a natural certificate for digital art, which used to be hard to certify because you can just right-click and copy it. Music takes that to the next level. With art, price discovery isn't easy for the average consumer. Why is a painting of a bull carrying a bitcoin worth millions, while the same painting by me is probably worth four dollars? Music is different. Everybody knows that John Lennon's "Imagine" as an NFT would be worth a lot more than the third track on Britney's fourth album, no offense to Britney. What excites us most is the start of an artist's career. Say you're one of an artist's first thousand fans. We all have that experience of seeing someone play a little bar or a friend's party who is now the biggest DJ ever. Now you can prove it, and you get to participate in the artist's career in a brand new way.

Ashton: Is OneOf just selling tracks as NFTs, or are you doing more with artists?▶ 06:08

Lin: It's a little bit of everything. Some other platforms are one-dimensional. NBA Top Shot is great, but it's a trading-card platform. It's so early in the NFT space that we're experimenting a lot, with a lot of success. We think NFTs really proliferate when the digital world connects with the physical world. One of our first collections was with Doja Cat, one of the biggest female streaming artists right now. It's seven different NFTs, and each unlocks an experience in the real world. They range from golden tickets to her next tour up to a one-of-one that comes with a VIP experience: we'll fly you first class to her next show and you spend a day in the life of Doja. Our first free collection was with iHeartRadio Music Festival in Vegas. We gave away one million free NFTs in a single night, which hadn't been done on any blockchain. There were 12 different tokens, and if you collected the right combination you could win a VIP experience at this year's festival. The opposite is also true. Imagine Doja is performing and blows a kiss to the audience, and everybody raises their phone to catch the virtual kiss. That becomes an NFT, and maybe it becomes a special item or character in the metaverse or a virtual game. When the line between physical and digital blurs, true fans get more utility than from the image or media file alone.

Ashton: How often are you running drops, and how are you lowering the barriers for everyday fans?▶ 10:25

Lin: We're planning about 200 collections in the first 12 months. Each collection comes with one or more drops, usually three, and each week one or more artists are featured on the platform. The biggest barriers to entry are price and difficulty, and we tackled both. On other platforms, minting can cost as much as five, six or seven hundred dollars because of the limitations of proof-of-work blockchains. We're built on Tezos, which is environmentally friendly and about two million times more energy efficient, with very low transaction costs. Minting an NFT is effectively about two cents, and we subsidize that for our artist partners. That gives artists a full canvas without charging their fans. The entire iHeart collection was free, which isn't possible on other platforms. The second barrier is complexity. On most platforms you have to be a fairly equipped user to set up a wallet and custody your own keys, and if you get it wrong you lose your crypto assets. OneOf is built for the everyday fan, so you don't have to understand crypto. You sign up with your email and phone number and can buy your first NFT for five dollars in under three minutes with a credit card. We also support crypto payments, including Tezos, so we're an inclusive platform. But we want to onboard the next 100 million non-crypto-native fans.

Ashton: Looking two or three years out, how popular will music NFTs be, and will every artist use them?▶ 15:06

Lin: I think this is the fourth pillar of an artist's revenue stream. It didn't exist before, and it's potentially as meaningful, if not more meaningful, than the other three. Think about an artist's career. There's music or streaming revenue, but artists often have to collateralize that by signing a record deal with a major label. There's touring revenue, but they usually sign a ticketing or touring deal with a company like Live Nation. And there's songwriting revenue, where they usually sign a publishing deal. NFTs are a direct way for artists to connect with their biggest fans and community and monetize directly, without collateralizing their revenue potential with a third party. That's very liberating. It's also a two-way street. Imagine you collected the rookie card of an artist you saw at a small bar in the suburbs, and three years later they win a Grammy. If you hold that artist's first NFT, you get to participate in their career. Quincy Jones has backed our company. He's one of the most legendary figures in music, and most people don't know he's very tech forward. He was one of the first investors in Spotify. Whenever there's a new technology that is fundamentally beneficial to artists, he's usually one of the first to adopt it.

Ashton: What does a collection look like in practice?▶ 18:00

Lin: Each collection is designed a little differently. We just launched one with The Game that combines music with trading cards. You can buy a pack and get any of 12 unique NFT cards. Some come with an unreleased track and some with an unreleased music video, and you can trade them with other fans. You can't get this song on streaming platforms or this video on YouTube, so true fans get to collect something nobody else has. The Game is pioneering how to release new music through this medium.

Ashton: How can fans get involved, and how quickly do drops go?▶ 19:47

Lin: Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at OneOf NFT, or go to the website directly. We have drops almost every other day, with multiple artists going live. The Game collection is live now, and later today we're releasing a free NFT with Alesso, the major EDM DJ, which teases his full collection later in the month. Collections usually sell out, or the free items get claimed, within minutes, so you have to stay on top of our social channels. We make it super affordable. You can get a great NFT for as little as five dollars these days.