- Meeting Collectors’ Demand for Vinyl
- Connecting Buyers to Content via NFC Tags
- Creating a Wallet and Linking to Content
Vinylkey’s specialized album
Vinyl album pressing company Vinylkey is linking the physical world of music, in the form of old-fashioned records, with digital identification and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that provide traceability and authentication, along with access to content regarding the music, users’ favorite artists, and trading and selling options. Vinylkey was launched in 2021 in Ashville, N.C. by five founders. Its pressing site, known as Citizen Vinyl, makes standard albums, as well as specialized vinyl with the digital connection.
The specialized records, being pressed as limited-edition products for several musicians, leverage Vinylkey’s cloud-based software to manage data and link to blockchain details, along with a digital wallet. The center point connecting the physical and digital worlds is a passive 13.56 MHz Near Field Communication (NFC) tag built into the albums. Users can tap their smartphones against the tag to uniquely identify and authenticate a record in the blockchain. After buying the record, they can then create a proof of ownership, as well as engage with the music and artist by tapping the tag to access more content.
Meeting Collectors’ Demand for Vinyl
Users can tap their smartphones against the tag to uniquely identify and authenticate a record in the blockchain.
Demand for vinyl records has been growing by double digits every year for the past decade, according to an ABC News report, with last year’s record sales revenue increasing by 61 percent. Despite being a vintage medium, vinyl versions of music are appealing to nostalgic baby boomers, as well as to younger generations of music buyers. Many pressing plants are opening or expanding their operations to meet the needs of vinyl album collectors, and as the records are purchased, these transactions are being enabled on websites such as Discogs.
Vinylkey provides its own standard pressing plant to meet this need, located in downtown Asheville, with an adjoining café and a used record store. The company gives tours of the pressing plant and its recording studio, built by a radio station in the 1940s. Citizen Vinyl hosts live performances in the space, and musicians record and produce their latest music there. However, the company has a digital mission that draws from co-founder Sean Moore’s interests, as a software developer, in cryptocurrency and NFTs. “I saw this opportunity for connecting what I call ‘old school’ and ‘new school’—vinyl with the NFTs,” he says.
The Vinylkey records are designed with unique features for music collectors. Each album comes with a built-in NXP Semiconductors NTag 424 NFC tag in its center, with an antenna that wraps around that center. The unique ID number encoded on that tag is linked to a specific record’s details. Users can tap their NFC-enabled cell phone against the tag, which triggers the phone to open a webpage where they can view the album’s details and confirm its authenticity. The system also enables users to pay for their purchase directly with their phone’s payment account, and they can then register their ownership.
Connecting Buyers to Content via NFC Tags
The specialized records are being pressed for musicians as limited-edition products.
Vinylkey’s cloud-based software manages data related to each album purchased. The vinyl comes with a printed, unique ink splatter pattern, as well as a registration key inside the jacket. The company presses the ink pattern directly into the vinyl by sprinkling clear green and black material onto the album’s surface before it is pressed. Each design comes out differently. In that way, Moore explains, that piece of vinyl is non-fungible based on the visual pattern, as well as the NFC tag embedded in it.
“We take photos of that album as it comes off the press,” Moore states, “and that is the photo of the NFT.” That information is saved in the software, along with the album’s NFC-based ID, and the splatter pattern offers a redundancy to the digital ID. Moore says customers like the visuals of the unique pattern, adding, “It’s a way to say ‘Look, mine’s different than yours.'”
With regard to the NFC tag, however, the connection to the vinyl’s digital presence is immediate. Once users tap the tag and can access the album data, they can register as the record’s owner. Buyers accomplish this through a blockchain-enabled NFT that links to content, such as digital artworks, photographs and videos. Individual can also other albums and add them to a MetaMask-based wallet, enabling them to sell or trade the products.
Creating a Wallet and Linking to Content
Sean Moore (left) and Citizen Vinyl founder Gar Ragland (Photo: Matt Peiken | BPR News)
Artists whose music resides on the Vinylkey album can continually offer and update unique benefits for record owners, which can include concert tickets, a VIP line to a show, or a round of golf with the artists. The NFT also provides proof of the album’s life history, Moore says, which could increase the record’s value. For instance, he states, “Maybe the album was owned by a famous DJ who used it at certain concerts.” Rapper Money Man released his Big Money album with a Vinylkey collector’s version, while Moses Sumney provided a Vinylkey-based version of his album Live from Blackalchia, recorded at a concert in Miami.
The pressing plant expects to outgrow its current monthly capacity of 40,000 albums, and it will look into enabling greater capacity, as well as selling its patent-pending Vinylkey technology to other plants. The company does not work with artists directly, but rather with either their business managers or record labels. How they distribute the Vinylkey albums is up to the artists, Moore notes. The records could be sold on tour or at their website, for example, or they could be sent to a distribution center to be made available for sale at record stores. The blockchain traceability of the specialty albums will then help artists and record label trace the records’ resales.
Musicians have been unable to participate in album resells, but with NFT’s they can now receive a percentage of secondary sales, since such transactions happen in marketplaces on the blockchain. The albums are more expensive than standard albums, and the price can be determined by an artist or label, depending on the features built into the NFT. “These are going to tend to be more high-value albums,” Moore says, “that the buyer would want to protect and say ‘This is mine. It’s authentic.'” The company recommends that artists and bands create 10 percent of their albums in the Vinylkey version.
Key Takeaways:
- The vinyl pressing company is using NFC technology to provide intelligence to collector albums, enabling automatic access to a record’s NFT.
- The goal is to help artists engage with their fans after an album is purchased, as well as earn a percentage of resale transactions.