Nifty Sax:
How can you provide value? You're not trying to take money from people. You're trying to give them something and then in exchange they will give you some money. So, you really need to think, "How can I provide value for my collectors?" Otherwise, they could just listen to your music on Spotify if they just like the music. But how can you give them extra value? That's the big thing.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music, but I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

Michael Walker:
All right. I'm excited to be here today with my friend, Nifty Sax. Nifty, his real name is Milo, and he's an award-winning saxophonist, composer, music director. He creates music NFTs using a saxophone, especially sold over 60 ETH which at the time recording this is worth over $70,000 USD, and it even can be much higher depending on the conversion rate of his own NFTs, and he's sold about 230 ETH including his artist project which means roughly $300,000 in USD using these music NFTs. And so, he's someone that has a ton of experience in the world of music NFTs on Ethereum, and I'm excited to talk to him today about music NFTs in general and the landscape of Web3 in the music industry and to hear his take and his perspective on the future of music as it relates to NFTs. So, Milo, thank you so much for taking the time to come on here today.

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited about the conversation.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. So, maybe to kick things off, we can just start with if you could share a little bit about yourself and maybe how you got started and how did you discover the landscape of music NFTs in the first place?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah. So, I've been always a musician, so gigging musician, so that was my life. I've never done anything else, so I didn't know how to do anything else when the pandemic hit, and so I was out of a job, just everything went away. So, I was initially, the first year I thought I could get into writing music for advertising because I'm also a composer. I studied music. So, I started to produce some tracks like that, maybe some epic music for trailers and some other silly music for ads, whatever, but it wasn't really for me. And then I found out about NFTs around maybe December 2020, something like that, and around January, I realized that this was something new and it was something big, and for the first time in my life I felt like I was at the beginning of something, like the new internet. Everybody that was smart that I was following was starting to talk about this stuff and I said, "Okay, I have to look into it. This is important."

Nifty Sax:
And so, I looked into blockchain and what it meant for artists, and at the time, it meant that visual artists, digital artists, finally could definitely make some good money. Before, it was very difficult for digital artists to make money, and I quickly realized that there were no musicians doing anything on the blockchain, but I thought, "Why not? Why wouldn't I be able to put my music on the blockchain and do something cool with it?" And so, I really went full on. I just started to research and study as much as possible. There wasn't much information around, but I mostly was looking on Twitter, following people that were already doing it in art and trying to translate it into music, and so, yeah, I created my project.

Nifty Sax:
I had the idea of starting this new persona, Nifty Sax, which I don't really know why, but it was kind of a dumb idea just because I thought, "Crypto, everybody is anonymous or whatever," but it wasn't really about that. Mostly it was about me having the creative freedom and no attachment to Milo Lombardi and whatever that was before. I was like Milo Lombardi Quartet, jazz guy, and here I could do whatever I wanted because nobody knew me as Nifty Sax.

Nifty Sax:
I had zero followers on Twitter. I just created a brand new account, and I just created a collection of a hundred saxophone improvisations which was a creative explosion for me. I let go of all of the music that was bottled up inside of me. It was very avant-garde kind of stuff, so not for everyone for sure, but I needed to let that out. That was part of me, and I started classical music, so I needed to let that out of me. So, a hundred pieces, I put them out, I had the structure of sales that was going with an increasing price, and I had the moderate success, say. It didn't go that well. For the first six months, nobody knew what the hell I was doing and nobody even knew what the hell music NFTs were.

Nifty Sax:
But then I applied everything else that I've learned by looking at other people's project, like what they call PFP projects, like profile picture collections, and I created Nifty Sax Spheres with those in mind with all of those concepts which we can go into little more later if you want, and that project actually did really well. It sold out in less than 12 hours. It generated a lot of money for me at the time. It wasn't that much, maybe something like 30 or $40,000 which was cool. I did it overnight. It's like, "Okay, that's great."

Nifty Sax:
And of course, like everything, it was not an overnight success. It took me six months to get there, but that money was generated overnight which was cool, and it was kind of a story, a new story. And then, yeah, from then on I realized that a lot of people were lacking some of the knowledge that I acquired in all these months, and so, I started to help them out on Twitter, doing Twitter spaces, and then I founded Nifty Music which helps other artists to achieve their Web3 goals. Yeah, that's kind of a short story of what happened.

Michael Walker:
Super cool. Yeah, I think the whole landscape of music NFTs and Web 3.0s is really fascinating, and so, Nifty and I have a meeting for probably two or three months now, would you say?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
And we have a mutual friend and colleague, Fifi, and Fifi is very successful at selling her own NFTs. I know she's partnered with you, Milo, and she was also our Gold Artist of the Year last year for Modern Musician, and so, she's sort of like this bridge that's brought the two of us together, and it's been great being able to connect, and we're still kind of discovering best ways that we can collaborate long term, and that's part of the reason that we're doing this podcast right now.

