Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

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In November of 2021 Universal Music Group announced the worlds first NFT music Supergroup, a band called KINGSHIP, which comprised of four characters from the Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible token project. The emergence of NFT technology, coupled with virtual reality raves in VRChat, which compete with video game music concerts such as Travis Scotts Fortnite gigs, alongside the rise of participatory music video based social media platforms such as Tik Tok, have radically shifted the way that Generation Z consume music based media. In this paper I explore the notion, that we have gone beyond Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, and moved to a new paradigm, which see’s the audience as a creator of 15 minutes of music based content. In this new world, the audience become a marketing tool and collective asset, perhaps an NFT project. This user generated music content is for the consumption of a 3rd wave audience whom re-consume what was created by music artists and audience which is disconnected from the source material. In this world, is the consumption of music in danger of falling into the category of fake news, and are NFT’s the answer to true authorship when presented with wave after wave of audience created facsimile.