Music label faces NFT scam as Artists’ works were minted without Authorization

Independent music label, Needlejiuce Records, is picking a fight with a so-called ”crypto-thief” accused of selling NFTs without authorization.

The accused thief is a website known as Hitpiece that claims to offer “one of one NFTs of all your favorite songs.” The website suddenly began selling digital links of musicians as NFTs. However, according to Needlejuice and other individual artists, there was no prior authorization.

The Nashville-based Needlejiuce represents 39 different indie bands and specializes in creating physical vinyl records. Last Tuesday, they took to social media and posted “Neither us nor our artists have consented to @joinhitpiece selling NFTs of our music. Crypto grifters prove once again that they do not care about artists or ethics- just their dystopian end goal of turning every facet of life into a stock market pump & dump scheme.”

Needlejuice cofounder, Brandon Brown, spoke on the controversy in an interview with Newsweek.

“We’ve never been in the position of having to send a cease & desist before, but now we’ve started talking to our lawyers to ask about the next steps to make sure the music that we distribute digitally is off the site,” Brown stated. “As far as a class-action lawsuit goes, it might depend on how much they’ve managed to sell; the appeal of these NFTs (to those that are into that sort of thing) would certainly be stronger for major label artists and vary wildly for independent ones, especially the internet-native artists we tend to support.”

“I think it would be nice to see a class action suit taken against them, as many of these NFT schemes prey upon artists who are too small to fight back,” Brown added.

In the interview, Brown noted that it would be difficult to prevent scammers in the future. He states that there are little to no preventative measures for unauthorized minting.

“There’s really no preventative measure to stop things from being minted. I could go and mint the webpage featuring this article and maybe Newsweek could convince brokers not to list it, but it’s still on the chain and in somebody’s wallet forever,” said the Needlejuice cofounder.

Source: Newsweek