Blockchain technology has paved a new way for communities to connect. In the entertainment industry, it is shaping a unique space for fans to connect with their favorite artists. This episode’s guest is all about bringing together the fans of America’s favorite inspirational action hero, Sylvester Stallone. Joel Comm is the co-founder of PlanetSLY, Sylvester Stallone’s first NFT project, which creates a limited-edition series that punches the Ethereum blockchain in the face. Joel shares how this project took shape and how they are throwing in that physical experience. Joining the conversation, Barnaby Andersun also drops by to share some pretty epic technology he’s building to revolutionize the music industry. He talks about BandNFTs, where musicians come and launch the first-ever multi-track music NFTs. This episode is jam-packed with information! Tune in to not miss out on how NFTs are taking over the entertainment industry.

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Joel Comm Of PlanetSLY – Limited-Edition Sylvester Stallone NFTs + Barnaby Andersun’s Band NFTs – Democratization Of The Music Industry, And More…

This episode features Joel Comm, the Cofounder of PlanetSLY, Sylvester Stallone’s first NFT project, which creates a limited edition series that punches the Ethereum blockchain in the face. Created by Stallone himself, PlanetSLY is a community that will provide events, benefits and many other utility-based opportunities for its holders.

Joel is an internet pioneer, bestselling author, international keynote speaker and the cohost of two top cryptocurrency and blockchain podcasts. He and his partners have minted 1.5 million NFTs. They now advise projects and companies in the blockchain, NFT, play-to-earn and metaverse spaces and have quite a bit of fun while doing it. Joel, welcome to the show.

It’s good to be back. I was on Episode 12. That’s what we decided. It’s great to see you growing, expanding your reach, and talking about these NFTs we love so much.

It’s hard to believe 113 episodes have flown by in less than a year. It was super cool to get a little sneak peek of this drop at NFTLA for anyone that had a chance to go over there. They might have seen Sylvester do a little virtual cameo on the main stage.

He opened the main stage. He was the first one on the big screen right there.

We’re doing arts and entertainment. We’re in LA. You got to start with Stallone. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to unpack this drop. I’m super excited to learn more. Thanks, Joel. We got 9,997 SLYGuys popping over to your nearest computer in May 2022. What are these SLYGuys? How did this project take shape?

My partner is Bill Zanker. Those of us who have been around for a while might know him from Learning Annex. He used to put on these arena events all over the country and would welcome celebrity and former president speakers to be headliners. They would pack 20,000 people in there. Bill is a pro at putting on events with his team. He’s got a long-standing relationship with SLY. He had listened to our podcast, The Nifty Show.

He was like, “How do we bring some celebs into the space and bring value to their fans so they can connect with them?” I said, “I got the ticket. Let’s put together a piece of generative art and bring on a world-class designer.” We hired Clark Mitchell. You’ve seen his artwork. You just don’t necessarily know it because he’s the guy who works for Disney and Hasbro and does boxes for Monopoly games and stuff. If you’ve ever bought a Star Wars Monopoly game, it was done by Clark Mitchell, the incredibly talented designer.

His son Cameron works with him. We said, “Let’s create these cool generatives that are inspired by the life and films of Sylvester Stallone.” This guy has done five decades of movies and has portrayed fighters, military veterans, gangsters and cops. He’s America’s favorite inspirational action hero. Many people love and respect Sly. We’re like, “Let’s create these generative NFTs that have all these cool attributes and characteristics.”

We’re working directly with OpenSea. They’re going to be doing an auction of 25 one-of-one Golden Editions. It was super important to Sly that he connect with his fans. If you check him out on Instagram, he’s always walking around his place there in Florida and inspiring people. The goal here is to give people cool NFTs that are each going to be unique and with real-life deliverables so that Sly can connect with his fans in a tangible way.

You do shows like yours and ours and learn a thing or two about building a real community, creating real utility, and having fun with drops. It sounds like this drop has a lot of your fairy dust from being in this space for so long, combined with Sly and who he is as a human being and a living icon.

Why Bill came to me is because he has seen that. We have been doing over 1.5 million NFTs of our original properties. What could we do working with a talent like himself? After he signed on, we got to go to Florida and meet with him. This was back when I had my moving-to-the-beach hair or my long hair. I spent a couple of hours with him. What’s interesting is those LIFE magazines had just come out that week on the newsstand. We didn’t even know.

We saw them on the newsstand. We picked up half a dozen of them that were there and brought them to him that day. I’ve got an autographed one. Bill’s got one. There are a couple of others floating around here with the team. He was tremendous, humble, likable and down to Earth. I needed to persuade him a little bit that NFTs were the right thing for him. You can see how I did that. It was a sock in the jaw. I pulled that off. It was a tough one.

I got to ask for a follow-up on the genesis of this thing. Here’s one of the things that we have seen, especially once we start intersecting the actors, even though Sylvester Stallone is much more than an actor, director, producer and writer with studios, ownership of IP and navigating all that. Did you have to work through anything like that as it related to the characters you’re portraying in the NFTs or the relationship to the movies, which has some ownership, I’m sure, with the studio level as well?

