Universal Music to launch an NFT band made entirely of virtual apes

Universal Music have teamed up with NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club to create new music under the group name Kingship.

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The metaverse group, as its described, are the first signee to Universal’s 10:22pm record label, which was set up by former Sony exec Celine Joshua and is said to be a “next-gen Web3 label”.

The characters are taken from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, pulled from a collection belonging to Jimmy “j1mmy.eth” McNelis, who recently sold another of his BAYC NFTs for $3.4million USD.

“You can call it an NFT band, or think of them as characters,” Joshua said in a statement, via Bloomberg. “The characters will come to life. The apes will come to life.”

Set to be turned into 3D beings by a team of animators, Kingship will perform across video games, VR experiences and other realms of the metaverse. One of the band’s members, the golden ape, is currently valued at over $300,000 USD.

While Kingship, of course, isn’t the only ape-themed virtual band, Timbaland is cashing in on the trend as well, starting new company Ape-In Productions that will also use Bored Ape Yacht Club characters to form a music group.

As reported by Variety, Timbaland’s group, named TheZoo, features six Bored Ape characters – such as Lincoln Aperaham and Safari Ferrari – and will release their first song ‘ApeSh!t’ on Wednesday.

In other NFT-related music news, M.I.A. has just released her new song ‘Babylon’, auctioning it off as an NFT of her own in support of Courage.org.

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