![]() You can imagine tie-ups between the music company and the youth-skewing Cash App audience. Square has a known win in its consumer-focused Cash App service, which reached 36 million monthly actives in December of 2020, up from 24 million in the same period one year prior. ![]() In its most recent quarterly earnings report, “in-person only” usage is falling as a percentage of seller gross payment volume (GPV), while “online only” and “omnichannel” GPV are taking up the slack. Square’s business users, its “seller ecosystem,” as it likes to call it, are increasingly digital. Why not take a swing at a part of the economy - music - that has migrated from the physical world to the digital in the past few years, much like small businesses in recent quarters? The company bought food-delivery service Caviar in 2014 before selling it to DoorDash in 2019, for example that Square appears to have made a venture-level return on the transaction is immaterial to the focus argument.Īnd Dorsey is not wrong that Square did shake up the commerce game for many offline businesses with its original card reader. And Square has made acquisitions in the past that appeared adjacent and failed to stick. It’s not hard to riff on the seeming strangeness of Square and Tidal as a pair. Some early reaction to the deal has proved negative. ![]() ![]() The deal also installs musician and businessperson Jay-Z on Square’s board. Noting that “new ideas are found at the intersection,” Dorsey argued that the confluence of “music and the economy” is one such point of convergence. Dorsey’s expectation is that his company can replicate the success of Cash App and other Square products in the world of music. In his opening message, he asked a rhetorical question: “Why would a music streaming company and a financial services company join forces?!” Dorsey seemed to expect the transaction to generate skepticism - which it definitely has. Square CEO Jack Dorsey used his other company, Twitter, this morning to explain the deal. The deal, worth some $297 million, will allow artist-partners to keep their ownership in the music company. Pair Dorsey and Jay-Z, and maybe it comes a whole lot sooner.This morning Square, a fintech company that serves both individuals and companies, announced that it has purchased a majority stake in Tidal, a music streaming service. All of a sudden, you're along for the ride, too.”ģLAU predicts something along those lines will come in “the next five to 10 years. “Maybe you find an artist you love before anyone else, and you can invest in their music”-as an NFT could allow someone to do-“and then you've invested in The Weeknd before The Weeknd blows up. Why buy an NFT? “Imagine you're a fan, and you want to invest in music,” explains 3LAU. Maybe he sticks to sheparding other artists toward the technology. He sold off a variety of different types of NFTs, some of which included access to new songs and digital copies of his 2017 Ultraviolet album.Ī musician’s NFT can do any number of things: sell an album, drop a single or strike a more complicated bargain-perhaps selling off a cut of future earnings for the immediate investment. And three days prior, the electronic dance music star 3LAU finished a $11.7 million NFT auction, the biggest sale of the tokens yet. (And it is undeniably a boom: Nearly $50 million of these NFTs are trading hands each week, some $180 million in the past two months.) A day ago, the band Kings of Leon announced they planned to release a new album through an NFT sale, something no other artist has done. Musicians are at the forefront of the boom. They can do it without giving up a lick to an agent, a lawyer or a record label. These tokens allow them to sell digital media-maybe an illustration, maybe an entire album-at prices never before possible and collect a cut of secondary sales too. To them, NFTs are manna from a coded heaven. If only there was a way to do that using a sophisticated financial technology, precisely the type Dorsey and Jay-Z might find particularly interesting.Īnd this is how the world could end up with Jay-Z NFTs.Īn NFT, or a non-fungible token, is a surging type of cryptoasset attracting all sorts of artists.
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