Anytime you’re dealing with talent, there are lawyers involved. These NFTs are inspired by Stallone, his life and his characters, but you’re not going to see any that are replicas of those actual characters. We changed up the designs on them and gave them items that were unique to the NFT collection. It’s the spirit of it. There’s no doubt. You look, “This is Sly.” You look at his face and you’re like, “There’s nobody like this guy.” How many of us have gone to Philadelphia and gone up the steps there with our arms in the air?

What’s cool is in Discord, which is Discord.gg/PlanetSLY, the people share stories and fan art, make videos, and show Sly love. That’s what we’re calling it to get whitelisted. Tell us your story. Make a 30-second video. Post it on TikTok. Tell us what film inspired you most, what character or what line. Maybe do an impression. Give us a, “Yo, Adrian.” We don’t want people getting on the whitelist to flip these. We want fans. Sly wants to connect with millions of fans out there.

PlanetSLY: Utility is essential now, especially with these generative PFP projects.

By showing Sly love, you’re putting in an actual effort to say, “I want one of these SLYGuys.” The real-world benefits that are going to come are what’s going to excite the collectors. If you collect any three SLYGuys and have them in your wallet by the snapshot date to be announced, you’re going to get a ticket to a private dinner in Miami that Sly is going to host. He’s going to be there. He’s going to speak and have dinner there. What an awesome opportunity to hear the inspiration in the room with him.

We’re working with OpenSea to present 25 one-of-one Goldens that are autographed. He signed 25 times and numbered each one of them digitally. They’re placed onto these Goldens that are each unique. If you have one of those, you’re going to get a private VIP experience at the dinner in Miami. You will get a meet-and-greet and photograph, shake his hand, talk to him for a minute and connect with them. Those are just the beginning of the IRL experiences and physical and digital goods that we hope to deliver to SLYGuy holders.

It reminds me that we’re working on a celebrity chef-related one where we’re doing some fun stuff around a dinner like that. You’ve got 9,997. Theoretically, you could have a few thousand people ready to rock out at that dinner. It’s a much lower number based on who will travel and grab three. That’s super cool. I wanted to ask. Is Gold different from the Signature? Is that the Signature?

The Signature versions are the Golden versions. I’ll give you a taste of that. We can go through some of the other ones that are in the collection.

I want to talk about that one that was up there with the hunter’s hat and the dog because that one was dope.

That was pretty cool. Here’s a sample of one of the Goldens. This is number five. It’s a Golden SLYGuy with unique attributes. It’s got his signature. You can see he has numbered it. This will be mint number five. Numbers 1 through 25 will be mint number 1 through 25 through the OpenSea auction that takes place. We’re excited to be partnering with the guys at OpenSea. Sly is going to be front and center on launch day. People will be able to bid on the Goldens.

The mint, which will come publicly at PlanetSLY.com, will be for the remaining variations. We’re looking around mid-May 2022 for the mint date. The Discord is growing quickly. We’re up to 18,000 already. The word is getting out there. We expect a lot of demand for these. It’s going to be challenging for people to even necessarily get three. They’re going to have to want it to be able to get those because we want to make sure as many people as possible can own a SLYGuy.

How is the auction going to work? Is it a declining price auction or the highest bid?

I wish I had a specific answer to it yet. The team is still speaking with OpenSea on exactly how that’s going to work. More details on that are forthcoming. If you get into the Discord, that’s a great place to ask those questions there. There’s the one you were talking about with the blue dog. Sly requested this.

Does this go back to the story of him selling his dog when he was broke?

That’s got something to do with it. He’s so inspirational because the guy was broke. None of these studios wanted to take on the Rocky script. He was so certain that this was a winning script that he sold his dog to feed it himself at that time. He ended up producing the movie himself and then he went and bought back the dog. What a badass.

The story was he wanted himself to also be in the movie. They were like, “We like the script. We will keep that, but you’re not going to be the movie.” He’s like, “No.” They would give him a significant amount of money for that, but he had to turn it down based on his true dream. His dog was the only thing had.

You told the story better because you’re more accurate. I appreciate that.

It’s a very nice-looking NFT. I love the bright colors of it.

It’s a rare dog. There are two dogs in the collection. There’s the other one with the ski goggles on. There are a bunch of different faces. In some of them, he’s got a black eye. In some of them, he’s battered and he’s got two black eyes. He’s got different hair, things for his head and some accessories. There are close to 100 torsos with different colored sweaters, t-shirts, long sleeves, short sleeves, jackets, and gear.

There are a lot of pants and shorts. The left and right hands are their own distinct attributes and backgrounds. You can see how it changes up. He’s even got tattoos on his torsos. You won’t be able to see some of the tattoos because they’re under a long sleeve shirt. It’s the only time I’ve recommended that we have an invisible attribute in an NFT because it makes perfect sense that he could have a tattoo that you can’t visibly see.