Michael Walker:
But I would love to hear your take on... It's only been a couple of years. Right? This is a new movement that's happening right now in the music industry and you've learned a ton in the past couple of years as it relates to Web3 and music NFTs, and I'd be curious to hear your vision for why do you think that music NFTs are really a unique opportunity right now for musicians, and if someone's listening this right now, and maybe they've heard the kind of trendy things about... They've heard about NFTs. They've heard people are creating NFTs out of crazy things and making a lot of money with things like NFTs, but maybe they're a little bit skeptical, or are on the fence, or they just don't fully understand why, what makes music NFTs a special opportunity. Could you share a little bit about just insight in terms of what exactly is NFT, what do you think is kind of the landscape, and why do you think it's worth someone paying attention to right now if they're a musician?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, definitely. So, first of all, I think a lot of people are scared of NFTs because of how many scams there are. Because it's a new internet, you can imagine how many scams there were when the internet came about. It's a new thing. There were so many scams via email when people still trusted emails. Now, they go directly to spam. So, right now, it's kind of a wild west. So, there's definitely a lot of scams and you got to be careful what you're doing. You kind of have to research into security because you are your own bank. That's part of the crypto ethos. So, apart from all of that, if you learn about security, and let's say that you're already over that, NFTs offer incredible opportunities that before there was just not the technology to achieve. You couldn't, for example, know exactly with a hundred percent certainty, who owns your music. There are many services that, yeah, they claim to do that. Maybe you get the email of these people, but who knows? They could have a fake email or whatever.

Nifty Sax:
So, it's just very complicated to actually have a hundred percent certainty of who owns your stuff, but now you can with the blockchain, and it's just one of the things that you can do. Then of course, once you know who owns your stuff, you can provide value to these people. You can give them access to specific things, and because for sure that they own your tokens, they own your music, and by owning your music, I don't mean that they own the copyright, they just own a digital copy of it, and so, the possibilities become endless.

Nifty Sax:
It's just all up to your own creativity, and that's why I think it's so exciting to be in this space because not only you can be creative in music, you can also be creative in how you release your music and how you engage with your fans and what value you provide them and how interesting you make it for them to collect your music because, for example, what I did with Spheres was a blind mint, meaning that when people bought it, they didn't know exactly which song they were going to get and they didn't know which rarity. Some songs are more rare than others. I just chose some songs to be more rare because they were my favorites, and that's cool. It's exciting. You can't really do that with just regular MP3s.

Nifty Sax:
So, it's all about the creativity. I'm sure there's so many ideas that still have not come out. It's all up to the new creators that come in and that decide to engage with their fans because what happens here is that you have a direct connection with your close fans because you can have a song or an album to be in like, I don't know, 150 or maybe 1,000 editions and that's it. No more. So, you will have a really, really close connection with these people, and so, you can think of them as your own investors. You can think of yourself as a small startup, and then these people are your advisors because they, not to say that you have to trust on them for your career, but they can help you out.

Nifty Sax:
But I've seen this with other artists, like Violetta Zironi. She had a really big collection, now she has a thousand holders, and these people are shareholders in her career. They come up with great ideas that maybe she didn't even think of, and they have weekly meetings. It's a very direct interaction which before maybe if you had a label and a manager and things like that, it's always very cold. You don't really interact with your fans. Maybe you do it on social media, but you don't know if these people are actually, they have your music or not, or they just trolls or whatever. Now you have, for example, token-gated access to certain things, like you can have a token-gated streaming concert only for people that hold your music, and it is just, there's way too many things that are possible on the blockchain. That's basically the concept that excites you the most. It's all about the creativity of the artist of how they can use this technology.

Michael Walker:
Super cool. Yeah, so it sounds like one of the things that you pointed to was that you can really hone in on the idea of ownership, and maybe we could dive a little bit into that idea of how does this ownership, why do you think that that part is so important and why is that such a big part of the opportunity of NFTs that they actually kind of like to own a piece of this artwork, and maybe just a quick debrief for anyone who maybe is a little bit on the outside who doesn't even know what is an NFT itself and what exactly what does that mean when it comes to editions and different types. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that as an overview.

Nifty Sax:
Oh, sure. So, yeah, NFTs, they just mean non-fungible tokens. So, really all it means is that these tokens are not interchangeable. Like a dollar bill, I can give you mine, you give me yours, nothing has changed, but if I give you my camera and you give me your camera, they are slightly different. Even if maybe they're the same brand, but they're different, so you can't just exchange them like that. They're non-fungible. It's just a silly technical term that somehow became popular, but yeah.

Michael Walker:
Right. That makes sense, that idea of you have a hundred dollar bill, another person has a hundred dollar bill, then the value is exactly the same thing. You can exchange them. It doesn't mean anything different. But yeah, like you're saying, these are two unique things that they're different from currency.

Nifty Sax:
Yeah. You can think of them as two different vinyls with a different signature. They might be similar, but they're not exactly the same. Also you might be attached to your own, your own edition, I don't know, 77, maybe you like that number, and so you want that one in particular.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, I mean, it's like a special guitar. Right? It's like a guitar that you've played for 10 years, right, and if you own this guitar, you could have the same one, but it's maybe a different one.

