Sure, but if I understood right, that or a similar business model is what the original poster is aiming for.
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Right, this is how I understand it. I think just the .vcv patch file could be turned into an NFT (although I’ve not seen one for sale as an NFT before) or an mp3 of the performance.
Stipulated that I think NFTs are dumb. They try to make something scarce that actually can be copied endlessly. It makes no sense to me. It’s like “here’s a digital thing. people can copy it endlessly, but if you’re willing to give me a bunch of money - digital currency - then I’ll give you a long string of hexidecimal digits that say you OWN that digital thing.”
If it’s more complicated than that, no one has explained how it works to me to my satisfaction.
Example: AFX Twin recently sold an NFT for 72 ETH ($237,396.96!). It’s here
But anyone can download a copy of it here
What did the person who paid close to 1/4 million dollars get that I can’t download for free? A string of digits that says ‘I am the exclusing owner of this 48 second video.’ But if ANYONE can download it it, copy it, remix it, etc etc. What has been sold? What was bought?
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Sure, but the same pretty much true of a painting or a photograph. Does the value of a painting change if it is authenticated or if it’s proven to be a “fake”? It’s the same paint on fabric.
But a physical object can be scarce. A painting is unique. A copy of a painting is not the same painting as the original.
A copy of an MP4 (or JPG or GIF etc) file has the same identical bit pattern, file length & checksum. What you get when you buy an NFT is the privilege to say “I own this” but you can’t prevent other people from possessing an identical copy.
So what you own is a string of digits that point into a block chain, not the object those digits denote.
No one has ever explained to me how you aren’t just buying a string of digits. Large number represented in hexidecimal are cool and all, but are they art?
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Sure, in physical terms, they’re not the same.
But a lot of art forgery has been valued as the real deal and exposed in museums. If I make a Van Gogh forgery that’s so good it fools even the best experts (for the sake of argument, let’s say I use a special technology that even fools scientific dating measurements), what really separates it from an original Van Gogh?
If it’s the fact that one is made by the real Van Gogh and one is not, then we’re not judging the value of the artwork itself, but artificially added value by tons of different factors. The concept of scarcity, as you mentioned, is one such factor that was used to determine value for a long time (for example, oil painting was an expensive medium, so only the rich could afford to have artists paint for them, and the painting itself generally showed things the patron owned, like land, or real estate, or exotic and expensive objects).
The invention of photography, and hence the ability to “reproduce” visual works of art ad infinitum, changed that whole dynamic. Now, artworks were no longer confined to a singular existence in space.
(at this point it should be painfully obvious that I’m shamelessly paraphrasing John Berger, so I’ll leave this documentary here)
Anyway, I don’t know how to relate all of that to NFTs. To me they’re an unintentional expression of how money, value, scarcity etc. are all artificial, arbitrary concepts (I’m not talking about natural scarcity). You take an infinitely reproducible thing and make an artificial license of unique ownership or something, and the marketplace is full of greedy speculator wannabes to pump and dump shit, and in the end we just keep raping the planet in the arse a bit faster. Oh, and money laundering. Like, a lot.
Damn I love capitalism.
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well the idea would be precisely that to sell them to art collectors as kind of sonic sculptures. a unique piece that is always playing and always different. or maybe as an art instation, or your idea of streaming it, though it would be expensive. Maybe the NFT thing is not the best idea in terms of like making money, but Im interested in the format, nonetheless. I was thinking about the NFT because I have some friends in the business and they have told me its a good idea and they would buy, but maybe we could just try and figure out a format and if it is possible, we can think about how to sell it hahahah. I like the idea of a kind of patch player. maybe an extension of vcv that comes with the program where you can load patches and they just play indefinitely.
