Or you may simply have too much money. But the most powerful motivation for buying NFTs is the possibility of reaping huge profits by reselling them. You might want to impress people by flashing the contents of your digital wallet. You may, for instance, want to show your support for the content creator. In fact, the same content can be downloaded by pretty much anyone with a functioning internet connection. So why, you may ask, would anyone buy them? There are a number of potential reasons. While an NFT “original” contains metadata that proves its authenticity, trademarks and copyrights are not part of the transaction. One of the biggest debates, when it comes to non- fungible tokens, centers on the question of ownership. Last March, the band rush-released its “When You See Yourself” album as a collection of digital NFTs, and were hailed by “Rolling Stone” magazineas the first band to do so.Īctually, that wasn’t true - Devon Welsh’s Belave, a virtually unknown indie band, beat them to the punch with the even-more-rushed release of an album called “Does the Bird Fly Over Your Head?” But Kings of Leon could at least take consolation in the more than $2 million they raked in, a quarter of which they donated to Live Nation’s Global Relief Fund for Live Music Crews. This was not Kings of Leon’s maiden voyage into the realm of non-fungible tokens, a form of digitally certified art that’s sold as a part of the cryptocurrency blockchain. It also earned tons of publicity for the band - the “Billboard” magazine headline “Kings of Leon Will Become First Band to Have an NFT Played in Space” was repeated, in various forms, by countless media outlets - just as they were reaching the midpoint of their 2021 tour. To the credit of all involved, the money raised from last month’s launch of SpaceX’s Inspiration4 was donated to St. When our Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, they could scarcely have foreseen the arrival of household assault weapons, Senate filibusters or, in all likelihood, Kings of Leon sending a cryptographic video into space and then auctioning off the iPhone it was played on.īut all of these things have come to pass, one of the most recent being the Southern rock band teaming up with Elon Musk to shoot a non-fungible token of their self-esteem into the stratosphere.