About the author: Alexander Fruchter, aka DJ RTC, is the co-founder of Chicago-based record label Closed Sessions. During the blog era, he ran the influential music and culture blog rubyhornet.com.
The start of Mig Mora’s rap career sounds like that of a typical artist who emerged during the late 2000s and early 2010s. Faced with a crumbling music business model reliant on physical distribution, and a new model built on a digital distribution system not quite established, Mora, like so many of his peers, released music for free through blogs, file-sharing sites, and the almighty SoundCloud. There wasn’t much money to be made, but there was an active community of bloggers, artists, and fans, and Mora was keen on that. On December 12, 2012, Mora released his first solo album, Music For The End of The World. It premiered on rubyhornet.com—a fact he actually reminded me about.
The project got some props in the local Chicago scene, which was paired with the growth of his fledgling streetwear brand, City of Win. The brand released a compilation mixtape of its own as a lead-up to Mora’s solo debut. The compilation, W1n Vol. 1, featured Chicago and blog era favorites such as YP, Scheme, Really Doe, BBU, and hometown hero Sharkula. While from afar it may have seemed like things were on the up and up, the drain of releasing music for free and operating beyond his core competencies on a streetwear brand left Mora, a law school graduate, feeling like he was hustling backwards.
Like many of his peers, Mora got a job, got good at it, moved to Brooklyn, and figured his music career was over. That was until he purchased CryptoPunk 5528, now known as the world’s best (and only) CryptoPunk rapper, Spottie WiFi. Through NFTs, Mora found new inspiration, a second chance at a music career, an exciting community, and for the first time ever, he made significant money off his music.
Mora grew up in Rockford, IL, a blue-collar factory town just far enough not to be a suburb of Chicago. He started writing raps in high school, continued in college, and upon graduating, Mora moved to Chicago and entered law school at Loyola University. He linked up with two hometown friends—producer Stefan Clark and emcee Hollywood—and the trio called themselves The Bridge. As Mora says, “I was running around rapping when I was supposed to be studying.”
The Bridge had a good run for an underground indie act. They opened for touring artists like Talib Kweli, Nas, Snoop and T.I., but like many groups that start to gain traction, egos and the pressure got in the way. Following The Bridge, Mora joined a cover band and performed at large venues across the Midwest and at music festivals. The band started writing original songs and Mora did enough to garner a publishing deal. It turned out to be a terrible one, locking him down for multiple major label placements. “I thought this is how you sign a record deal, you sign a publishing deal first,” he admits. “Of course, the record deal never happened. That band fell apart.”
After the cover band, Mora brushed himself off for the aforementioned solo album, Music For The End of The World. The album was a conceptual project that mixed science fiction and politics and took a somewhat comedic approach towards impending doom. “That was a big moment for me,” he says with an exhale. “The album was well reviewed. I got some love from Rubyhornet. I got some love from [Vocalo Radio] and NPR. And then, I think I was just sort of exhausted. I said so much on that album,” he recounts. “After that, I sort of had writer’s block for a decade. I did write a little bit, but it just never turned into anything. Basically, nine years went by and I hadn’t really made anything. And then I was inspired by this world of NFTs.”
If you haven’t been following along, cryptocurrency has been having a banner year after a bad crash in 2017 and a slow rebuild with plenty of detractors. The crypto landscape has expanded far beyond Bitcoin, and the blockchain is being used for more than just digital currency. People create, bid on, purchase, sell, and trade pretty much anything that can be traded. Digital basketball cards, digital artwork, and digital music sales are growing in NFT (non-fungible token) form and beginning to break through to the mainstream. It was just announced that Nas, Katy Perry, and Jason Derulo were amongst the investors in Audius, a blockchain streaming service.
Mora was an early adopter of cryptocurrency, and went through the highs and the lows without selling or giving up on what he believes is the future of currency, and now, music distribution. When he contacted me out of the blue in late August to tell me about his new path as Spottie WiFi, the NFT music community that was supporting him, and the further possibilities, it all made sense. When I spoke to him again in the early evening hours of September 5, his excitement for this new world became even more clear.
“It’s hard for me to overstate how cool this is in the world of NFTs,” Mig Mora tells me from his current home, just outside Miami, Florida. “My voice might be in and out because I’ve been yelling all day.”
