Spark to debut NFT-featured music platform

Spark, a copyrights management startup, is establishing a new brand to help music artists protect their intellectual property rights, the first platform in its kind on the Chinese mainland, it announced on Wednesday.

The new brand – Free Spark Crypto Music – adopts blockchain-based NFT or non-fungible token technology. Some NFT products are being sold via Alibaba's auction website, but bidding with yuan, not with cryptocurrency. 

"Water Know," by Chinese artist A Duo, has been sold for 304,271 yuan (US$47,699) on Tuesday.

A non-fungible token is a unit of data stored on a blockchain that certifies a digital asset as unique and therefore not interchangeable. NFTs can be used to represent items such as photos, videos, audio and other types of digital files.

A digital NTF artwork sold earlier this year for cryptocurrencies valued at US$69 million.

Spark, founded in 2020 with a music library over 600,000 works, said it would conduct NFT business in compliance with Chinese laws. It said the new platform will help Chinese music artists gain recognition overseas.