SING A SONG A DAY, MANN
“I set out to do it for a month, and then after a month, I decided to keep going, and after a year, I decided to keep going, and then I decided never to stop.”
Jonathan Mann’s journey to the world of NFTs is wild. It is unlike any other in this book, in fact. This American singer-songwriter is most famously known as Song A Day Mann. Uploading a brand-new song and music video every day since January 2009, Jonathan’s depth of creativity is unmatched. He holds the record for the most continuous days spent creating songs.
“I set out to do it for a month, and then after a month, I decided to keep going, and after a year, I decided to keep going, and then I decided never to stop,” he explains. His songs frequently refer to recent events and trends that were trending on the day the song was composed.
How did he jump into NFTs and how did he become a success in web3 too? Before discovering NFTs, Jonathan made his living by collecting YouTube ad revenue, royalties via Spotify, patronage from Patreon, and also doing recap songs for conferences where he used to – and occasionally still does – get up on stage at the end of a conference to recap the events by song.
“When I found out about NFTs in 2017, I recognized in them a sort of new ability to monetize song and day in a way that had never been possible before,” he says. Jonathan found a community called the ‘Crypto Art Community’ and was onboarded by the head of the blockchain Cosmos, Ethan Buckman.
Jonathan fell in love with CryptoPunks and connected it to Song A Day: “I fell in love immediately with CryptoPunks. Literally, you can see, like I wrote a song about CryptoPunks the week after about learning about it,” he shares.
Today, he’s selling every new song as an NFT. He firmly believes that his songs are a form of art. “It’s a collectible; it’s a form of connecting the artist and the collector and making relationships. And it’s a piece of history. It’s not supposed to be something that blows up. It’s a form of art,” he says.
Because of this, Jonathan will continue Song A Day and mint new songs until he can no longer.
His ultimate hope for the future of art in the NFT space is “that those projects are not backed by VCs, they’re not corporate entities, that they are truly decentralized and truly owned by the people who are adding the value.”