Anytime you're dealing with talent, there are lawyers involved. Click To Tweet

We should tell the readers we’re pumped. We’re going to grab some of these guys and appreciate the opportunity to be involved in this project because we’re all fans of Sly and you. It’s two icons in the space coming together. Let me ask you a question about the drop. There’s some sophisticated thinking here. To what extent do you feel that what you’ve learned from doing this show and being in the space in 2021, particularly where there has been so much evolution in the NFT space, has influenced your thinking on how you execute this drop? What are some of the things, for example, that you are doing here that maybe you wouldn’t have even thought about before?

Utility is essential now, especially with these generative PFP projects. People want more than a profile picture. These NFTs become tickets to experiences. We’re hiding some surprises in here. Once we hit 100% on sale, which we think is going to happen quickly, we’re going to have announcements to make. There are going to be people that are holding IRL deliverables in their NFT. They might not necessarily know that item.

For example, this guy is wearing a very specific helmet. He’s got a specific microphone and photo in hand. Any of these items could end up being a deliverable for a physical good, a digital good, something for the community or a real-life experience. We’re not going to reveal what those are right away. It’s going to be up to the community to speculate, “What could this be? Does having a Molotov cocktail or a painted face mean something?”

Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. I’ve learned to add utility on an ongoing basis, not just coming out of the gate with it and saying, “This is what you’re going to get,” but having that mystery behind, “What’s possible here? How does Sly continue to connect with his fans beyond the initial launch of this?” That’s what has gotten me excited about NFTs. It is a loyalty card that can keep giving. There are also six unique complete one-of-ones that we have titles for in the collection.

There’s the Prisoner. It is a singular character. It’s not a mix and match of different attributes. There’s the Racecar Driver, the Gangster and the Veteran. There’s a unique one-of-one. It’s the Award-winner. There are going to be chances for people to get some unique pieces out of this. We’re excited about the collection. Once you jump into the Discord, you will see people are hyped. They love Sly and they cannot wait to mint these.

The utility aspect reminded me of our Spirit Seed NFTs, which we handed out. To be honest, it was a utility that we let people know about, but I don’t think they realize the impact when they got their free tickets to NFTLA. If they could be there live, they could utilize it. If they couldn’t, potentially they could trade it, pass it along to a friend and stuff like that. Those are fun surprises. They always leave a bunch of people kicking themselves.

One of the guys that won one of the Spirit Coins from Nicole Buffett owns an amazing Thai restaurant in LA, Emporium Thai. We will have to go there when you’re on this side of the country. This is his first time buying an NFT and now he’s got this physical item that he gets to hold. It’s worth 2 or 3 ETH on top of all this other utility. As we’re thinking about this, Joel, we’re building bridges here to the mainstream. When you take an iconic figure like Sly and throw in that physical experience, that connects a lot of dots for a lot of people.

It does that to the wise. There are people who think that NFTs are just right-click and save as, “Now I own your NFT.” It’s okay. They don’t have to understand it. They will when it’s somebody that they’re following. It’s the way to onboard people in NFTs that are like, “NFTs stink.” Until their favorite band or musician does it, they’re like, “I want that because I connect with them.” It’s their favorite TV show, actor or whatever it is. People are going to find their points of connection and then see the value. That’s how we’re going to mainstream and onboard people into the space.

Sly is a great avenue to do that. He’s got millions of people following him on Instagram. He’s excited about the set. We’re going to bring a bunch of new people in that love Sly and are falling into, “I don’t understand these, but I want that. Help me to get it.” We will teach them how to use MetaMask and how to get Ethereum in their wallets and help them treasure this. I hope for many people that this is their first profile picture NFT and that they will use it proudly on their Twitter, Instagram and other social accounts.

We touched upon the intricacies of having to deal with a movie star, IP and all that stuff. I would love to get your perspective since you’ve dropped so many NFTs. What’s the process like of filtering who you might partner with, subject matter, artists and all that stuff? It would be fascinating to hear a little bit of your perspective on having such an inside look at things.

When dealing with high-profile people, it’s a lot more intricate than when you’re doing something on your own. When we created Blockchain Heroes and minted them on WAX, it was me, Travis, Zach and Jharek. It’s the four of us. We’re directing everything and we’re not going to anybody to ask for permissions and get approval. We’re driving that car and we take it where we want to go. It’s a lot simpler.

When you’re dealing with a high-level personality, there are things to watch out for. There are lawyers, trademarks, studios and copyrights involved. It takes more effort. Also, where it was simple for us to mint on WAX, Ethereum is a little bit complicated. We have partnered with the company Galaxis, which you might know as Ether.Cards initially. Andras and his team are fantastic. One of the things I love about their technology is that on Ethereum, they’re able to build a switch that tells you whether or not a redeemable has been redeemed on an NFT.

A lot of times, something will come out with a redeemable and then they will sell it on the secondary market after they have redeemed it. The person buying it doesn’t know that it has already been redeemed. Using Galaxis’ technology, you will clearly see what is attached to the NFT that is still a redeemable item and what hasn’t. I love that. They’re a great team. They’re our partner on this.