Mora had just been booked for a performance—well, Spottie had been booked for a performance. The booker was the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 NFT ape characters that hang out at a digital Swampland Yacht Club and throw parties on their virtual riverboat casino. The Apes burst onto the NFT art scene in April of 2021, offering collectors the chance to own a minted Ape NFT as well as any associated IP rights. In doing so, Bored Ape Yacht Club instantly created brand ambassadors and franchisees. One collector launched Bored Ape Streetwear, and another created a Bored Ape IPA at his brewery. On September 9, the Bored Ape Yacht Club ended a Sotheby’s Auction featuring just over 100 Bored Ape NFTs. The Auction closed at around $24M, hence the reason for their party at the BAYC Riverboat Casino.
Mora is a proud member of the Bored Ape community, as well as others such as the Gutter Cat Gang, and of course, the CryptoPunks. According to Mora, Spottie WiFi went from CryptoPunk president to CryptoPunk king in a matter of months. Spottie, named so because of his spots, is part Puff Daddy and part crypto evangelist. It’s the attitude of the Shiny Suit Era of rap that Mora grew up on in Rockford, mixed with a nerdist enthusiasm for this new digital world. “I loved the shiny suits, I loved Puff Daddy spitting champagne in the camera. There was a rock star vibe that I related to more than other genres.”
On August 18, Mig and his producer Stefan Clark released a seven-song album. Limited to 2,000 copies, each EP purchase came with a mystery mint NFT. The purchaser also instantly obtained sync rights to the NFT’s master recording, allowing them to use their song in a commercial, film, or television show, and keep the profits. Each NFT holder will also get a vinyl copy of the album. Mora explains exactly what he did in the interview below, but the punchline is that the project sold out in under 60 seconds, and netted Mora over $190,000. Not too bad for an artist who gave up on music almost a decade ago.
What happened first, you started to get into the world of NFTs and that got you going creatively to make music again? Or did you want to make music again and then search for an NFT to do it with?
NFTs came first. I got really into crypto in late 2017, which was the last big crash. Bitcoin was going crazy, doing crazy numbers. I bought in like a dummy right when it was about to crash. I put in more than I was prepared to lose. I put in too much money, it crashed but I just stuck with it. I had a friend who told me, “You don’t lose any money until you sell.” So, I never sold it. I kept buying more in 2018, 2019, and then fast forward to January of this year, the crypto market was doing well and I was up. I was under water with this investment that I made for years, and now I was seeing profit.
And then I start hearing about this thing called NBA Top Shot [NFT Basketball Cards]. I started collecting those in January. I ended up reconnecting with an old friend who I met working with ad agencies. He was really into NBA Top Shot and he had a friend who was also really into CryptoPunks. They helped me learn all about the CryptoPunks. He took me through the CryptoPunk site, showed me the punks still for sale, the attributes you could sort by—different attributes are rarer than others.
After a few weeks in February of 2021 I decided, “If I believe in this technology and CryptoPunks have historical value, they’re one of the leading things you can collect in this thing—then I should just do it.” I had no concept of Spottie or music, doing anything with it. But I started shopping for a CryptoPunk. What I found interesting was the spots that are on Spottie’s face. Out of 10,000 CryptoPunks, there are only 124 that have spots. That’s super rare. But people sleep on the spots because they think it’s ugly. They think it’s an unattractive trait and they don’t want that as their Twitter profile picture. They don’t want that to represent them as an avatar, but I saw it as a value. It’s cheaper than the other traits that are similarly rare, so I bought this CryptoPunk. At the time it was 27 ETH, and that was almost exactly $40,000. That was a big investment for me, but I was just seeing it as an asset. My crypto is finally in profit and this is a way to diversify and be on the cutting edge of art and crypto.
As I got more into the scene, I would see my friend who introduced me to the CryptoPunks and other people in the CryptoPunk world, they’re often anonymous online. You have no idea who they are, but they’re building these online personas behind their CryptoPunks, behind their profile picture or avatar. People follow them and want to hear what they have to say just because they have the clout from this little jpeg. They’re an early adopter, a thought leader. I thought that’s really interesting and I thought I can take it a step further. Rather than just being Mig and being anonymous, speaking in my voice anonymously, I can embody my CryptoPunk and give it a backstory, make it a full-fledged character. The way that I can bring it to life the most is through music. At some point the name Spottie WiFi came to me.
What I purchased was CryptoPunk number 5528. That was it. The name hit me. I instantly knew, that’s the name right there! I knew that if I could get Stefan Clark [Mig’s former producer] on board, I could do this. He was helping me at this time, doing all the sound work and design for another Crypto project I was doing. I said, “I have a crazy idea for you.” We talked on Google Hangouts and I shared my screen and was just like, “This is a CryptoPunk.” I explained what an NFT was and I told him that I spent this amount of money on it. The crazy idea is that I want to make him a rapper.
