Artist Of The Year NFT From The BRIT Awards With Mastercard’s First Ever NFT Collection Sells Out Within 30 Minutes!

The BRIT Awards with Mastercard, in partnership with eco-friendly NFT platform Serenade, have sold each of the 250 Artist Of The Year NFTs in their first ever NFT collection.

The collection is breaking new ground by being the first collection of NFTs to be released by a UK awards ceremony, celebrating winners in 13 award categories; including Best New Artist, Mastercard Album of the Year and the four new genre awards Alternative/Rock Act, Dance Act, Hip Hop/Grime/Rap Act and Pop/R&B Act.

This first-of-its-kind collection offers music fans the opportunity to own a piece of music history and get closer to the winning artists by owning an official digital collectible associated with this significant career milestone. Fans who collect at least one edition from every category will also see themselves in with a chance to win tickets to next year’s BRIT Awards.

The limited edition NFTs cost just £10 each, with the proceeds raised from the sale donated to The BRIT Trust, the charity arm of The BRITs which distributes money raised from The BRIT Awards to organisations and charities that promote education and well-being through music, including The BRIT School and Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy.
Winners for this year’s BRIT Awards were revealed on Tuesday 8th February at The O2 arena in London, broadcast exclusively on ITV and ITV Hub, and include artists such as Adele winning Mastercard Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Artist of the Year with other winners including Olivia Rodrigo, Little Simz and Sam Fender.
An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a unique digital asset with an individual identity that can be purchased for collection, trading or public display. NFTs cannot be faked or copied, giving each NFT intrinsic value for its owner. The BRITs are the first ever UK awards show to partner with an NFT platform.

Mastercard returned as headline partner for the 24th year having supported The BRITs for over two decades, bringing cardholders closer to music through a range of Priceless BRITs experiences. This year, Mastercard will continue to sponsor the much sought after Mastercard Album award, as well as Song of the Year with Mastercard for the second time and is proud to carry on connecting people to priceless possibilities.

YouTube Shorts was the Official Digital Music Partner and bought fans closer to the BRITs than ever before. As the home of the official livestream on YouTube, audiences around the world were able to watch the whole journey of the BRITs unfold, from the nominations, through the run-up, to the awards themselves and the performances on demand afterwards. In an exciting first, fans were also be able to watch exclusive behind-the-scenes footage on the night on YouTube Shorts, a new short-form video experience right on YouTube, as well as listening to their favourite artists’ playlists on YouTube Music. YouTube Shorts sponsored the 2022 Artist of the Year award.

Serenade’s Environmental Credentials Explained 
Serenade NFT emits just 1/10th of the carbon of a tweet, which comes to 1/44,000th of the footprint of a normal NFT. We do this through an energy-efficient NFT authentication method called ‘Proof of Stake,’ a counterpoint to the standard Ethereum ‘Proof of Work’ method.

This marked improvement is a result of the Serenade platform being built on top of a layer two blockchain called Polygon. Polygon has a trusted relationship with Ethereum, which means it doesn’t have to go through the exhaustive process of proving every NFT transaction to the blockchain, but rather achieves this via collective proofs.

Not only does this lead to far better ecological outcomes, but it lowers the cost of creating NFTs so artists can be free to produce more work for their fanbases without bearing any gas fees.

Not sure what an NFT is? An NFT is essentially the same as a physical limited-edition merch item, like vinyl or an artwork, only a digital file. The owner holds the copy of the digital file but not the copyright within it, as they would with a physical item, and they can sell their item at any time to another fan.