We’re partnering with OpenSea. That’s new. We’re working with the biggest marketplace in the world by a long shot and having them put us front and center. They’re going to for anybody who hasn’t heard about the drop by then because they’ve got all the eyeballs there. That’s different. In working with partners, there’s a lot of back and forth and compromise, “We should do this or that.” You learn, work and play nice with others.

In projects like this, it’s almost so exciting for everyone from the beginning. It becomes this pile of ideas. Everybody gets excited. They have their favorites. You have to do the process of pruning and approving and all that stuff.

There’s our team. Sly is the battalion commander. There’s Bill Zanker, Founder of Learning Annex, his son, Dylan, Sam Delcanto and Chris Murray who have been by his side on his team. They’re all fantastic, super smart and generous people. There’s my specific SLYGuy. We’re all working together to make this a reality. We’re convinced that it’s going to be a huge sale. They’re going to go quickly. We want as many people as possible to be able to get there. We don’t want the whales to come in and snag them all. You got to get into the Discord and get on the SLY-List to make sure that you are in the queue for these.

PlanetSLY: People are going to find their points of connection and then see the value. That’s how we’re going to mainstream and onboard people into the space.

The mint day or shortly thereafter, once all of the craziness ends, is the reward for all of that negotiating and putting things together.

The reveal will come. You will know exactly what you’re bidding on for the Goldens. They will be clear because they’re numbered 1 through 25. You will see exactly who the characters are and be able to go to OpenSea to bid on those auctions. For the remaining ones, there will be a certain number minted for Sly, the team and some of our partners. There will be those that the public is minting. All of those will be together random. There will be a reveal several days after the collection sells out. That’s when the real fun begins because that’s for Sly when the connecting with fans is going to take place.

We will be waiting patiently for it. We’re looking forward to that. Thanks for sharing all the deets on that. You’re at the tip of the spear of the Web3 and NFT world. Where are you drawing inspiration from these days? We love to always share this with our readers.

Like you, we get so many emails from other projects. To be candid, it takes a lot to get me excited. I want to see innovation. I want to see people taking NFTs to the next level and utility. That’s why I insisted that I don’t want to just do a PFP project as part of this team. This has got to deliver and continue delivering. I love to sit around with Travis, my cohost. We ideate, “What if we did this or that?”

I try not to watch what others are doing too closely because I never want to be accused of copying what anybody else has done. There are enough crazy ideas going on in my imagination. There’s no short supply of them. I need a breather after this particular launch and to sit back and enjoy playing with my NFTs, which is what I do. I mint other people’s NFTs all the time. I’ve got my collection. We used to play with our toys when we were little boys and girls. I look at my NFTs and we can consider that playing with them.

You’re trying to be original with everything. I have to ask. We talked about this. Did the idea of the Sly Ape Club ever come onto the table as a research idea?

No. Apes are great. I’ve got no problem with Apes. There are a lot of derivatives out there, but this was always going to be a Stallone-inspired collection to be close to him. There are only 9,997 SLYGuys ever. Think about that. We talk about these collections that have 10,000 PFPs. We’re like, “There’s plenty to go around for everybody.” I like to look at NFTs through the lens of the future. I’ve collected all kinds of things like comic books, vintage software and Star Wars cards.

When you look at them at the time, you’re like, “These aren’t worth a whole lot.” Over time, when you look at NFTs from the future, these collections that have 10,000 when you’ve got several million, 50 million or 100 million people, these are the OGs of the space. Some of these collections that didn’t sell out at the time only minted 1,500 of 10,000. Don’t you think some of those are going to be revived and come back? This was thought of as a failure at the time, but now these are super rare. We don’t know which of those they’re going to be.

A lot of these collections might have DAOs or don’t even have one. In the future, a DAO could form around a defunct collection out of nowhere. Thirty years from now, that could happen. Somebody can come along and say, “We love these zombie octopuses. We’re forming a DAO around people who hold these. We’re going to deliver this to them.” That’s mind-blowing to me that anybody can bring value to any collection at any time. It doesn’t have to come from the creators.

There are a lot of projects that go down below the cost of gas to unload them. At the same time, when you think about fast-forwarding five years, are you going to have more regret if you sold a killer collection that has the potential to be worth a lot more and bring you joy and happiness or even more regret if you don’t sell it and it goes up and down a little bit? At the end of the day, it makes sense to trust your gut, buy projects that you believe in, go into it with the long-term mentality, or buy a couple of them and make sure you hold your favorite.

You do you. Short-term thinking in the NFT world is cancer. People have developed this popcorn microwave mentality, “When moon?” They expect that as soon as it sells out, the floor is going to rock in. If it falls below that, “Team, do something.” I see immaturity rampant in the space. There’s no sense in allowing time to pass. My parents would buy stock and if they got 10% returns a year, they were doing well. That was a solid investment. You have people out there expecting 10X overnight. I’m like, “These people have not tasted the real world because that’s a rare anomaly.” You’re not going to have Moonbirds all the time. It’s not going to happen.

