While some see music NFTs—unique digital assets that often have both musical and visual components—are the future of the music industry, opening up new opportunities for both artists and fans, DJ Agoria, a prominent French electronic producer, composer, and DJ isn't too keen on the hype.
“Since the beginning, I was saying that I don't trust in music NFTs, even if I'm a DJ, an artist, and a musician. We don’t want to make music NFTs mainstream, we want music NFTs to be rare, and the fact that we develop things that people desire or fight to get, excites me more,” DJ Agoria told Decrypt at this year's NFT Paris.
For him, it's about going beyond platforms like Spotify where "for $10, you can have any type of music at any time."
DJ Agoria started his career back in the 1990s when raves dotted clubs around Europe, and those vibes are still alive today, making him “really believe in the desire and the need to look for something more.”
DJ Agoria: Music NFTs and beyond
Heavily involved in generative art—a process of generating new ideas, forms, shapes, or colors using algorithms—DJ Agoria is also curious about what artificial intelligence is capable of.
“I work a lot with AI and usually say that the camera is the eye of the visible and AI is the eye for the invisible,” he told Decrypt. “It's very cool to look for things that we can't capture with their eyes and that's why I'm interested in doing art with AI because it’s like we finally find things that are usually invisible.”
Last year, DJ Agoria also partnered with hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger to launch his inaugural NFT artist series—a massive 20ft generative art piece in the form of a psychedelic puzzle broken down into pieces that can be seen on the artist’s website.
The project promises a unique experience of minting, buying, selling, and trading the NFTs, which the artist—along with his other initiatives in the realms of music art—sees as a cool way for people to understand his works and possibly be willing to learn more about crypto and NFTs.
“We are educating a new move, a new generation of people and I think it's very promising,” DJ Agoria told Decrypt. “We are just at the beginning and I strongly believe that there will be something very interesting in the future."
He also has a few words for those still skeptical, saying the important thing is not to come here for the money as “you will lose for sure.”
“We are not here for the money, we are here as artists to find and develop new ideas that were not possible in Web2,” said DJ Agoria. "That's what is exciting: using Web3 and blockchain technologies to do things we couldn't do before.”