To the financial windfall has been the emergence of dedicated fan bases who are coalescing around groups on Discord, the preferred platform for NFT and crypto enthusiasts. Allen subscribes to the idea that having 100 true fans is better than having many casual ones, so he spends 6 to 8 hours a day interacting with his fans on his Discord, where they offer encouragement, feedback, and memes. Because many of them have bought a share of his masters from him, their emotionally and financially invested in his success. For his next project, he wants to break down the wall between artist and fan even further. I want to be like, here are 20 demos, let's make an EP together, he says. There are a lot of creative people in my Discord, but they haven't necessarily had the mechanisms to be able to exercise their creativity. In building up community and infrastructure, Alan and others NFTs as a viable alternative to the current system of major music labels. Labels have long been powerful in the music industry because they provide artists with cash upfront, mentorships, mass distribution, and strategies to thrive, but in return they usually assume creative control and the rights to an artist's masters allowing them to use the music in perpetuity. Owning masters was so important to Taylor Swift that she is re-recording all of her old albums from scratch, NFT musicians believe that a new model like the one offered by catalog might be able to provide financial stability, creative freedom and community all in one go. Halik mall became a believer in the power of NFTs after a decade in the music industry, including being signed to labels, led him to grow disillusion with the system. There was a large degree of manipulation and a lack of regard for my wider vision as an artist, he says. Last month, mall sold four songs as NFTs for 56 ETH, now $261,000. Mall also has a thriving Discord owns his masters and is using the funds he made from NFT sales to build a music and art studio in Barbados, which he hopes will uplift a community that often suffers from brain drain. Before your fan base couldn't be in the label meetings with you, but now we're all the label together. He says, it's like being in the auction house window versus going and campaigning for what you believe in. La Tasha and LA based musician who sold over 50 music and multimedia NFTs says that the ability of labels to nurture talent from the ground up was already on the Wayne before the rise of NFTs. I haven't connected with a label in years that was fully into developing artists anymore, she says. Artists had to before really cultivate numbers on platforms like Instagram TikTok and Twitter before a label would even look at them. I think it's important for artists to think about their autonomy. As individual artists build ecosystems around them, more collaborative efforts are also amassing momentum. Song camp a collective founded in March has hosted songwriting camps for dozens of previously unconnected songwriters, with those new creations selling for thousands of dollars on catalog. The.