UMG trademarks pave way for Bored Apes

A few days ago, the global music corporation UMG filed trademarks for the manager of their Bored Ape band. The filings suggest the project would involve trading NFTs.

The Universal Music Group wanted to be the first recording company to have an NFT band. In November 2021, they announced that their next-gen label 10:22PM was forming Kingship, a group featuring four Bored Apes.

At the time, the announcement turned crypto Twitter on, and multiple Apes offered their services as bodyguards, managers, cowboys, sound engineers, and so on.

A few weeks ago, the 10:22PM paid over $360,000 for the ape-in-charge, #5537 aka Manager Noët All. Now, they filed trademarks that include plans to trade and exchange “utility tokens, application tokens, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs)”.

It’s unclear exactly what sort of music Kingship would play, if any. For now, Manager Noët All is focused on tweeting and building a Discord community.

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The UMG’s initiative appears to be hanging between Metaverse ambitions and NFT music. More broadly, it’s one of many attempts by a major corporation to test the waters of Web3.