It’s the same thing with even interest rates, “It’s 5%. It’s through the roof.” Historically, it’s still disgustingly low to our benefit. I wanted to highlight one thing that you said earlier because you don’t hear it that much. That was using the reference to toys and thinking about the NFTs, spending time with them, playing with them and going through them. It’s hard if you have a lot.

For those of us that have been fans of NFTs for a while, we got a lot. It’s hard to keep track of what’s happening with all of them. It is an interesting way to think about it, “I’m going to crack this thing out, take a look at it, see what’s going on in the community, play with it, make it into Discord, look at the utility, indulge in this experience for this particular NFT for this amount of time and give my attention to it.”

How many times, Jeff, have you gone back to a project and gone, “They’re staking now. There’s a game I can play. I can earn tokens.” You’re surprised to discover, “This team followed through and built something.” When I buy stuff, I put my trust in the team. You know that there are going to be some rugs and some that fail, at least at that time, and some that are going to take a lot longer to develop. Through the lens of the future, if they are honest people and intend to follow through, most people will be happier than not unless the whole market falls apart. There’s always that quid pro quo. If the economy fails, NFTs are going to fail as well, at least for a time.

That is a fantastic segue to our next segment on a hot topic that we both will appreciate.

Barnaby, would you like to join us?

People want more than a profile picture. These NFTs become tickets to experiences. Click To Tweet

What’s up?

It’s great to be here.

Barnaby was also an early guest in Episode 8, if I’m not mistaken. At that time, you had a chance to share with us some pretty epic technology you’re building to revolutionize the music industry. You’ve been doing that. It’s a great allusion to what Joel said. Sometimes it takes a little while to get it right. You’ve been building in self-mode for a long time now. Tell us. What are you launching in April 2022? We want to know.

I’m thrilled about the timing. It has been a while since I was last on the show since we have been working on and building out BAND Royalty, since I’ve also been having Joel with us as part of our core team and since you bought one of those NFTs as one of our first investors. It’s coming together.

This was not a setup. Joel didn’t know that Barnaby was going to be the hot topic. We kept that as a fun little surprise.

I did not know. I saw it. I was like, “I’ve worked with Barnaby.” You’re like, “I know.”

It’s part of the utility of coming on the show.

As a follow-up, we realized we’re building our next NFT project, the Living Tree NFTs. We decided to bake in some icons for the first 50 episodes of the show. You two will be represented within that collection. Barnaby, you got a little 8-bit record for BAND Royalty and Joel with an 8-bit microphone.

We can announce it officially. We will be giving you each one of those NFTs when we launch that project soon. To offer a fun opportunity for folks to connect, if somebody gets an NFT with the icon of your episode, they can connect with your projects and so on. It would be an interesting way that we can connect and build the ecosystem. It’s fun stuff.

Speaking of thrilled, what are you thrilled at in terms of what you’ve built here? Tell us what has been going on here.

You’re spot on about it being in stealth mode. We did sell $1 million worth of NFTs in 2021 as part of the private stealth sale. That was how we started BANDRoyalty.com with this vision that my business partner Noble DraKoln had for many years. He comes from a hedge fund background. He has been investing in music royalties for over two decades, going back into the ’90s. He had this vision on how we can democratize and ideally even decentralize music royalties.

After we had already done some great work in other NFTs and NFT games that we launched, Joel was in there helping us out with that. That was the King of Quotes. We cut our teeth on a few other NFT projects. One day, Noble said to me in March 2021, “What if we could launch an NFT series that connects with music royalties?” He got my attention and I was like, “Tell me all about it.”

We laid out the framework and began building an ecosystem that would combine us to buy real music royalties. We went and bought a catalog of Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Timbaland and platinum-selling artists, bought their rights, and then connected up in a DeFi smart contract their earnings. That has come to fruition as well. We have had twelve months of earnings on that catalog. What’s coming out?

We’ve got two parts to the business. It’s a lot to take in, but the first half is earning passively on music royalties. That’s BANDRoyalty.com. You got those BR1-NFTs. That’s where you get to buy one. There are only 3,000. You will start earning on that catalog of Jay-Z, Beyoncé, etc. Pop over here and then have a look. That’s what’s coming out. We are launching the full integration of the staking of those NFTs in April 2022. Even potentially more exciting is if you go to BANDNFTs.com.

That’s the other half, which is where musicians come and launch the first-ever multi-track music NFTs. You need to connect up to the Ethereum mainnet there. That’s launching on April 21st, 2022. You asked what are we excited about. We’re excited about rewarding our early investors with earnings on a music catalog. That’s point one. Point two is the launch of the world’s first multi-track music NFT platform.

I’m sure this has all been pretty much smooth sailing. There are no hiccups, glitches or groundbreaking manual stuff that you’ve got to do. I’m sure you mostly did this from the beach in Puerto Rico with Joel sipping piña coladas or something.

PlanetSLY: It’s mind-blowing to me that anybody can bring value to any collection at any time. It doesn’t have to come from the creators.

