The world’s largest music company has created a band of four virtual apes. Bloomberg reports: Universal Music, the home to top-selling musicians like Drake and Taylor Swift, is working with collector Jimmy McNelis to convert four of his NFTs into a band called Kingship. Kingship consists of four digital characters — three bored apes and one mutant ape — all part of an NFT collection known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The club is one of the most successful NFT stories of the past year; it gave anyone who bought one of the apes full commercial rights to use the image.
10:22PM, one of Universal’s labels, has hired a team of crypto artists and animators to turn the two-dimensional apes into three-dimensional beings. The company will record music for Kingship that it releases on streaming services. The “band” will perform and participate in video games, virtual-reality applications and across the constellation of digital experiences known as the metaverse. “You can call it an NFT band, or think of them as characters,” Celine Joshua, the head of 10:22, said in an interview this week. “The characters will come to life. The apes will come to life.”
As technophiles coalesce around the idea of Web 3.0 — a decentralized internet — Joshua has jumped into the world of NFTs. That’s how she met McNelis, one of the leading collectors. McNelis acquired hundreds of ape NFTs from Yuga Labs LLC, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and has a collection that he estimates is worth more than $100 million. He was an early buyer of Ethereum, a cryptocurrency. Joshua pitched him on the idea of creating a new group, and picked four characters that she thought would work as a band. That includes a golden ape, another of which just sold at Sotheby’s for $3.4 million. Kingship’s golden ape is valued at around $190,000 at current prices, according to offer data on OpenSea, the largest marketplace for NFTs.
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