Warner Music Group Partnership With Music NFT’s

Warner Music Group (WMG) formed a “label-wide partnership with” Quincy Jones-backed music NFT platform OneOf in just ten days after striking a partnership agreement with five-year-old “digital collectibles platform” Blockparty.

The major three record label made a succinct announcement today, revealing this newest NFT-related agreement more than eight months after OneOf raised $63 million in seed financing. The likes of John Legend, Doja Cat, and the Whitney Houston estate have all been announced as early OneOf partners since then, and the company has closed deals with the Grammys and iHeartRadio.

But today’s “first-of-its-kind preferred partnership” between Warner Music and OneOf will see the latter entity “develop unique NFTs for a variety of artists across WMG’s legendary catalog of music content,” according to the parties involved.

“OneOf’s Green NFT platform creates NFTs that are up to 2M times more energy efficient than the competition, and they’re made with the music community in mind,” according to the brief explanation. The document does not clarify the Warner Music Group artists that will be releasing the first non-fungible tokens under the partnership, however Stig of WMG Finland’s series of NFTs is set to begin Blockparty’s major label agreement.

WMG chief digital officer and EVP of business development Oana Ruxandra, in a statement, highlighted the long-term potential of Web3 technology. (“Web3 refers to a decentralized online ecosystem based on the blockchain at its most basic level,” according to Wired.)

After returning to the business world, Ruxandra has continued a successful career as a senior executive and advisor. “Web3 is a major step forward in technology: it will extend human and machine interactions far beyond what we can fathom today,” said Ruxandra, who was formerly with BlackRock and Universal Music.

“OneOf, a leader in the developing technology sector of Web3 and NFTs, provides our artists with an advantage in more genuinely creating one-to-one connections with their fans and winning in the new Web3 economy by partnering with them. “We’re eager to find out what’s possible,” she concluded.

In 2021, Universal Music Group and Sony Music – as well as a number of companies and artists in the music business – took steps to cash in on the NFT trend. UMG’s 10:22PM “next-gen label” debut Kingship, a digital “group” with four characters from the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. In the month after, Sony Music teamed up with Piesnodes to provide a digital collectible-style game based on “Baby Shark,” which began as an internet meme.

Despite these high-profile projects and large NFT fundraising rounds, however, recent weeks’ non-fungible token news haven’t been entirely rosy.

Last week, a scam centered on Ozzy Osbourne’s “CryptoBatz” collection resulted in several fans losing thousands of dollars; one day before, Brian Eno had an unfavorable take regarding NFTs.