NFT micro-philanthropy gives a new voice to opera

Opera-centric DAO uses NFTs to open up new funding avenues for classical musicians outside of limiting legacy institutions. Interview

The music industry has been a major user of Web3 integration, with use cases ranging from song rights, blockchain-based streaming, and new forms of digital releases.

Genres such as pop, EDM, and hip-hop have so far represented non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the music industry. However, classical music, and more particularly opera, has just found its entrance.

Living Opera, a Web3 community that combines classical music with blockchain innovation, turns to emerging technology to give a new voice to prestigious art and the artists who perform it.

Soula Parassidis, CEO of Living Opera, told Cointelegraph in an interview that the first Magic Mozart NFT collection is a way to bring the innovative world of fintech into the traditional world of classical music and vice versa.

"We wanted it to be easy to understand, low risk, and make people feel comfortable."

Parassidis explains that these NFTs pay homage to the concept of "musikalisches würfelspiele", a game of dice to randomly generate music from precomposed options. It is one of the earliest examples of generative art and is allegedly attributed to Mozart.

Musicians have used NFTs to generate additional revenue and fan incentives, such as Grimes' $5.8 million digital asset project. For classical music, this could mean a whole new life and a step towards relevance for the next generation.

A survey by the National Endowment for the Arts found that the percentage of adults in the United States who attend at least one opera a year fell from an already low 3.2% in 2002 to 2, 2% in 2017.

The pandemic has worsened the situation by closing classical performance halls and opera houses around the world. One of the biggest opera houses in the world, the Metropolitan Opera, announced that in July 2021, its revenue was down $25 million from the previous year.