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, I love that analogy. That's exactly like that, yeah. And basically, the whole concept of owning NFTs and owning this digital copies of music is really like owning a copy of a vinyl. It's something cool, it's collectible, and it's something that might increase in value, and the thing is that what I think in the macro system what's happening is that music is moving towards a freemium model. So, like what games have done very successfully, they give you the game for free, but if you want the really cool stuff, you have to pay for something. Right?

Michael Walker:
Right.

Nifty Sax:
So, that's the same thing. Music is free. In everybody's mind, music is free. You just go to Spotify, whatever you pay, maybe 10 euros a month or whatever it is, and you get everything, almost everything you want, or you just go to YouTube. You can probably even not pay anything and still get the music. So, that's what people want, so that's going to happen. You can't just go against millions of people and how they think.

Nifty Sax:
Initially, actually I thought, "Oh, we have to change people's minds. We have to go back to collecting music and buying music that is not available anywhere else." That doesn't work. People want music. Let them have it, but let them pay for extra utility that comes with the music. If you own this particular piece of music of mine, then you can come to my shows for free, then you can have a call with me, you can do this and that. Maybe I send you some merch or you have discounts on my merch or many, many things that I can think of. Anything I can think of, I can give you that because I know that you hold a piece, so you paid extra so you get extra.

Michael Walker:
All right, let's take a quick break from the podcast so I can tell you about a free special offer we're doing right now exclusively for our podcast listeners. So, if you get a ton of value from the show, but you want to take your music career to the next level, connect with the community of driven musicians and connect with the music mentors directly that we have on this podcast, or if you just want to know the best way to market your music and grow an audience right now, then this is going to be perfect for you. So, right now we're offering a free two-week trial to our MusicMentor coaching program, and if you sign up in the show notes below, you're going to get access to our entire MusicMentor content vault for free. The vault's organized into four different content pillars, the first being the music, then the artist, the fans, and last but not least, the business.

Michael Walker:
When you sign up, you unlock our best in-depth masterclasses from a network of world-class musicians and industry experts on the most cutting-edge strategies right now for growing your music business. On top of that, you'll get access to our weekly live masterminds where our highest level of Modern Musician coaches teach you exactly what they're doing to make an income and an impact with their music. Then once a month we're going to have our MusicMentor Spotlight series, and that's what we're going to bring on some of the world's biggest and best artist coaches and successful musicians to teach you what's working right now, and one of the most amazing parts is that you can get your questions answered live by these top-level music mentors. So, a lot of the people that you hear right here on the podcast, but they're live interacting with you personally. So, imagine being able to connect with them directly.

Michael Walker:
On top of all that, you'll get access to our private MusicMentor community, and this is definitely one of my favorite parts of MusicMentor and maybe the most valuable is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and discuss everything related to your music career. So, if you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now. Sign up for free. From there you can check out all of the amazing contents, connect with the community, and sign up for the live masterclasses that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast and supporting the show. So, don't miss it out. Go sign up for free now, and let's get back to our interview.

Michael Walker:
So, it sounds like one of the things that you're pointing to, one of the benefits of NFTs is that you can assign utility to those NFTs, and you can actually grant someone who owns an NFT something, some special access, and just sort of an extra bonus in addition to them having it as a piece of art that they can own where it has value in and of itself, but then also the fact that you can add this utility adds a lot of extra value and different opportunities. When it comes to having gated content for someone who owns one of those tokens, this might be a little bit too technical, so we don't necessarily have to go down too much a rabbit hole, but I'm just kind of curious how that works exactly. How do you gate access to certain contents based on people owning the token?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, there are very, very simple third-party tools that you can use. For example, if people are already familiar with Discord, inside Discord you can have different bots that are already created by other people and you just apply them to your Discord, just invite them to your Discord, and then some channels you need to verify your wallet. So, once you verify your wallet, you hold certain tokens so you can access the channel. That's just one of the options. Then there are many other services that allow you, for example, to watch a video only if you hold a token. You just connect your wallet. So, Web3 which what we call the web on the blockchain is basically instead of signing up, put your email and password, you just connect your wallet.

Nifty Sax:
So, the tokens you hold determine what you can do on a website. I don't necessarily need to know who you are. If I know that you hold a token, you're good. You have a pass. You can do whatever I decided that the holders of this token can do. So, basically, yeah, we are already at the point that we don't need to have the technical knowledge because there are so many third-party tools that we can use and you just apply those.

