Hip-hop artists have always loved the finer things in life—elegant clothing, exotic cars, gleaming jewelry. The industry’s latest fixation, the NFT, falls into a similar category, with rappers like Future, Gunna, and Eminem spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on collectible pieces of digital artwork. Whole cottage industries have emerged selling luxury goods to famous MCs, but the key difference with NFTs is that now the rappers are the ones selling them to the people.
Ask a tech evangelist what an NFT is—a non-fungible token—and what follows could be a 45-minute dissertation on the blockchain, the importance of decentralized digital currency and the future of the metaverse. Ask a skeptic, and they’ll likely have some variation of the “right-click, save as” meme—who would pay six figures for what is essentially a JPEG? Ask multiplatinum rapper Young M.A what they are, and she’ll give you the kind of succinct response that would likely be echoed by many rappers who have jumped into the whole world of non-fungible tokens.
“People look at it a little too deep, a little too scientific, a little too mathematical,” Young M.A says of the trend. “But in all reality, it’s something to take your time on, like you do everything else. It’s a day-to-day type thing. It’s a new way of making money.”
The New York rapper released a capsule of five NFTs on the Serenade NFT marketplace in April, based on the biggest musical moments of her career thus far. She’s using the medium to provide fans with exclusive benefits and songs. The ability to provide passionate supporters with new perks was also one of the main sales for Fanpage CEO Billy Rodgers. The tech company in the entertainment world works with musicians and athletes to create unique digital memorabilia projects with unique benefits and utility.
“Think of one of your favorite artists singing their favorite Christmas carol in front of their Christmas tree and they drop that as an NFT and you write in the smart contract that it can only be watched during Christmastime,” Rodgers explains. “Now you’re having a Christmas party and you’re seeing something that no one else in the world is seeing at your Christmas event.”
While it wasn’t during the season of gift-giving, Jim Jones’ discovery of NFTs was a gift in itself. The Harlem rapper has been in the game for over two decades and hustling for even longer, so when someone showed him the profit potential of NFTs, it didn’t take long for him to see dollar signs.
