This week’s Web3 Wrap includes Mirror’s new feature suite Plugins, Coachella’s FTX partnership offering lifetime passes via NFTs, the Hitpiece debacle, and a killer selection of music NFTs from Tycho, Three Oscillators, raays, and more.

Check it out below.

Mirror Reveals Web3 Plugins

Web3 publishing facilitator Mirror has announced a new feature suite of products aptly called Plugins.

The Plugins suite will be added to the Mirror Dashboard and offers a handful of Mirror’s popular features as plugins, including Crowdfunds, Editions, and Splits, which can be installed, used, and uninstalled on a per-project and platform basis. Mirror has decided to pause its Token Race and Auction features while it builds out and develops Plugins. Mirror is also working on a framework that will allow “anyone to be able to create a Plugin for any web3 tool or project, and compose stories with everything Mirror has to offer.”

With the announcement, Mirror released a new Plugin called ERC20 Tokens, which has been fine-tuned for gas-efficiency and flexibility, allowing users to mint ERC20 tokens to form communities.

You can read the full announcement and check out the plugins here. 

Coachella Partners With FTX on Lifetime Ticket NFTs

This week Coachella announced a partnership with FTX to deliver three NFT collections.

The drop, which is titled Coachella Collectibles, includes three tiers: the Coachella Keys Collection, which features 10 NFTs that grant lifetime festival access and VIP experiences for 2022, including front-row views of the main stage, on-stage access at the electronic-focused Sahara Tent, and a celebrity chef dinner; the Desert Reflections Collection, which is available in an edition of 1000 and offers the owners a random selection of 1 of 10 digital renditions of iconic Coachella posters and a redeemable physical copy of the Coachella | The Photographs: 1999-2019 photo book; and the Sights and Sounds Collection, available in an edition of 10,000 and offering 10 unique combinations of fan-favorite festival photos and never before heard soundscapes from the Polo Fields.

You can check out the collections here.

Hitpiece Uploads 100s of Thousands of Songs as NFTs Without Artist Consent

Earlier this week, Crypto Twitter was—quite rightly—set alight by the news that a new NFT marketplace was selling music without artists’ knowledge or consent.

Following some digging from Twitter users, it was reported that Hitpiece was being run and operated by a few music-industry execs and was using a relationship with Spotify to gain access to the streaming giant’s API to automatically list as NFTs all the music on the service. According to a source with inside knowledge of Hitpiece, the aim was to hold any money made on NFT sales for the relevant artists to claim and if the artist did not wish to sell, the money would be returned. The people behind the platform were reportedly anticipating a wave of lawsuits but with the hope that the lawsuits would lead to press and position them to cut deals with many of the artists and labels in question. It was also noted that they had raised over $5 million in funding.

With the widespread attention this has been getting across all of the music industry, the situation will undoubtedly slow the development and onboarding of artists and labels to the music NFT ecosystem, falling into the oft-used “NFTS are a scam” category.

At the time of writing, the Hitpiece platform is down, with a placeholder on the site reading: “We Started The Conversation And We’re Listening.”

XLR8R’s NFT Picks, Featuring Tycho, Three Oscillators, and More

This week, we trawled Nina and Catalog and picked out a selection of our favorite music NFTs.

Nina had a fresh helping of genre offerings, including subtle and transfixing ambient electronics from Leslie Keffer; a slice of pop-influenced proto-house by Zanias; contemplative beats from Three Oscillators; and haunting shoegaze by Allison Lorenzen. 

On Catalog you can find atmospheric breakbeats from TWERL; sophisticated pop electronics from Tycho; Lackhoney’s introspective widescreen hip-hop; and shifting, molecular ambient from raays.

What to Join and Who to Follow:

Station: building on-chain infrastructure for a new genre of work.

Cabin: a community of cabins for Web3 workers and cre3atives.

Austin Robey: Web3 writer, thinker, and founding member of Ampled and Metalabel.

Surge: a female-led community focused on educating and securing positions in Web3 for women.