Nifty Sax:
Of course, again, the security is very important, so you need to do your research and don't get some random plugin from the web just like that. But if it's a trusted resource, then you can use it, and it works pretty flawlessly. Most people these days work with MetaMask and for example, there are many other ways to connect with wallets, but on Discord, the very common is Collab.Land where you can prove that you hold certain tokens and enter certain channels where you can then put some links only for your VIPs to maybe a Zoom conference or whatever it is. So, yeah, there are already many tools available out there.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. Yeah, it's super interesting. So, I'm a amateur newcomer to the crypto currency and NFT landscape. So, a lot of my understanding of it's very early on, sort of amateurish, but one thing that it sounds like you're pointing to that is a part of the revolution or the breakthrough nature of Web3 is that rather than... So, with Web2, you basically have these private, independent data aggregators, people like Amazon and Facebook and Google, and they all verify your identity essentially. They can have a unique ID, and so, they have a huge database of all of their users and they know who everyone is, and in the part of the revolution shift is switching from these companies that essentially own your data to it being decentralized and someone else doesn't own your data. It's actually everyone sort of has a publicly verified database of all these independent users.

Michael Walker:
That's something that through starting to get into software development, I'm starting to kind of wrap my head around this idea of having unique user IDs and using those, identifying who fans are, identifying who people are, and then using that to better serve them and to do things, like provide gated content to those people. Maybe you could riff on that a little bit. What's your take on that overall crypto movement and how that connects to this idea too?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, this is something that is very important for some people in crypto to have the anonymity, to be able to not have to trust any big company. So, what's very big in crypto is trustless actions. So, if anything can be trustless, usually it's preferred to be that way. So, if you don't have to trust anybody to perform a certain action, it is usually preferred to be that way for people that are familiar with crypto because there are many things that can be automated and you don't need to trust me. When you connect to my website and maybe buy one of my tokens, you don't have to trust me, you don't have to trust a bank or anybody else. You can read the smart contract. It's a very simple interaction. You send me this, I send you that, and it's automated. You don't have to believe that I'm going to do it. It just happens on the blockchain once you initiate the contract.

Nifty Sax:
So, these things are very important for some people. Other people just don't care. They're willing to give up their data to everyone, whatever. They say, "Oh, I have nothing to hide, so take it," which is totally fine. I'm not pro or against it. It's just, it's nice to have options for those people that prefer it that way. And also, basically it removes a lot of these third parties, like these big companies that collect all this data because this data is publicly available to everyone on the blockchain. Everybody can look up my address and see what I own, what I sent, the money that I sent here and there. So, it's kind of scary for some people, like, "Oh, everything is out in the open. I don't know if I like it." It's kind of a double-edged sword because in a way there's more anonymity, but in another way there is also, it's easier to see your movements, your financial movements. So, yeah, that's how it is.

Michael Walker:
It's super interesting. This is probably one of the things that I geek out about most or something that I think is likely going to happen at some point in our lifetimes is there's a pretty big movement happening right now around this idea of data collection and privacy, and there's some companies are taking a very firm stance, like Apple's anti-tracking, and Google and Facebook, their whole business is built on tracking and providing relevant ads based on the data that they know about their users. There's different movements and part of it, there's agenda, there's different agendas. So, like Apple, it's one of their competitive advantages. They're kind of leaning into this privacy model.

Nifty Sax:
Oh, absolutely.

Michael Walker:
I think that there's also, just in terms of society, it's easy to kind of focus on, when it comes to us being tracked and our data being collected, it's easy to focus on the scary nature of it or sort of like the, "Oh, I'm being manipulated or being used," and not necessarily appreciate the benefits that kind of come from that improved relevancy. In a lot of ways, having access to this data is really good for you. But I think that because it's been under this radar, under the surface for so long, now it's kind of coming up to the surface that, wow, how did they know everything about me? This is crazy. I really think that there's a movement that's going to happen, and I don't think anyone has cracked the code on this yet, and maybe it's related to crypto and this idea of having more decentralization or more trust. I think OAuth is a good example of putting the trust back in the user's hand so they can decide, "Okay, I want to give this company access to my data."

Michael Walker:
But I really think that at some point in our lifetimes, or probably in the next 10 years, we'll move to a point where end users like us, we willingly give up as much information, personal information about ourselves as possible to some trustworthy or trustless source that basically has every single detail about our lives, has all of our health information, has all of our biometric tracking, has all of our demographics, has all of our interests, has all of our history of our behavior, and everything that we possibly could want to create a digital avatar that most closely mirrors who we are. So, it's not like a hidden thing where someone like Facebook has to track us with a pixel. It's like, nope, we actually voluntarily want to track all of these things so that the algorithm can do a better job of giving us recommendations, but then we have the ability to grant access to different companies who maybe they can request access to certain types of your data based on what they can use to better serve you.

Michael Walker:
A hospital might ask you to grant access to your health metrics and data, right, and maybe you could even grant it and they could pay a subscription. Maybe certain businesses could actually pay subscription to access all of your demographic data they really need, for example. But I think that that's the movement that's going to happen and maybe it's connected to the decentralization at some point.

Nifty Sax:
I think so.

Michael Walker:
If there's a trustless, decentralized authority that we could give our information to.

