How NFTs Helped Me Pivot Back to Music
Just before the pandemic I had amassed the most energizing momentum of my music career to date. I had successfully launched a grassroots tour in the homes of my biggest supporters. I had lined up weekly dates throughout 2020 to perform kitchen sessions in cities ranging from Atlanta to Oakland to Boston to LA. (This was after I had already traveled from NYC to perform in Detroit, Rochester, and the DMV). And somehow I had booked an appearance on Sway in the Morning. All independently. With no management or PR or agents.
And then the global pandemic disrupted our way of life.
Our attention rightly turned to health, family, and transitioning notions of work culture. I, like most creatives and artist-entrepreneurs, had to figure out what I was going to do next. All my kitchen sessions were cancelled. Performance venues were closed. And new opportunities were few and far between.
I tried to keep my momentum going with virtual kitchen sessions - I did Instagram Live takeovers with some of my favorite black-owned, women-owned brands like BLK+GRN, Asodara, and Soulcare Collective, to name a few. I even released a house-inspired collaborative EP inspired by the lockdown. But there was declining interest in new music. Especially for up-and-coming indie artists like myself. So to promote this new music, I got creative. I produced a 2-day, IG live festival of wellness conversations with some of my friends who happen to be leaders in their fields. By the fall of 2020, that festival eventually rolled over into a podcast. With no clue how I’d get my music back off the ground, I ran this podcast with weekly episodes for the better part of nine months. I facilitated workshops for teens who were building their own podcast. And I had begun consulting - connecting with clients to help them develop brand identity by building their websites and developing their pitch materials.
I had fully pivoted away from music.
In February 2021, partially in an effort to manifest a return to my music journey, I focused my podcast on music conversations. I talked to a multi-time Grammy winner, a former president of Roc Nation, a fellow indie who sharpened skills on the underground NYC performance circuit, and a singer-songwriter-vocal architect. This all inspired me to get back on the horse and figure it out. That prompted me to learn more about what an adviser said could revolutionize the music industry: non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Neither of us really knew what this was or what it meant. But his tech/entertainment/investment conversations were abuzz with that term, NFTs.
I’d call my first attempt at creating and utilizing NFTs largely unsuccessful. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. But the attempt got my gears grinding. The bug came back.
A few months later, the deceleration of my podcast coincided with the news that my partner and I were expecting our first born. Around this time I had a rush of creative energy that inspired me not only to write and record new music, but also to ideate ways I could give new life to music that I had held on to for far too long. I was also starting to revive my live set in the form of a live album with my backing band.
Eventually all of this creative energy led me back to NFTs. (I wrote another piece that outlines, in-depth, my entry into web3). In November 2021 I entered the web3 space. And upon entry I was invigorated by new energy, new eyes, and new opportunities. There was a lot of dialogue about music’s value and web3’s role in helping to re-establish that value. I found that so many of my fellow artists are sweat equity-powered true craftspeople experimenting with tools that enable us to keep creating. The energy is undeniably palpable. I minted, listed, and sold my first NFT in January 2022. With just that first sale I had made more money from music than I had made in the prior 18 months combined. A couple weeks later I made my second sale. A few weeks after that, a new song prompted a feature on AllHipHop.com where they acknowledged I wasn’t a household name yet, but stated that I should be. And a few weeks after that, I closed a license deal with a podcast to use a song for their intro.
Needless to say, I’ve pivoted back to music. Only time will tell where this journey will take us next.