It has been a lot of crazy work, even from a legal perspective. Joel talked about working with Sly and making sure that everything was legit. You could imagine. We’re dealing with some top-tier artists here and major celebrities. It’s a perfect segue into everything that Joel was talking about. Here we are. There are two halves to the business to BAND Royalty. The first half is not seeking permission.

We just buy the royalties. Beyoncé is not part of BAND Royalty, and neither is Jay-Z, Timbaland or anything. We had Justin Timberlake and their officers ringing us up. Sony rang us up and said, “What on Earth are you doing? How are you doing this?” They couldn’t do anything when they saw that we own the literal real-world contract to these platinum tracks. That’s permissionless.

We buy royalties and you earn passively on them through the NFT staking. The other side, which is coming out now, is the BAND NFTs where any of these artists or any artists can come to us. Click on Andie Case. There are two tracks. They’re the same song, but one is a radio edit without swearing. You’re seeing this mashup of Spotify and OpenSea. No one has ever seen an NFT like this. Embedded in this is the multi-track.

It works on OpenSea. We have made this fully interoperable with the ERC-1155 NFTs. There are only going to be 777 of these. Andie Case has got 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube. What is so interesting with this is that they’re going to only be 0.03, which is about $100. We think BAND NFTs is such a cool business because we don’t have to go out and get the customers. Think about every musician and the next one has got 5 million.

Here’s what starts happening here, with each musician doing a drop and letting their fan base know. As Joel was saying in the previous segment about the onboarding, many people think NFTs are going to be the onboarding into this, but the fans of the musicians are going to be onboarding into this, hopefully, through BAND NFTs, which are interoperable with all the other NFT marketplaces.

When people go to listen to these tracks, do they need to be listened to on the BAND platform?

You can see the tracks there. You can play any of these.

When it comes to the royalty portions of things, the royalties are coming in from the plays on all sorts of platforms as well, like Spotify, YouTube or wherever royalties come in or depending on the particular contract you have.

I want to separate that these are digital collectibles. You don’t access the royalties with these, not yet. We’re pushing out to the market something brand new. We’re also separating the listening of music from music as a tradable digital instrument. You can go listen to music for free. People don’t realize that artists are making less than 12% of all the revenue. Forty million plays on Spotify earn you $2,000. That’s it. We’re platinum-selling multimillion-dollar deals last century. They are a couple of thousand dollars.

Most artists are doing it tough. What this does is it opens up the doorway to an entirely new product. Most of these musicians have never sold a physical item, not even merch. Musicians are so into making music and doing concerts. That’s how they make their money. Here they have, for the first time in a decade, an actual product that is music and that they can sell as a collectible. If they launched, let’s say, 1,000 or 10,000, they could sell out depending upon the size of their fan base. We’re building this whole thing out as a web.

Royalties are going to be coming in but think of them as purely collectible items. It’s very similar to the Sly Stallone collection where you are a fan of Andie Case or you’re smart and you’re like, “There are only 1.4 million-plus fans. What if I get one of these or a couple of hundred?” There are only 700 of these NFTs. Maybe those fans might want one. What happens if I snap it up before them because they don’t know how to do crypto yet?

There’s so much goodness built into this. I wanted to ask this also. When you say multi-track NFTs, what do you mean by that?

You can put up an album on this with ten tracks. There are other music NFTs out there. Kings of Leon sold millions of dollars in 2021 on their first album. When you go and have a listen to their album, it’s one file. They have to be an MP3 or MP4. It’s typically an MP4 with a visual, but it’s one file. How are you going to skip through the tracks on one of those NFTs? You can’t. I’m sure that of those 10 tracks in that album, 2 or 3 of them are going to be your favorites. You don’t want to listen to the others. You’re going to want to skip through them. The only place you will be able to do that is on BAND NFTs.

It’s amazing how you have evolved here. I’ve got to ask. You’re an entrepreneur. You’ve led a number of different projects over the years. I’m curious. What was the inspiration for this iteration of BAND Royalty? It’s a different foundation but very much so related to what BAND NFTs are.

That came about through our whole team, which included our legal team. What started happening was for us to pay out on the music royalty. We’re going to answer your question on tokenomics because we have built out an entire music ecosystem with tokens. You’re earning them in the governance tokens to pay you out for the first version of the music royalty earnings on the catalog. We couldn’t pay you out in cash, Bitcoin or Ethereum. Otherwise, they might be considered security.

When we realized that, we had to build out a governance token that you could only earn through the staking of the BR1-NFTs. There were only 3,000 from 2021, and then because of that, we were like, “What else are we going to do?” We can keep launching our NFTs, but we saw that there was going to be this need for artists to come on board. That’s why we launched the RYLT token or the fungible token.

Short-term thinking in the NFT world is cancer. Click To Tweet

The RYLT token will be the currency of music where you will be able to trade, buy, sell, and stake the RYLT tokens on the BAND NFTs platform to further support the artists and yourself. In 2021, we realized that there was a way to have a token that you staked on the platform where you earn on every trade. Who do we see do that? It’s LooksRare. They did that vampire attack on OpenSea.

