The author | wonderful
The museums rolled up.
However, the volume is not a cultural relic, but a digital collection.
As the digital collection market continues to heat up in China, museums seem to have found a new way of playing with cultural relics. Last year, Whale Detective and Dunhuang Art Research Institute launched two digital collections, limited to a total of 16,000 sets, which were sold out as soon as they were sold, and then major museums quickly followed the launch of digital collections.
After nearly a year of development, the difference between China's digital collection and overseas digital collection (NFT) has gradually been reflected.
Nowadays, more and more cultural and artistic fields are beginning to set foot on this new track. In the spring evening, the dance drama "Only This Green" jointly issued a digital collection commemorative ticket with Lingjing Culture, which is also the first digital collection commemorative ticket in the performance industry.
The film field and digital collections have also found a clever combination. In 2021, director Wong Kar-wai made an NFT (digital collection) of unaired footage from the 1999 film "Fancy Years" and sold it for 4.28 million Hong Kong dollars.
Through the combination with various cultural and artistic fields, the characteristics of the Chinese version of the digital collection are being highlighted, the use of technology to promote traditional culture, digital collections in the Chinese market is exploring more new ways to play.
01 Big factories enter the digital collection, what are they doing?
According to a survey by market tracker DappRadar, total NFT (digital collection) sales in 2021 were $24.9 billion, up 260 times compared to 2020. Stimulated by the boom in digital collections, more than 100 digital collection platforms of various sizes have emerged in China. Tencent, Ant, JD.com, Baidu, NetEase and other Internet companies have launched their own digital collection platforms. These digital collection platforms mainly use pricing and limited sales models.
It is worth noting that unlike the overseas digital collections (NFTs) that are on the Ethereum public chain, most of the domestic digital collection platform access is the alliance chain, whale detective, Ali auction access is the ant chain, magic core, R-digital collection, reading access is the letter chain. Most of the platforms under the big factories do not support C2C transactions.
After nearly a year of development, the digital collection business of the big manufacturers has entered a stable period, whale detective and magic core are sitting firmly at the head of the industry, and brands and IPs have been in a long line in order to release digital collections on these two platforms.
According to the research report released by the future think tank, Whale Detective is currently the largest digital collection trading platform in China. As of January 31, 2022, Whale Detective has released a total of 255 digital collections and limited sales of 3.02 million copies. According to the data of "Blockchain Daily", Phantom Core has also issued 29,067 digital collections.
In addition to being a platform, many brands are also trying to try to the content operation field.
BlueFocus is expanding into the field of digital collection services, helping brands and IP to create, produce and distribute digital collections.
In the field of content IP, as early as August 2021, Lingjing Culture launched a digital collection of xiaobai and xiaoqing characters in conjunction with the summer national comic film "White Snake 2: Green Snake Robbery". This is the first national comic film in the industry to be released on the digital art collection chain with ant chain technology, and it is also an innovative attempt at the value of IP derivation of movies.
Recently, the excellent domestic content IP "Wandering Earth" and "I Am Not a Medicine God" have also released digital collections in conjunction with Spirit Realm Culture.
"The Wandering Earth" launched six digital collections of "Earth Migration", "Space Retrograde", "Earth Wheelhouse", "Red Superstar", "Arrangement of Fate" and "Moon". "I Am Not a Medicine God" digital collection and a front-line illustrator artists in the United Nations to create in-depth creation of the film.
These two domestic masterpieces, which have brought touch and hope to countless people, have reached an immutable, non-replicable and inseparable digital bond with collectors in the form of great emotional value, artistic value and collection value.
02 Digital Collection Gameplay Rolled Up
Different from the speculation and speculation overseas, the Chinese market, which has not opened up secondary transactions, has a new way of playing in the commercial value of digital collections.
In recent years, major museums across the country have been exploring digitalization, especially after the arrival of the epidemic, the difficulty of offline visits has further increased. In order to allow more people to see the cultural relics, museums are also working from offline to online.
After the digital collection entered the Chinese market, museums were the first to target this emerging thing.
At the beginning of this year, the National Museum of China launched a digital collection of four national treasure-level cultural relics such as the Siyang Bronze Fangzun and the Western Han Dynasty Gold and Silver Cloud Bronze Rhinoceros Zun, which were sold out on the line; the first digital collection of the Hubei Provincial Museum, "Yue Wang Gou Jian Sword", was limited to 10,000 pieces, but the number of people participating in the rush was as high as 600,000.
In October 2021, Whale Detective launched the "Treasure Plan" focusing on the field of culture and museum, with the participation of 24 cultural and museum units such as Hubei Provincial Museum, Hunan Provincial Museum, and Henan Museum, and released cultural and creative digital collections derived from the museum's collection. During the Spring Festival, the 24 museums also collectively launched a 3D digital collection on whale exploration.
