Billion-dollar music copyright market meets NFT, Euterpe model may become a growth point.

The latest annual report "Engaging With Music" by IFPI found that after surveying 44,000 music users worldwide, the average weekly listening time for music users in 2022 is as high as 20.1 hours, exceeding 18.4 hours in 2021. Among them, Indian users reached 25.7 hours, and Chinese users even more so, reaching 28.3 hours.

However, at the same time, the market share of the three major music record copyright giants, Universal, Warner, and Sony, has also reached 70.1%, occupying a large amount of market resources. The record resources are highly concentrated, and the music playback channels are also the same. According to a report by MIDiA Research, Spotify occupies the first place with a market share of 31%, followed closely by Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tencent Music, with market shares of 15%, 13%, and 13%, respectively.

The high concentration of the music industry has led to lower profits for creators and a trend towards popular music styles with a lack of diversity. Of course, the problems facing the music industry are not limited to these issues, as complex value chains and opaque copyright data are also rooted in the shortcomings of past systems.

At the end of 2022, a group of copyright professionals from Stanford, Tencent Music, ByteDance, Sony Music, and Warner Bro. discovered that NFTs seemed to be able to change the traditional music system. As a result, they established the Euterpe platform.

Euterpe received an early investment of $8 million from investors including Fenbushi Capital, Huobi Ventures, BingX, and HKICEx, one of the three major trading platforms in Hong Kong, when it was founded.

Ideas, Strategies, and Euterpe's Global Layout

Euterpe can attract traditional music industry practitioners and cryptocurrency fund investors, not just through storytelling, but through its philosophy and direction, which are the core of its competitive strength.

During the past quarter, Euterpe mainly focused on the Southeast Asian and Hong Kong-Taiwan markets, signing contracts with multiple music copyright companies and launching 3 music copyright NFTs, including Zhou Shen's "Together", Shan Yichun's "Hey", and Pet Conspiracy's "Dance Underwater (feat. Tihsjah)".

During this quarter, Euterpe plans to launch the SocialFi feature. Additionally, Euterpe will complete the Sui Chain cross-chain deployment in the same quarter. The SocialFi feature will enable users to mine tokens by listening to and promoting music, while voting mining, staking voting, and other functions are planned for implementation in the next quarter.

In fact, besides the quantity of music copyrights, the biggest difference among music platforms may lie in their social ecosystem. Traditional platforms, from Spotify and Apple Music to Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music, all emphasize social functions such as sharing and commenting.

Euterpe's social function is different from traditional ones, and it is more of a Social+DeFi model. On the Euterpe platform, users can initially enjoy listening to music and sharing mining. Later, users can earn token rewards by voting for their favorite music, and if they stake tokens to vote for songs, high-quality music with more votes can also be made into NFTs for circulation. This method effectively incentivizes participation in the music industry, rather than just charting in traditional music, solely for the purpose of getting their favorite artists a higher ranking.

Parallel to building social applications, Euterpe will also expand its copyright scope. After completing the copyright in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong and Taiwan regions, the music copyrights in Japan and South Korea, Europe and America, and film and television copyrights are also planned to be expanded in 2023. After that, Euterpe will expand into the market of minority languages, cooperate with well-known artists in minority language regions, and promote the issuance of NFTs.

According to Euterpe CFO Charles Cheng, Euterpe will expand into a wide range of IP fields, including games, books, concerts, and celebrity merchandise. Public information shows that Euterpe has already begun to lay out trademark NFT products and patent NFT products.

Artist IP-NFT single product, a new trend?

除了签约音乐版权公司之外，Euterpe also provides a function for artists to independently join and upload their own music to release music IP-NFT.

Currently, there are 1497 IP-NFTs officially sold, including Zhou Shen's "Together", Dan Yichun's "Feed", and Pet Conspiracy's "Dance Underwater (feat. TiXiang)". In the Vickrey auction on December 28, 2022, a total of 213 IP-NFTs were sold at a starting price of 0.01 ETH, with the highest individual NFT selling for 0.03 ETH, three times the starting price.

On January 3rd, "Together", "Feed", and "Dance Underwater (feat. Tixiang)" IP-NFT blind boxes were publicly sold in three phases. The second phase requires holding Euterpe SBT to participate. Euterpe SBT is a Soulbound Token issued by Euterpe on November 11, 2022, representing oneself as an early and loyal user of Euterpe. It is reported that during the Euterpe SBT application period, the total number of applicants for Euterpe Genesis SBT was 5,248, and Premint registered around 8,500.

This IP-NFT blind box sale has a total of 1180 boxes, divided into 3 types, each containing 1, 3, or 9 gold NFTs, priced at 0.02 ETH. After being fully open for sale for about 8 minutes, all blind boxes were sold out.

OpenSea data shows that the floor price of blind boxes has reached 0.0475 ETH, an increase of 137.5% from the initial sale price. The floor price of "Together" on the Euterpe official website's secondary market has reached 0.095 ETH.

Singer's release of IP-NFT single is a new way of music distribution, which can present music content in the form of NFT, bringing a new revenue stream for singers and providing fans with a new way to support their favorite singers. In the future, holding IP-NFT may also entitle one to receive platform external media royalties and secondary creation royalties.

Overall, singer IP-NFT is forming a new trend, helping singers increase new sources of revenue and enhancing interaction with fans.

In order to support more creators to participate in the production of IP-NFT, Euterpe will launch a creator fund to assist outstanding creators in theme creation, such as "World Cup" and "Olympics" music. At the same time, Euterpe will also launch a copyright infringement compensation function to better protect the rights of singers and NFTs.

IP-NFT will be the new growth point of the music copyright market

Original image source: Will Page

According to the latest report from Grand View Research, the compound annual growth rate of the global music streaming market from 2022 to 2030 is expected to reach 14.7%. However, the development of NFTs is even more rapid. In 2022, the total size of the NFT market reached 3 billion US dollars, with a staggering growth rate of 900%. When two rapidly growing industries meet, IP-NFT is bound to generate more narratives and value.

Earlier, the popularity of digital music and online music platforms accelerated the growth of the music copyright market. Subsequently, more and more enterprises and investors entered the field of music copyright, promoting the regularization of the copyright market. Now, with the introduction of NFTs, the music copyright market will see new growth points and demands, as the combination of NFTs and IP increases the value of IP and helps IP-NFT holders earn more revenue.

With the continuous development of the music market and the increasing demand for music, there will be more and more market participants entering the ecosystem of IP NFT.

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