Part of what sold me to purchase this was Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban made a rap song about CryptoPunks. It’s super goofy, but it’s Mark Cuban rapping about how CryptoPunks are priceless, how they’re the rookie card of NFTs. I played this for Stefan and I made my case: “I bought one, and I have this idea. This is what it looks like. And the name is Spottie WiFi.” And he just instantly got it. I thought I was gonna have to twist his arm or convince him. He was like, “No, I get it. I love it. I’ve been waiting for one of my friends to approach me with something that will inspire me creatively and I think this is it.” We came up with a partnership agreement and he and I together are the brand of Spottie WiFi. I’m just the voice.
How would you describe Spottie WiFi?
He’s an underdog. He resents the fact that he was overlooked because of his spots. He’s trying to make everybody aware that what was perceived as his greatest weakness or liability is actually his greatest strength. He has a little bit of a chip on his shoulder. A bit of a Napoleon complex. You’ll see him typing in all caps all the time on Twitter. He loves to say that he’s “not always right, but he’s always real.” He might be a little reactionary at times, he’s had a couple little Twitter spats with a couple different entities.
At the end of the day, it’s really all about having fun. That’s what Spottie’s all about. He definitely has an ego and has bravado, but he’s really just about having fun and exploring the fluidity between the virtual world and the real world and how that’s gonna play out over the next several years.
First you acquire this NFT and then you turned it into a Twitter profile? Did you display this CryptoPunk as your Avatar, and did other people know this is the dude that bought CryptoPunk 5528? Did that build a community before Spottie WiFi became a rapper?
That’s right. That did happen a little bit. I made him my profile picture for my personal Twitter for a while. I was co-hosting a YouTube show and a Twitch show called NFT stories, so occasionally I used him as my Avatar, things like that. So, me, myself as Mig, I did make some relationships and there are some people in the community that know it’s me. But it was only a few weeks after I bought it that I wanted that separation of church and state and make him his own entity. It was pretty short-lived that I was really associating my personal Twitter and online identity with the CryptoPunk. Very soon after I completely separated it. I would say very few people know, but it is also not hard to find out it’s me. It’s pretty easy if somebody was curious.
“I had a lot of people, a lot of smart people, a lot of intelligent people, who thought I was just a dumbass for buying into Bitcoin, watching it crash, and then buying more.”
You mentioned this blend between virtual and real world. In the music, he’s very self-aware that he’s a CryptoPunk. What kind of beliefs are you able to put in the music, or ideas and concepts between those two worlds? Is there any of how you see the world and what Crypto currency can do? Is that injected into Spottie at all?
In some ways. In terms of that underdog mindset, that’s something that I think most people can relate to. Spottie embodies that in a sense. I’m reminded of the Muhammad Ali quote, “I am the greatest. I said that before I knew I was.” That is Spottie. Spottie will tell you! A couple months ago Spottie was saying he was the president of the CryptoPunks. Now he’s the king of the CryptoPunks. He’ll be the first one to let you know that he made history.
A lot of it mirrors my personal experiences with crypto. I had a lot of people, a lot of smart people, a lot of intelligent people, who thought I was just a dumbass for buying into Bitcoin, watching it crash, and then buying more. A lot of doubters, a lot of people making wise cracks and things like that. Spottie is my outlet to talk shit and kind of just swing some elbows without all the personal ramifications.
I know you were on the fence about keeping yourself a secret but figured out anyone could look you up. Is that a tough part of this? Spottie is the character and you’re the voice, have you thought about how to balance that?
Yeah, I guess. There are times where it is tough to keep the two separate and think about, “What should Spottie say in this moment?” There’ve been a couple times where I was on a Twitter rant and I got a text from Stefan, “Ay, are you sure we need to go scorched earth on this right now?” And then I have to check myself. It’s cool to be combative once in a while but maybe I need to tone it down, maybe I need to delete some tweets. That has happened on one or two occasions. So that’s where it can be tough to manage my personal impulses and what is really, truly Spottie? What’s gonna keep his fans engaged? Especially now, because I have collectors.
I have 700 people that have collected my NFTs. The average collector owns three of them. My average collector spent $300 because they love Spottie. It’s no longer about me and what I want to say, what is my impulse at the moment. It’s really about how I can make it painfully obvious that they are the smartest people in the world of NFT collecting, and they are bar none the smartest people in understanding the future of music distribution? For me to do that, for me to reward them and give them that recognition, I need to check my own identity and my own personality once in a while.
