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.