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, I think so. For example, I like what you said with the hospital. You could grant access. Basically when you go to the hospital, you just connect your wallet and you would have your records as NFTs and then you can just disconnect when you're done and then just move on with your life. So, I don't know how people are going to implement this, but I definitely see also any kind of record will be an NFT. It doesn't need to be on paper and it doesn't need to be on a centralized storage. It can just be an NFT living on the blockchain, and then, yeah, whenever you need to grant access, you just connect your wallet to whatever entity you want and they can see the NFTs you hold so they can read the content because you can also have unlockable content behind NFTs. Only the holders, or only if you grant access, you can see the content behind it.

Nifty Sax:
So, yeah, I definitely see it going that way. Most records are going to be NFTs on the blockchain. For example, copyright, things like this will definitely be on the blockchain. I already see the Italian PRO called SIAE, they already moved to Algorand, they moved 4 million copyright items to the blockchain. Now that's where they live. So, I definitely see it happening probably in the next five years. We'll see.

Michael Walker:
Wow, that's really interesting. A sort of like a source of truth for all the different types of information. Cool. Well, maybe tomorrow, Nifty, you and I, we can just create the technology that everyone can use to grant all their access, and you guys can come check back in a couple days and we'll provide that for you. Yeah, there's something about that idea that just really, I feel like that is potentially a humanity changing sort of ideas in terms of this Web2, Web3 transition is sort of giving the control or giving the power back to the end user so that they can essentially verify and authenticate how their data's being used, but also just fill it out and get all the benefits of the machine learning and all of the artificial intelligence because the more data those have, the better.

Michael Walker:
But right now, it's like these companies almost have to, I don't want to say trick you into giving up your data, but a lot of them, they have to put it on tracking pixels and they have to do really advance setup to conversion tracking to track all these different things, whereas if you could have a system where they could be transparent to say, "Hey, here's what we want from you and here's why it's going to benefit you," then that'd be a lot more transparent of a system, I think, and better than Apple's solution of when I open up my phone, it's like, "Do you want to allow this person to track your every detail?" It's like yes or no. No. Why? The way they present it is so why would anyone ever say yes to that, unless they know this is actually a good thing. So, I don't know.

Michael Walker:
So, anyway, we got to get out of the rabbit hole and just ramble here. But next question that I have for you is now that you've been doing this for a while now and you have a lot of success, both personally and with the artists you've been working with to help them to launch their NFTs, what are some of the biggest challenges or mistakes that you see musicians struggling with when they first discover the world of music NFTs?

Nifty Sax:
Oh yeah, that's an easy question because I do daily spaces and this comes up a lot. So, I thought about this quite a bit, and the biggest mistake usually is to come out with your biggest work, something that you're so attached to, "Oh, I'm going to put it on the blockchain," and then the problem is that you're so attached to that, that you're not willing to let it go for a small price. But nobody knows you on the blockchain. Nobody knows you on Web3. So, nobody's going to buy it for five ETH or something for $10,000. It just, it's not going to work. So, it's much better to start humble and let some works go.

Nifty Sax:
So, what I usually say to the people that ask me this is just create something specifically. So, just create something new. I mean, you're an artist. You can create. Just do it. Do something that you're not so attached to, and just try, just try to put it out on blockchain, see if you can sell a few works at a small price because the problem is that you see other artists that are already established selling at insane prices, like, "Oh, this guy sold a song for $5,000. I can do it too," which is true, you can, but you need to be patient. You can't just come out of the gate with just your best work and expect it's going to sell for so much just because it's so good. People don't care it's so good. There's so many good things around that it's overwhelming.

Nifty Sax:
So, most of the time collectors, they buy into you, not into your art because the art is good. There's many, many good pieces of music everywhere that there's no shortage of that, for sure. But what's interesting for a collector is you. Who are you as a person? Why would I connect with your work? So, that's basically the most important thing. Create something specifically new for Web3. Don't be too attached to it, and just start making connections because that's what it's about. It's a direct connection with your collectors. There's no middlemen anywhere. They just buy directly from you. And so, that's probably the most important thing.

Michael Walker:
Super good. Yeah, so generally you recommend starting with something that you're not super attached to, that you're not going to feel comfortable selling for less than hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars because if you're just starting out from scratch and you don't have a relationship with these collectors, if you don't have an audience, then it's unlikely that you're just going to come out of the gate and sell millions of dollars. So, that leads kind of nicely into a second question, which is, yeah, it sounds like a big part of the landscape if you want to be successful selling music NFTs is to build a relationship with the collectors and the people that are actually going to own it, especially because they're not even necessarily just purchasing the art alone, but it's also like they're investing in you, and in order to invest in you, they need to know who you are. They need to have connected with you.

Michael Walker:
So, how do you recommend that someone who's maybe starting from scratch, let's assume that they did the initial work where they created some really cool pieces of art and they're doing something kind of unique, they have a unique collection, and they don't have an established audience or an established relationship with collectors yet, but they do have some really cool collectables and they have a cool collection, how would you recommend that they start building these relationships with the collectors and kind of get their foot in the door?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, this is where it gets hard. So, right now, it's so early, it's really the wild west. So, I don't have the perfect solution. I would say the best thing is to rack your brain and just come up with a new solution because there is so much space, there's so much land to explore. So, just go out and think of something because right now, the best thing I can tell you is just go on Twitter, talk with a bunch of people, make friends, make friends with other artists, and just be present. So, that is also, it's kind of a job. You need to have time because it takes you at least probably 20 hours a week just to connect with people. Otherwise, you're not going to make deep enough connections for people to actually trust you and invest in you because that's how it is. It is an investment for most people because these things, these NFTs, they maintain their value or they even increase in value.