What is the future of music distribution in your eyes? Can this NFT distribution method exist concurrently with the DSP system in place now?
Basically, right now the music industry is infested with middlemen: artist managers, business managers, booking agents, labels, publishers, streaming platforms. They all have their hands out to take a cut whenever value is transferred from the fans to the artists and vice versa, and NFTs are going to expose how unnecessary most of these middlemen are. Artists don’t need a million fans that are gonna spend one dollar on them per year just so all these middlemen can eat. With NFTs, an artist just needs 500 or 1,000 fans that really rock with them, want to see them succeed, and are willing to invest in their success.
If that artist goes on to develop a larger platform and following, then those early believers will be rewarded because NFTs offer them the potential for a return on that initial investment, in a way that streaming or even buying MP3s does not. NFTs also offer the potential for artists to deliver much more utility than a MP3, like offering a copyright license and commercial usage rights, or potentially even splitting royalties with fans.
Plus, with NFTs an artist can continue to deliver value to their collectors in perpetuity, because the blockchain makes it easy to know exactly which NFT wallets contain their NFTs. For example, I’m working right now on a collab with a major artist that will become a NFT song, and all my album token owners will receive one of these new NFTs for free as a reward for believing in me from day one.
“Artists don’t need a million fans that are gonna spend one dollar on them per year just so all these middlemen can eat. With NFTs, an artist just needs 500 or 1,000 fans that really rock with them, want to see them succeed, and are willing to invest in their success.”
You got the name, you got your producer onboard, you got the idea and the character—how did you first introduce Spottie as an artist and go about attracting these 700 collectors?
I waited until I had Stefan onboard, then I knew I was cooking with gas. I changed my Twitter bio. I started calling myself the best—and only—CryptoPunk rapper alive, and letting that be known. I recorded a couple videos of myself rapping lyrics about Spottie and I sent them to a few friends. I don’t know if I even posted any of those. It began with the debut single, “I’m Spottie.” That was Stefan and I thinking about, “How do we introduce this guy in one song?” I think Eminem did this very well. Eminem was very much in a lot of ways an outsider trying to ingratiate himself in a world of hip-hop and he came in making fun of himself on “My Name Is” and making people laugh. If people laugh with you, they can’t laugh at you. That was the idea for “I’m Spottie.”
That song was really key. We felt like we had something special from there. We got a lot of mileage out of that song. In fact, we didn’t plan to do an album right away. We planned to release just a bunch of remixes of that song and that was going to be our first NFT drop. But the whole process took so long that we said, “We can’t just rest on this song with a bunch of remixes.” We did make two remixes that we pushed heavily—the 8-Bit and the emo remixes. Then we made a bunch of other remixes that were Easter eggs in the NFT drop.
I did a couple rap battles also. I was introduced to the world of Discord cyphers and Discord rap battles. With dozens of people every week, multiple days a week there are these communities where you go on Discord and there’s a voice chat channel in a server and people will host cyphers and rap battles where the beat’s being played and people are just rapping over the phone to each other on Discord from all over the world. I did a rap battle like that really early on, and then I will occasionally join those cyphers. That’s a really important part of the community.
I wrote and recorded “Christie’s (PUNKS Anthem)” which is the theme song for this NFT comic book called PUNKS Comic: The Hunt for the Lost Robbies. The comic book was highly anticipated among the NFT community and went on to become one of the most successful and lucrative NFT drops of all time—it helped give us a ton of credibility in the first few weeks of Spottie’s existence. For context, we released the “Christie’s” song on May 5, barely three weeks after the “I’m Spottie” single dropped.
A week after we debuted the Christie’s song, Christie’s auction house had its first CryptoPunk auction in NYC [more on that here]. In order to introduce Spottie to the Christie’s crowd, we rented a digital billboard truck and had it park right outside the auction house for like eight hours that day while blasting “I’m Spottie” from its external speakers. Some news photographers took notice, so now photos of the Spottie truck are some of the only Getty images available when you search “CryptoPunk” in Getty. As a result, images of the truck have been used in all sorts of NFT-related news articles ever since then.
Can you break down exactly what you sold? You made 2,000 NFTs that included special artwork, the music, and each NFT acted as a token for vinyl, is that correct?
