Chinese tech giant Tencent’s music streaming arm, QQ Music, has jumped on the non-fungible token bandwagon and over the weekend sold out its first NFT featuring popular Mando-pop singer Tiger Hu.
Fast facts
- QQ Music, one of China’s major music entertainment platforms, plans to roll out a slew of music NFTs. Over the weekend, all the 1,983 publicly available copies of the NFTs featuring “Monk,” a song by Hu, were sold out in a lottery that nearly 80,000 people signed up for, according to a special NFT page on QQ Music.
- Each NFT was sold for 199 yuan (US$30.70).
- Tiger Hu, or Hu Yanbin, is a 38-year-old Chinese singer-songwriter and music producer best known for his R&B songs. The NFT was made from a demo version of his song “Monk” that was originally released in 2001.
- This isn’t Tencent’s first attempt to make a foray into NFTs. Earlier this month, the tech giant launched an NFT trading platform named Huanhe — built on the company’s own Zhixin chain. Its debut sale featured 300 audio NFTs created based on well-known Chinese talk show “Shisanyao,” set to be sold for 18 yuan each, according to Tencent.
- Alibaba affiliate Alipay, one of the country’s major payment apps, just last week again rolled out NFT artworks designed as wallpapers for users’ payment code pages, with a total of 80,000 copies of two editions combined having sold out within a day. That followed its June successful drop of NFT art adapted from images of flying apsaras and sacred deer from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, or Mogao Cave, in the Chinese city of Dunhuang.
- Chinese online shopping platform Taobao, owned by Alibaba, last month also sold NFTs at its annual shopping festival.