OpenSea takes down NFTs featuring Rihanna’s music

Last week, in advance of Rihanna’s hotly anticipated Super Bowl halftime show, an NFT collection featuring royalty rights from her 2014 song “Bitch Better Have My Money” was taken down and delisted from OpenSea.

One of the song’s original producers, Jamil “Deputy” Pierre, offered his rights to the song to an NFT marketplace specializing in music royalty rights, AnotherBlock.

The collection sold out on the first day, with 300 minted for $210 each, generating total sales of $63,000.

Each of the 300 NFTs represents a 0.0033% ownership of future royalties provided by digital streaming providers.

However, just two days later, and a day before Rihanna’s Super Bowl appearance, Michel “bigmich” Traore, the CEO of AnotherBlock, told members of AnotherBlock’s discord that OpenSea had banned the collection — leading to an outcry in AnotherBlock’s discord.

OpenSea said sales were halted because it went against the marketplace’s terms of service, “appearing to promise fractional ownership and future profit based on that ownership.”

That response perplexed AnotherBlock because, according to a community lead, “we have also brought up why similar collections (Royal.io and Corite for instance) are still tradable on their platform in our communication without getting any comment on that either.”

Royal.io, a music collection NFT available on OpenSea, is made by the electronic musician “3LAU” Blau. A collection that, like AnotherBlock, allows for downstream revenue to be shared amongst fans and artists.

According to AnotherBlock, however, OpenSea was “ignoring” their attempts at resolving the issue.

The Rihanna NFTs are still available on AnotherBlock’s marketplace and on Blur, but some users within AnotherBlock’s discord wondered if the OpenSea ban was affecting the floor price.

“Our AnotherBlock traffic is not sufficient,” one holder, kyo1984, argued in Discord. “Our floor prices and transactions are going down.”

The collection’s current floor price on AnotherBlock’s marketplace is 0.55 ETH ($867), up 330% from its mint price of 0.128 ETH, with total volume as of press time at 155 ETH (about $245,000).

AnotherBlock, founded in 2021 by entrepreneurs Michel D. Traore, Sebastian Ljungberg and Filip Strömsten, offers fans a marketplace to buy, sell and trade royalty rights for songs by other artists such as Offset, Metro Boomin and the Weekend.

Internal documents seen by CryptoSlate advertise annualized yield returns for initial NFT offerings upwards of 11%.