Yeah i see what you mean.The truth is i don’t really understand that. it seems the value of these NFT exists only on people’s perception. The only reason any NFT sells for a lot of money is because there is a general perception that that particular thing has value, so people buy and sell it at that high value, but isn’t that the same for all art? Like the only reason art has value is because people give it its value. So like yeah anyone can just download the AFX twin song that one guy bought for a shit ton of money, but only the guy that owns that NFT can make money out of it. it’s like the art itself is not unique but that code in the blockchain is, and that code is directly associated with a piece of art. Maybe the value is in the uniqueness of that NFT code, rather than the art itself? I really don’t know, I’m just like a musician trying to sell his music and NFT seem to be an interesting way to go. The concept of owning music has never really existed in the same way you can own a painting. music has always been this ethereal thing where you can listen to it record it have it on your phone, but you don’t own it. the record label owns it. It’s probably not for all music, but it could be a new avenue of distributing unique music. maybe like unreleased songs, or different arrangements or personalised pieces. I don’t really know what will happen in the future moving forward, but it seems interesting.
Yes! thats the whole point, you could sell the .vcv patch file as NFT, but the buyer would have to have vcv rack and all the modules to play it. if a person could just install a “vcv patch player” and could play them it would be a lot easier to distribute. and so imagine the artistic opportunities it could bring. If that vcv patch player could send midi out you could control light shows, or kinetic sculptures that are triggered with the music and are always changing. Or have animations that are triggered by midi, so you could have generative music, and generative video. I don’t know, it seems like some things art collectors would like, in the real and digital world.
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Like any other asset, the price for an NFT is totally prone to manipulation.
How? Here is what happening, 2 people (friends or whatever) mint an NFT from something they create, or buy an NFT for cheap.
Then 1 of these people, buys the others person NFT for a ridiculous amount of money.
Which after the other person buys an NFT from the 1st person for that exact same amount of money.
They both loose 0 money, but instantly their NFT’s have a ridiculous value, based on… nothing. And those NFT’s go for that value on to the open market.
It is called NFT “flipping”, and flipping is not new.
So it is rabbit-hole with a lot of in and outs.
Another thing to take into consideration, is as pointed out earlier, licensing of VCV and modules. And getting a patch to play and sound exact as its creator intended, which not always happens, as i experience from opening older patches, they sometimes break, or simply don’t play as they played first.
more on flipping here:
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hi, I had the same idea some time ago here Module ideas - #188 by ale47p
I remember that someone replied to me, saying that the headless version of vcv rack 2 probably would be able to do it…check it out! 
Not a fan of crypto, but own some.
Quote from guy that created dogecoin.
After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity.
Not a fan of NFT.
In 1962, the French neo-avant-garde artist Yves Klein began dealing in what he declared to be Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. In exchange for a sum of solid gold, Klein would imbue a patch of thin air with his artistic aura and provide a receipt. One such “zone” was bequeathed to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where it exists only as a photograph of the transaction, taken as the receipt was set ablaze and half the gold tossed into the Seine.
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On the limited technical question, yeah, headless mode (coming in V2) would work. It would also be extremely easy to compile a version of V1 that had all the interface interactions disabled except for pan, zoom, and selecting an audio driver on an Audio module that had been already added. This could then get packed in a single self-extracting-and-executing file for something like a watch-and-listen-only patch.
On NFTs, not gonna comment except to excerpt this:
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you the man!
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So, what you are talking about is a musical version of NFTs. It sounds interesting, even though I cannot imagine it working. But to be honest, I don’t understand NFTs till the end either, so it’s fine. I have never been into cryptos or trading because it takes so much time and is rather risky. I prefer making music, and it also brings me the amount of money that’s fine for me. I tried trading to see what it actually is. I googled how to open a real account on metatrader 4 and created it. Then I invested some $50 in a growing asset or something and managed to make another $25. But then it all dropped, and I lost $30. And I decided it was too volatile for me.
No. VCV is a music tool, not a marketplace for environment destroying memecoins. I am so extraordinarily tired of the waste of electricity and money that is NFTs being permeated into every digital platform. I’m suprised FL Studio doesn’t have an NFT collection. Please, for the love of Moog, keep this out of Rack.
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Thank you !!!
I think the proper way to do this is to do what Wu-Tang did. Record an album, produce only one physical copy and don’t leak any digital. Sell that single copy for $1,000,000. Of course, as noted above, you can’t be Joe Schmo to pull this off, you already have to be Wu-Tang.
JMJ did similar with Music For Supermarkets long before NFTs, sold just one copy on vinyl.
My band did very similar, though we made 500 copies of our mini album on vinyl and sold about 10. And not because we wanted to. 
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