There are also new explorations in the field of art in digital collections.
After the dance drama "Only This Green" of this year's Spring Festival Gala was released from the circle, in March, China Oriental Performing Arts Group, Barley and Lingjing Culture jointly launched the digital collection commemorative ticket of the dance poetry drama "Only This Green".
Through the integration of technology and art, it not only enriches the path of "Only This Green" to reach the audience, but also gives a model for the performance industry.
In recent years, the "new internet celebrity" TV station Henan Satellite TV has launched a new IP "New Folk Music National Wind Night" in the small Chinese New Year's Eve. A few days ago, this new Guofeng IP and Lingjing Culture launched four Guofeng audio digital collections, which were sold out shortly after they were launched.
These four innovative national style digital collections continue the innovative and integrated presentation of folk music, opera, ancient poetry, intangible cultural heritage and other art forms at the evening, and the four collections are unpublished versions of the evening program, which further increases the collection value of the digital collection.
There are also platforms that use digital collections for the traceability and copyright protection of artworks.
In 2020, Tianxiaxiu launched the first blockchain digital economy art value platform "Hashii Art", which mainly serves the art circle and can also be seen as the predecessor of TopHolder. By tying art to digital collections, "Hashii Art" can view the transfer link of digital collections at the time of transaction and understand who has been in the hands of the works of art.
In the field of music and film, which has attracted more public attention, digital collections are even more popular.
In March this year, musician Zhang Gayi launched the "Tuchao Song" series of 3D digital handmade, although only 1,027 copies were sold, but after the reservation channel was opened, it attracted 50,000 users to book, and after the official release, it was all sold out in 1.3 seconds.
At the same time, film publicity has also found new publicity channels through the exploration of digital collections. In this year's Spring Festival file, several of the hottest movies "Pleasant Goat and the Basket of Gray Wolves Out of the Future" and "Four Seas" have launched digital collections in conjunction with Spirit Culture.
While exploring more commercial possibilities, digital collections have also injected new vitality into Traditional Chinese culture and classic domestic IP.
03 Use technology to empower the cultural industry
After nearly a year of development, China's digital collection market has been significantly differentiated from overseas markets.
In overseas markets, the digital avatar collection is a big hit, with its parent company Yuga Labs valued at $4 billion with the "top- and high-end" boring ape.
Overseas markets are open to secondary trading, and collectors mostly hold speculation and speculation.
Nonfungible's recently released NFT 2021 Annual Report shows that the average holding time of collections in the NFT collectibles community is only 40.9 days. March 2021, Mike Winkelman's digital collection of everyday picture collages, taken in 2007, fetched a sky-high price of $69.3 million, the highest-priced digital collection ever sold.
In China, because the secondary market has not been opened, the mentality of collectors is more inclined to "collection", and they pay more attention to their artistic value and cultural value when buying collections.
Many collectors are lovers of traditional art, for whom digital collections are the same as collections, but under the protection of technology, the "shelf life" of collections is longer.
A practitioner of the traditional art industry said that most of the digital collections in his collection are in line with his own artistic aesthetics, and as for the appreciation space, it is not within his own consideration.
Although digital collections enter the domestic market later than overseas, the domestic digital collection market is forging a path of digital collections with Chinese characteristics.
Counting the digital collections issued by the two major platforms of Whale Exploration and Phantom Core, the vast majority of them are cultural and creative digital collections. The data shows that on whale exploration, the digital collection from traditional culture-related IP accounts for 70%.
It can be seen from the field of domestic digital collection distribution that the value of digital collections is no longer focused on monetary attributes, but has developed more commercial possibilities, and at the same time further promotes Traditional Chinese culture and excellent domestic IP.
New things are bound to be accompanied by bubbles, under the heat of digital collections, there have been some speculators to disrupt the market, some over-the-counter trading, trading speculation and other events. However, the relevant regulatory policies of various platforms have also kept up quickly, and whale detective has recently launched a series of penalties to regulate the market.
In February, Whale Detective restricted the ability to resell users who violated the rules, and in March again punished hundreds of users who snapped up third-party software with plug-ins and scripts. Whale Detective stressed that if it is found that users are organizing transactions outside the platform in a way that constitutes criminal activity, they will "notify the police and (details) hand over to the judicial authorities."
Tencent is also tightening the policy of digital collections, starting this year, WeChat Mini Programs have removed a number of digital collection platform Mini Programs, including West Lake No. 1, Unique Art, DongYi Yuandian and other platforms. For the only art, WeChat's ban was based on "suspension of service due to suspected circumvention, circumvention or confrontation with platform audit supervision.".
With the improvement of supervision, the industry has gradually matured, and with the joint efforts of major platforms, digital collections with Chinese characteristics are also using technology to empower national culture and stimulate the new vitality of the cultural industry.