Nifty Sax:
Many of my collectors made a lot of money with my pieces because I kept growing as an artist and they had many pieces so they let go of some of them. They sold at a way higher price than at what they bought for. So, this is something important for the collectors, and they're not going to buy from some random stranger if they don't believe that you are here to stay because what if you're not really a musician, you're just a scammer, you just pulled some music out from who knows where and just put it out on the blockchain. They need to trust you as a person. So, that's why it's so important to have a direct connection, and it's not easy, it just takes time. So, it's not something that happens in a week or in a month. It takes probably a couple of months, two or three months of really connecting with people, and so, you need to invest the time. This is what I tell anybody that comes to me for advice.

Nifty Sax:
Also, what I tell my artist before I take them on, do you have at least 20 hours a week, because if you have another job and you're not going to invest this time, it's just not going to make it. It's just going to be very, very frustrating because you're going to see all these other people making sales like, "Oh, I'm not selling anything. How come? What's happening?' And you're going to start to think that it's your music which is definitely not the case.

Nifty Sax:
It's just about the amount of time that you put in and the amount of value that you provide because another important thing is to think how can you help. I know it sounds very hippie, but that's how it is really. How can you provide value? You're not trying to take money from people. You're trying to give them something and then in exchange they will give you some money. So, you really need to think, "How can I provide value for my collectors?" Otherwise, they could just listen to your music on Spotify if they just like the music. But how can you give them extra value? That's the big thing.

Michael Walker:
A hundred percent. Yeah, that's super good. One analogy that popped up as you're talking about the idea of, I actually just recorded a video about this idea of kind of like dipping your toes in the pool of your music career because there's so many musicians who have a day job and they wanted do music full-time, but they feel like, "I don't have enough time or energy," and so, they want try to do music on the side or at night, in between their day job, and the analogy that I think of is that it's kind of like if you want to learn how to swim and you're standing next to the pool and dipping your toes in the pool, you're never going to learn how to swim if you're just kind of dipping your toes in the pool. You got to jump in, right?

Michael Walker:
If you don't know how to swim, it helps to have an instructor or a mentor can help you not drown, but the bottom line is your best odds of success are jumping into the deep end of the pool where it's like you got to learn how to swim and you got to give it your all, and like you're describing, seeing everyone else being successful, it's like you're dipping your toes in the pool, you're like, "Man, look at all these other people who are swimming in the pool and they're having so much fun. Why am I not swimming in the pool?" Well, you got to go all in.

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, I have a similar analogy that I always say to the people that I advise. It is something like somebody comes to me and they say, "Oh, I want to have perfect abs, but I want to work out only once a month or once a week." This not going to work. Yeah, you can dream, but it's just not ever going to happen. Even if you do it for 10 years, just once a week, you're just not going to do it. So, you just have to really invest the time. That's the only way to do it. If you really want that, just do that. You have to invest the time.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, if there's anyone listening to this that's in one of our programs or has taken any of our challenges, all the stuff that you're learning when it comes to building your audience and building a community a hundred percent applies to what Milo's talking about right now too with building a relationship, and specifically in Web3 and with this community. I think the hyper networking approach which is really about doing what Milo just said about reaching out and building relationships and figuring out how can you provide value to those people seems like a great initial point of contact is just making a big list of all of the artists that are successfully doing the thing that you want to be doing.

Michael Walker:
So, in this case, you make a list of all of the musicians who are somewhat related to your genre or in a different genre who are doing music NFTs ore selling a lot of them, and look at their best fans or best collectors and then have a targeted approach to not just show up and be like me, me, me, me and just thinking about yourself, but just to show up and start connecting with them and building a relationship and thinking how can I actually provide value for them, and a hundred percent, that's a great way to build your initial relationships.

Michael Walker:
I mean, for you, you're someone who sold close to $100,000, depending on the day, right, of your NFTs. How did you build some of the... Because I'm sure that you know who those people are that are purchasing those. You know your top collectors. And so, do you remember how did you build the relationships with some of your favorite fans or your favorite collectors for your music?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah. Well, at some point, I started to do a daily Twitter space where I would just talk to people and just be myself. So, that was where I made most of my connections. Just Twitter space are just calls. It's just audio, social audio. There's no video. You just talk to people. And so, I had this daily space called Space for Introverts which was quite successful because a lot of people turns out are introverts that are artists. So, it was a great place to meet both fellow artists and fellow collectors, and we were just talking about what we were doing, introducing ourselves, practicing, talking in spaces, and that's where I made most of my connections.

