Featured News

Coachella to drop NFTs including a lifetime access ‘key’

Coachella fans will be able to unlock lifetime passes, art prints, photo books, digital collectibles and more with the new Coachella Collectible NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

The festival has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange FTX to embark on the new venture, building an “environmentally friendly marketplace” on the Solana blockchain.

The NFTs are set to drop on Friday, and will include the ‘Coachella Keys Collection’ which is a set of “10 NFT keys that will grant you lifetime access to Coachella”. This collection is due to go up for auction, and also includes unique festival experiences and further virtual experiences. Bidding starts on February 4th at 10am PT (6pm GMT).

Other collections include ‘Sights and Sounds’, which is made up of 10 digital collectibles, including iconic festival photos. The ‘Desert Reflections Collection’ celebrates Coachella’s 20-year history and if fans mint this NFT, they will randomly receive one of 10 digital renditions of an iconic festival poster. Each NFT is also redeemable for a physical copy of the book, Coachella – The Photographs 1999-2019.

NFTs are becoming increasingly popular in the live entertainment sector, through merchandise, commemorative tokens and even ticketing.

Josh Katz, chief executive of YellowHeart, a blockchain live event ticketing platform, has said that NFTs allow tickets to be a direct link between artists and fans.

Katz told Yahoo!Finance: “So what this does is it really empowers artists with transparency around sales, eliminates the need for middlemen – because if you think about most artists, they really get to their fan base through social media.

“Once fans learn about music or tickets or something else, they now need to go to a third party to make the purchase. What [an NFT] does is it allows the artist and the fan to have a direct symbiotic relationship without middlemen.”

Katz added: “[NFT tickets] have media embedded in them. They have access to future events, access to fan clubs, access to merchandise and access, really, to anything the artists can think of.

“And it just opens up, basically, a connection between the fan and the artist to really give the artists more commerce opportunities.”

Image: Andrew Ruiz on Unsplash