The Whales will be based on avatars from the Solana NFT project, and tunes will come from both traditional and Web3 channels.
The famous hip-hop music label Def Jam Recordings is the latest to try to make a band with NFT avatars. Today, they announced that they will work with the Solana-based project Catalina Whale Mixer to make a virtual band.
The Whales
The virtual band, called The Whales, will be made up of colorful whale avatars from the Solana profile picture (PFP) collection and music from what the companies say will be “an all-star cast” of musicians and producers. The names of these people haven’t been made public yet.
It follows a similar strategy to Kingship, a virtual band composed of Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars turned into band members with ambitions to release music around the metaverse. Kingship is distributed by 10:22PM, a Web3-focused sublabel of the big music label Universal Music Group (UMG), while Def Jam is also falls under the UMG umbrella.
WAGMI Beach, the studio behind Catalina Whale Mixer, was formed by veterans of the music industry; experts will influence The Whales’ music. However, according to WAGMI Beach CEO Carlo Fox, Whale NFT holders will help define the project and their own NFT avatars might potentially join the band through an upcoming audition process.
“Instead of it just being like four guys in their garage that are deciding what it is, it’s like this community of all these people determining the direction that it goes,” Fox told Decrypt.
Chauncey “Hit-Boy” Hollis and James Fauntleroy, who have both won Grammys, ended up making the music for Kingship.
Fox said that this way, all people who own a Catalina Whale Mixer could have a say in some part of the project. His team’s experience in the entertainment industry makes it able to “tee up these opportunities for our community.”
Fox said that the popular non-NFT virtual band Gorillaz and veteran musician and producer Pharrell Williams (who is working on the Doodles NFT project) were some of the inspirations for The Whales. Benjamin Willis, who was also a founder of WAGMI Beach, said that the working title of the album is “A Compilation of Vibes.”
“It’s not depressing, it’s not dark,” Willis explained. “It’s aspirational, it’s fun—you can dance to it, you can party to it. That’s kind of the idea.”
What will happen next?
The first music from The Whales is supposed to come out this summer. Def Jam and WAGMI Beach plan to release music through traditional channels and as collectible music NFTs. In the same way, they are planning to perform at concerts, festivals, and digital metaverse worlds.
Willis said that the deal had been in the works for months and that there “were a lot of hoops to jump through” to pair a traditional record label with a Web3 upstart. In the end, the people who started WAGMI Beach said they were glad to have Def Jam’s help with this new project.
“Def Jam is one of the most important labels of all time, culturally—and from early hip-hop onward, they’ve always taken a leap on supporting what’s new before it’s popular,” said Fox. “We were very humbled and appreciative that they were able to see the vision and why this is something special.”
Content Source: decrypt.com