OpenSea never launched their token. There’s the $200 million per day on OpenSea trading. They’re keeping 2.5% to 5 million-plus per day. OpenSea gets all that. LooksRare is sharing that with the token holders. We’re doing that as well with the RYLT token. We had to think through, “How can we reward the fan base of the community with artists launching and multi-track innovation?” That’s how we build up the whole token ecosystem.

Joel, do you have anything to add from an advisory perspective working with these cats?

I’ve worked with a lot of people. I am not blowing smoke here when I say I’ve seen Barnaby and Noble work harder than any other pair to bring massive value. I’m super excited about this project. They’re pioneering with what they’re doing here and kicking ass. I’m not being a financial advisor here, but there’s no doubt to me that music in NFTs is going to be massive. I’m betting on this particular horse. These guys are going to help lead the way.

That’s an amazing take on it. There’s the multi-track support and how that works and the entire function of it. It feels very different from any other music project that we have seen in the NFT space. It’s dropping officially.

Head over to BAND NFTs and register on the site. I’m thrilled to be part of it. We can’t say any of the big names, but some very big names are in the queue. We have listed out the next nine artists that are launching. Some of them coming out have fans in the tens of millions. You start thinking through. What happens when they start launching? That’s not even the big guys yet.

What happens when they tell their inner circle or the people who have got 200 to 300 million fans and they want to do their launch and drop? They realize that we’re the only place with a multi-track and that they can get the governance tokens to control where we’re spending to buy more music catalogs and the RYLT token is staking so that everybody starts earning. I’ll leave it to your imagination where this can go.

We’re super excited. We appreciate all the work you’ve put in here. Before we wrap up here, we want to make sure everybody knows the next steps to get involved. Skirt around a little bit and refer to this or that. Where should we send people to get to know more?

Go to BAND NFTs to register your email so that you can see what’s the next drop. Every week from now on, there’s a new musician drop. Once we start selling out on those, then they will be every 2 weeks and then 5 weeks. Head over to BANDNFTs.com. Go over to BANDRoyalty.com as well and check out the whole platform if you feel inspired and you want to see if you can still secure 1 of the 3,000 foundation NFTs to start owning the governance tokens and buy up some of those RYLT tokens so you can start earning on the whole platform and staking.

Register your email. We’ve got so much material. Here’s the thing. We have tried to make it as simple as possible. The music industry is complex. It’s all behind closed doors. We’re trying to educate and show people how it works and most importantly, reward the artists who are missing out and their fans. We love it. It’s a community effort. We’re going to build this out as DAO. All of you can participate. Let’s all make money with music and support the people who are making the music.

I’m 100% aligned with you, Barnaby. Thanks for sharing with us. That’s a killer hot topic. Go check out BAND NFTs and BAND Royalty. We’re big supporters as well. We think you will be a big fan once you learn more. Thanks. We will talk to you soon.

Thanks, everyone.

That’s good stuff. What a show overall. There’s so much goodness baked into these projects. We talked to a lot of folks. The utility side of both of these projects and everything we have talked about are taking things to another level. We’re on this utility train and it has left the station. Many cool things are happening and iterating as quickly as the space overall has iterated. Kudos for building that into these projects. Before we break overall for the show, we also wanted, Joel, to give you a chance to let folks know where to learn more about PlanetSLY as well as your individual socials and any other places that people go to follow what you’re up to.

I appreciate you having me on. PlanetSLY.com is the website. The link to the Discord is Discord.gg/PlanetSLY. It’s @PlanetSLYNFT on Twitter and Instagram. Make sure you follow the official Sylvester Stallone account there. You will see that he is verified. If you want to connect with me, it’s @JoelComm. Check out The Bad Crypto Podcast, The Nifty Show or maybe both.

Check it all out. That’s amazing stuff and a big inspiration for us as well. Thanks so much. Also, for our readers, we talked about doing a little giveaway. We’ve got a little info on that. Josh, did you want to give the deets on that one?

We are giving away a few SLYs to some lucky readers, if I’m not mistaken. Is that correct, Joel?

I can’t recall exactly what we said, but it’s somewhere in my email.

There are at least two. We will figure it out. It’s not that we haven’t done these contests before, but it’s going to be a special giveaway. You want to stay tuned to our social for that, especially if you’ve missed out. These things sell out. You will have a chance to get it through us. We appreciate the opportunity that you’re giving our fans there. Thanks so much.

I’m super excited about that one. The word on the street is there’s a late entry into our giveaway opportunity. Barnaby is coming through with an Andie Case multi-track NFT. Do you want to tell us anything else about this giveaway?

We know it’s going to be hotly sought-after. Joel was pointing to this. It’s the first to collect attention. Those CryptoPunks were the first ones. They had to give them away. Nobody wanted them. We have the CryptoKitties with each iteration, but there is some clout to the first-evers. This will be the first-ever multi-track NFT. We know that there are some people that are like, “Make sure I get one of those. Thanks very much.” We want to give your readers one as well because you never know where these things are going to go. Historically, what crypto is all based upon is typically the first.

