Universal Music Group has piled on to the laundry-list of brands and large companies capitalizing on blue-chip NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Depending on who you are, they either sound like an even worse version of the pandemic events we livestreamed throughout 2020 or the perfect solution for enjoying music without the irritation of drunken crowds.
For the latter, Universal Music Group (UMG) just acquired another NFT from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection to front UMG’s metaverse band, Kingship. Get out your 2022 bingo card, because this has it all.
Yes, that’s right: a metaverse band. UMG has been pouring money into Kingship since November. All of the members are NFTs, and though the company hasn’t said how much it spent on all the NFTs, two of the ones it already owned were priced at about $125,000 in November.
The ape-led music group will eventually produce music and perform virtual concerts in the metaverse, according to the company.
“NFTs are going to have many use cases that go beyond [just] art,” McNelis told Blockworks.
McNelis and all Bored Ape collectors became eligible to claim 10,000 Apecoins (APE) on Thursday, in connection with the ApeDAO. APE is trading up 4.92% on the hour at $14.4 per token.
The announcement discloses that in addition to purchasing the latest BAYC, KINGSHIP’s official website and Discord have been launched. The new site and Discord channel aim to “provide fans and the collector community with information about the group’s activities, new developments including access to the allowlist and future activations.”
UMG has been delving into NFT technology quite a bit this year, as the company revealed a partnership with the NFT marketplace Curio in mid-February. At the time, the entertainment giant said it had plans to showcase NFTs tied to the firm’s many music labels and hit recording artists. During the first week of March, UMG announced a partnership with Billboard and the Flow blockchain.
The fact that UMG is creating a cartoon-character-led band with NFTs bought and sold on a public, immutable distributed ledger is new for a label that has made its name with decidedly more conventional artists. But this isn’t the first venture into the music scene for BAYC characters in general.
Aziz Ansari, The Strokes, Lil Baby and Questlove all performed at “Ape Fest,” a crypto music festival held in New York in November. Timbaland has an entertainment with the collective, called “Ape-In Productions.” And Bored Ape #9797 made a music video in December, making it the first NFT to do so
