Animoca Brands to create K-pop music metaverse
Animoca Brands is adding K-pop to its content features under a new joint venture with Cube Entertainment.
Gamification and digital entertainment company Animoca Brands has announced plans to further expand its digital empire by adding K-pop to its growing list of content features.
Courtesy of a joint venture deal signed with Korean entertainment company Cube Entertainment, Australia’s largest blockchain gaming company said it intends to build a “music metaverse” to complement its existing work in blockchain gaming while issuing non-fungible and ecosystem tokens based on Cube’s widely popular K-pop content catalogue.
K-pop is a relatively new music genre first originating in South Korea in the early 1990s while being influenced by styles and genres from around the world including pop, rock, jazz, hip hop and electronic dance.
One of the first K-pop pioneers, a boy band called Seo Taiji and Boys, experimented with different styles and genres of music and integrated a variety of foreign elements that helped reshape and modernise South Korea’s music scene.
The popularity of K-pop has not been confined to South Korea with foreign audiences now reaching into the millions and closely matching South Korea’s 52-million-strong domestic market.
True digital property rights
In a statement to the market, Animoca Brands said it will issue non-fungible tokens (NFTs) “using resources including digital sound sources, albums, portraits, and avatars” of globally popular K-pop artists, currently being managed by Cube Entertainment.
The deal is expected to further Animoca’s overarching strategy of delivering “true digital property rights” to millions of people, including artists and their fans.
To help commercialise the genre’s growth and in tandem advance its blockchain aspirations, Animoca Brands intends to bring K-pop into its own digital metaverse while issuing a variety of NFTs.
The newly announced addition of K-pop to its offering will complement Animoca Brand’s concurrent development of The Sandbox, a gaming metaverse enabling players to experience a blockchain-based social hub that facilitates people to build collections of fantasy and role-playing adventures.
As an intriguing commercial quirk, all valuables can be traded with other players, creators, and artists on the platform.
Going non-fungible
NFTs are digital assets and collectables that possess core characteristics associated with physical items, including authenticity, rarity, scarcity and ownership.
According to Animoca Brands, all digital ownership rights are independently guaranteed, verified, and secured on the blockchain.
Unlike traditional digital content, which is provided temporarily on a licensing basis, NFTs are “truly ownable” just like physical collectables and thereby allow NFTs to attain significant value as digital collectables.
To coincide with the news, Cube Entertainment chief executive officer Ahn Woo Hyung said that Cube’s intellectual property, including music and images, will be sequentially ported to Animoca Brands’ digital ecosystem and would serve as “an important beginning for leading the global digital culture market and advancing the digital content industry”.
Currently, Cube Entertainment manages 50 high-profile “talents” including Jo Kwon, BTOB and Lightsum – artists that typically attain dozens of millions of views via social media alone.
The Korean agency has confirmed it wants to provide “more intimate experiences” to US, European and Asian K-pop fans using promotions and digital initiatives such as the one agreed with Animoca Brands.
“K-pop is taking the world by storm, and here at Animoca Brands we can’t wait to work with Cube Entertainment and its roster of K-pop artists as we continue our efforts to make the open metaverse a reality,” Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu said.