Nifty Sax:
I didn't really do what I now advise people to do which is to seek out collectors and be more proactive. I was just kind of experimenting, just being myself, and a lot of people connected with that. They just like the vibe, and so then when I had something that was coming out with my collection, then they were just happy to help because of all the time that we spent together just talking, and so, I received a lot of support. On the day of the drop, the retweets and the love was overwhelming, and so, that was really good and so maybe that's even better, but it definitely takes time to just be yourself and wait. It takes more time.

Nifty Sax:
If you want to be a little bit faster, you definitely can be more proactive and connect with people, but if you have patience, you can also just be yourself and wait for the people to just connect with you because you will find these people, but you need to be out there a lot. If you are out there many hours a week and you're just being yourself, at some point you will find your own tribe, and then the tribe will help you when you need it, especially if you're also a helpful person. Otherwise, if you're always take, nobody's going to help you. So, this is the game, the same thing, you just have to give. A lot of time, give your time to other people.

Michael Walker:
Right, a hundred percent. Yeah, and everything you're saying, it's probably a matter of what, and, rather than this one or that. Right?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
If you're doing a daily live stream or a daily Twitter space or daily Twitch performance or whatever it is, and you're also taking the time to connect with people and build those relationships and invite them, invite them to your next daily space, super smart. Yeah, to speak again, to your point, I drill this home a lot because everyone I bring on to this podcast is like you, they're all givers, and that's why they're successful is because they show up and they think, "How do I provide value? How do I serve more people?" And that is like the hidden secret of success is having that mindset of how can I provide more value because the more value you provide, the more that comes back.

Michael Walker:
I know that there's psychology to this. There's a really awesome book. It came out a while ago called Influence, and it talks through the art of human psychology, and basically he studied... It's really pretty fascinating. If you guys haven't read this book yet, Influence, by... Gosh I should remember this guy's name. I think it's Robert something, but Influence basically walks through these different what he calls mental triggers, and these are just psychological ways that our brain works that drive our behavior, and so, some of these are a little bit actually disturbing. Like some of them, he talks about authority and talks about Nazi-ism and why did people do that even though they're good people and they shouldn't be following along.

Michael Walker:
There's one study, one example of one the studies, this was about authority was they did this test where they had a subject with a doctor leading the study and there's another person in a different room that was answering questions, and so, the doctor was giving this other person questions that they would have to answer as like a trivia, and the doctor and the person answering the trivia questions, they both were aware of what was going on. They weren't really part of the study. The main study person was the person who was standing next to the doctor and was asking the questions. What happened was the doctor, whenever the person answering the questions got it wrong would press a button to shock the person and put them in pain, and the person would you be like, "Ow, that really hurt," and then they would bump up the pain each time they got question wrong. The main crux of the study was how long would the person let the study go on until they decided, "Hey, let's stop doing this. You're putting this person, this was pain, this is wrong."

Michael Walker:
What they found was that one of the key distinguishers was, because by the end of it, at question eight or question nine, the person was literally unresponsive and they would keep zapping them with more pain because they had been knocked unconscious from the pain, and what they found is that if the doctor was wearing a lab coat, then they were more likely to go four or five questions deeper on average than if they weren't wearing a lab coat. And so, that was an example of this mental trigger of authority where we tend to... It also depends on demographics, your culture, where you're from, but we tend to, if someone has a police uniform on or someone has a badge of authority, even things like social status, owning an NFT is sort of a social status badge or an icon, but we tend to... That's one of those things that can kind of trigger authority or status or influence.

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, I definitely see that happening also with verified Twitter profiles, and the thing is that back in the day it was very easy to get verified. Right now, you need articles about yourselves in really big magazines, but before, I think you just had to apply, and I don't know, send your ID or whatever. So, there are actually a few scammers that use this because they have an old profile with a lot of followers and they try to scam people and they seem more trustworthy. They are, they're verified, I must follow them. So, yeah, I don't know why we started talking about that.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. Yeah, maybe we'll come back. We were talking about these mental triggers. I think there's a different one that I want to dig into. Yeah, we can maybe come back.

Nifty Sax:
We talked about the book, from the book Influence, and you said that there was a mention of this study about the mental issues.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, maybe we can come back to it if I remember, but it was something related to one of these specific types of mental triggers that was really interesting. Well, anyways, we can come back to this. Maybe we were talking about... No, no, it wouldn't have that. I mean, social status is one of those triggers where if you have... Let's say there's like a hundred thousand people who are following a page, and they're legitimate people, then we'll tend to lend more credence to that versus someone who has two followers, for example. So, social has an interesting one. But anyways, maybe we'll come back to it.

Michael Walker:
But another good question to dig into, so you're talking about one of the biggest challenges was that when someone's starting out, they shouldn't get too attached to their first entities that they're creating and overvalue them for 10 or $20,000, but instead start with maybe creating something new, and would do you say... Oh, here we go. Found it. I found the missing link. Yes. So, we were talking about this idea of providing value and how important it is and how if you focus on that, you're much more likely to be successful long-term with your NFTs, and the reason I thought about that book was because one of the mental triggers is reciprocity, and what they found is that one of the, quote, unquote, "mental triggers" or influence behaviors is that as humans, if someone gives you a gift or someone gives you something valuable, we literally feel compelled to reciprocate. We want to repay the favor.