Keep in mind that there are less than 777 now available.

Pay attention to our socials, please. We will give you all the deets on there about how to get one of these bad boys. Thanks again for your generosity with that. We have reached the outer limit at the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers to make this journey so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.

Important Links

• PlanetSLY.com
• Ethereum
• Episode 12 – Previous episode
• NFTLA
• The Nifty Show
• Discord.gg/PlanetSLY
• Blockchain Heroes
• WAX
• Galaxis
• Episode 8 – Previous episode
• BANDRoyalty.com
• King of Quotes
• BANDNFTs.com
• Andie Case
• @PlanetSLYNFT – Twitter
• Instagram – PlanetSLY
• Sylvester Stallone – Instagram
• @JoelComm – Instagram
• The Bad Crypto Podcast
• CryptoPunks
• CryptoKitties
• Spotify – Edge of NFT
• iTunes – Edge of NFT

About Joel Comm

How do you sum up 27 years of online business? From working with major brands such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Alibaba, Harvard, the UN and Twitter to writing 15 books to delivering keynotes and workshops all over the world to developing an iPhone app that was #1 in the world to having a top-rated cryptocurrency and blockchain podcast to pioneer NFTs to … so many other projects… welcome to my page.

So how may I help you?

If you’re looking for a speaker for your event, look no further. I’ll wow your audience with the customized topic of choice and leave them talking about what I’ve said long after I’m gone.

If you are looking for Blockchain content, the podcast I co-host is one of the most popular in the world. I’m an advisor to a number of Blockchain companies, and I may be a good fit for you as well.

If you’re looking for a JV Partner, I receive more proposals than I know what to do with. But if we decide to work together, you’ll find I’m one of the most creative and connected people you’ll find. (Real connections… not pretend or fake LinkedIn “connections”)

And if you want to consume any of my stuff, you won’t be disappointed. I’m not going to lie. It’s great stuff. It’s not about being egotistical. It’s about knowing that I am the absolute best at what I do. (I don’t do the other things cause I suck at them.)

Some of the things I am currently into:
– NFTs! I have minted over 1.5 million NFTs of our original IP and consult with brands on their Web3 strategy.
– Co-hosting a popular blockchain & cryptocurrency podcast (Go Bitcoin!)
– Brand Influencer – I’ve worked with all of these brands: Twitter, Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba, Salesforce, Cisco & others
– Social Media Strategy (more than 12 years)
– Live video marketing (since 2008)
– Writing books (#15 soon to be released)
– Keynote Presentations (My fav thing to do! Hire me… you’ll be glad you did)
– FUN! (It’s not just something to do when you aren’t working. It’s a lifestyle.)

Should we talk? Perhaps. If you think there’s a potential fit, reach out. And have an awesome day! #DoGoodStuff

☎ Call me today: (657) 200-5635 or email hello@joelcomm.com

About Barnaby Andersun

Barnaby Andersun has spent years developing blockchain and cryptocurrency solutions, acting as CEO of BlockAlchemy, a blockchain, ecommerce and digital design consulting firm. Being involved in all aspects of web technologies since their conception in the early nineties has made Barnaby a true pioneer in web development, ecommerce, branding, online marketing and blockchain. A sought after international speaker, Barnaby has been invited to speak on cryptocurrencies at Harvard and World Economic Forum, Davos, where he coordinated a blockchain digital asset conference, as well as Stanford University.

Following a 25 year career in technology, Barnaby began exploring blockchain in 2012, since 2016 he has made cryptocurrency and decentralisation the central focus for all of his online projects. Of particular fascination to Barnaby is the ICO process of inventing a unique use case and tokenomics for emerging cryptocurrency projects. As the founder of BlockAlchemy, each project that Barnaby works on must have leverage and scalability, with the blockchain focus on massive social impact.

* Barnaby was invited in January 2018 to speak in Davos at the World Economic Forum on cyrptocurrencies
* Invited to speak at Tokenomx blockchain conference, rated as top speaker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbxe-vyP6c8
* Moderated panel discussion on Bitcoin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhdudSDZwP0
* Blockchain panel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hAAhGwHcdM

Starting in technology in 1993, Barnaby’s career took off when he joined Australia’s first major Web Design & Development team in Feb ’95. Being involved in all aspects of web technologies since their conception has made Barnaby a true pioneer in web development, ecommerce, digital branding & online marketing.

A core focus is his successful blockchain ICO accelerator, BlockAlchemy.io is a full service agency which takes an ICO project from conception, token model, unique usecase through to whitepaper, marketing and investor engagement.

Focusing on the Asia region, Barnaby is set to introduce projects to key investors through China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singpaore.

If you’re excited by the possibilities of blockchain, Barnaby will take your project to the next level.

With a background as an in-demand international speaker, he continues to be invited to talk on innovation and blockchain, following speaking at Stanford and Harvard universities and World Economic Forum in Davos.