Michael Walker:
There's something that's actually psychological. It's a drive to reciprocate, and apparently it was based on when we were in tribes and it was just, this is how we survived. It was by trading and by reciprocating favors for each other, and it's just good nature. But if you buy into the idea of the selfish gene that really, we all have drives towards whatever we identify with as ourselves, and that's kind of what ultimately drives our behaviors, whatever we identify with, then it helps to know that by actually focusing on other people and providing value, you are doing something for yourself too. It's actually what's best for you and it's what's best for other people too. Isn't that awesome, that it can be a win-win? It's like when you focus on providing value, it's actually good for you too. It's much better for you than vice versa. So, that was my ramble. I'm glad we reconnected there.

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, I really believe in that too, and I also think that it has to really be true for you. You can't just put that on. You can't just pretend to help people and expect it's going to work. I think you just have to really do some soul searching and see, "Okay, can I do this? Do I have it in me?" Because I'm pretty sure you do, but you do, you have to really do it honestly. That is so important, especially in Web3. People are so aware of dishonesty because there are so many scams, so they can smell it a mile away. And so, yeah, I think that's really important to be completely honest. Try to help people for real, not just to say that you do or just whatever.

Michael Walker:
A hundred percent. Awesome. So, what are some other pieces of advice that you might have for anyone? Let's say that someone, after listening to this, they're like, "Okay, this is really cool. I want to dig a little bit deeper into NFTs. I think that there's an opportunity there.' Where do they even get started? What's the first thing that you'd recommend that they go if they wanted to take that first step towards actually creating music NFTs?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah. The first thing is probably if you don't use Twitter so much, start using it more. Follow some people that actually are very active in music NFTs. You could follow me if you want. If you follow me, for example, you will see that I interact with certain people, then follow them too, and then when they interact with other people, follow them too because initially, maybe now you're following just, I don't know, your mom and your cat, but when you start to follow a hundred or 500 people, you're going to start to see a lot. If you actually pay attention and you start to interact with them, you generally interact with people's posts like, "Oh I like this or this, I don't know, makes me feel this," or whatever. Be honest, be genuine, and that's probably the first step.

Nifty Sax:
Then if you want to be faster, of course, I can also encourage you to join us at Nifty Music, and we have a program to take you through the first steps, but you can totally do it yourself. How can you provide value? You're not trying to take money from people. You're trying to give them something and then in exchange they will give you some money. So, you really need to think, "How can I provide value for my collectors?" Otherwise, they could just listen to your music on Spotify if they just like the music. But how can you give them extra value? That's the big thing.

Michael Walker:
Pretty magical that happens when... Because I mean, it can be scary at first when you first start showing up and you first start going live and start connecting with people because there's a piece of you, I think it's in something in our brains too, just tell us, if you get rejected, you will die. That's what our brains say. If you get rejected, you will die. And so, it brings up all this fear, and the truth is that that's not what happens. You don't die if you get rejected. I think that what I heard or what I read was that in evolutionary psychology, the reason that we have that drive is because we used to live in tribes where if you got rejected by the wrong person, you might get ostracized, you might literally die, and nowadays, our communities don't work in that way. So, it's an outdated thing that we haven't evolved out of is this fear of rejection.

Michael Walker:
So, to your point, yeah, just showing up, and the more that you do that, yeah, the armor starts to crack, and you start having to reveal parts of yourself, and you'll tend to attract the right people who actually resonate with that. Yeah, super good stuff. Well, hey, Milo, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on here and talk about this stuff. This is super fascinating. We went down a few different rabbit holes. We're talking about decentralization, and we talked about the user data and being able to grant access to it, and you're dropping value bombs for how do you actually build a relationship with your collectors in a way that's organic and authentic, and how to go about getting started with music NFTs.

Michael Walker:
And so, thank you for being here and for doing what you do. For anyone who's listening or watching this right now who would love to learn more or connect with you when it comes to either your social media and also the program that you offer, could you talk a little bit about what would the next step be for someone who wants to connect more?

Nifty Sax:
Yeah, I mean if you want to find me, you find me everywhere, Nifty Sax, N-I-F-T-Y S-A-X, just @niftysax everywhere. So, the best place to connect with me is probably Twitter. So, follow me there, and my DMs are open, so just send me a message and I'm happy to help if I can. And if you want to join our program, you can either just google Nifty Music or just go to niftymusic.app, and then you can just apply for our program and we'll reach out as soon as possible. That's it. You can just google my name, Milo Lombardi. You're going to find some stuff. I'm very easy to find. Just find me on Twitter and send me at DM and we will start the conversation.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Cool. Well, like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes so everyone has easy access to it, and yeah, I appreciate you coming out here and until next time.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today, and if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then that'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music career to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.