I don’t want to overstate it, but the thing that we did that I think was revolutionary, that nobody did before, was we made it a mystery mint. There are seven songs on the album and then there are 24 remixes of the song “I’m Spottie” that don’t exist on the album. Those are super rare. Those will only exist as NFTs. So, there are 31 different tracks total and they’re all basically in a digital gumball machine. You put in your ETH, you put in your cryptocurrency and you’re gonna get one of those 31 tracks, but you don’t know which one you’re gonna get as an NFT. Each one of them has unique artwork. 31 tracks, 31 unique pieces of artwork.
Some of the songs are quite common, like the original “I’m Spottie.” There were 528 of the NFTs out of 2,000 were the original version of “I’m Spottie.” Some of them are quite rare. Some of the remixes of “I’m Spottie” are even one of one. So, you get one of those, nobody else in the world will have that particular version of the NFT song. Nobody had ever done this before. People do this all the time for JPEGs, images that are sold as NFTs. I was telling you about the Bored Ape Yacht Club, that was a mystery mint. You put in your ETH, you’re going to get an Ape but you don’t know what it’s gonna look like, what clothes it will be wearing, what color fur it will have. But we were the first ones that did that with music.
Basically, there’s a distinction between the MP3s and the NFTs. No matter what, you get the MP3s as a free download of the seven songs, but those rare remixes, those are not part of that. If you buy one of those NFT songs, later this year we’re going to take what they call a snapshot to see who is still holding it in November, and those people will be able to sign up to receive the vinyl record. And the other thing that’s kind of cool—no matter what NFT you got out of the gumball machine, you have commercial usage rights to the song that comes out. If you have a podcast, or you have a YouTube show, or you’re a film producer, or you’re a music supervisor for a show, or you’re making an advertisement, you can put the song you got as an NFT and use that song. You have sync rights. You can also license it to a third party.
I think this was also innovative. I worked with a few different lawyers and figured out the best model to do this right now. Because they can pursue a sync deal, they don’t owe me anything if they land a sync. If they put it in an advertisement and it airs I still keep my performance royalties.
Are you concerned that someone could align “I’m Spottie” with a brand or an independent film project or something that has values you don’t align with or would damage Spottie as a character?
That is for sure the risk. That is the risk of this sort of a model. In a lot of ways that risk has always existed. Think about New Balance, remember when all the Trumpsters were wearing New Balance, or what happened with Pepe The Frog? You can never really avoid the risk that somebody is going to take your creation and make it identifiable or associate it with something that you don’t approve of.
I’m opening myself up to a limited amount of risk that wasn’t there before, but I’m also opening myself up to a world of opportunity that wasn’t there before. This was inspired by the Bored Ape Yacht Club. They made all their token holders franchisees and brand ambassadors. I think that the people that are well intentioned and understand what Spottie is all about are going to outnumber the others by nine to one.
You put this up and within minutes you sold the 2,000 minted NFTs. Was that surprising? How did that feel?
I think it was actually under a minute, but it was all happening so fast that I didn’t even know. If you would have told me that was gonna happen a few weeks before the launch, I would have been surprised. I probably wouldn’t have believed you. But the final week before the launch we were seeing a crazy increase in Twitter followers, a crazy increase in people joining our Discord. We went from 200 people in the discord to over 1,000 people in the discord 48 hours before the launch.
I was promoting it on Twitter. I did all sorts of podcast interviews. I went on people’s Youtube shows. I did a rap battle on Twitter Spaces. I did a song with a good friend of mine and a lightning rod, a polarizing entity in the NFT world. Her name is Digital Artchick. I did a song with her and she has a big following. That was 48 hours before the release. The couple days before the release I could feel a swelling of interest and support.
I’m guessing that it felt good to also make the money. This was the first time you actually made money from music?
I don’t want to speak for Stefan, but we both had some adventures and had some crazy ideas and pursued things in different creative fields for a long time. I’ll just speak for myself—I made more in one minute than I ever made in one year of doing music. But the cool thing is the opportunity for us to reinvest in the future of Spottie and in new content and new partnerships that will reward the people who believed in us, and the people who invested in the NFTs.
“I made more in one minute than I ever made in one year of doing music. But the cool thing is the opportunity for us to reinvest in the future of Spottie and in new content and new partnerships that will reward the people who invested in the NFTs.”
I think some people reading this interview might just understand bits and pieces, but is this something any artist can do?
That is a super big question. Number one, I had a big advantage in that in the NFT world I’m known as the best and only CryptoPunk rapper, and CryptoPunks are known as the gold standard of NFTs. That’s a big advantage. Especially now because CryptoPunks have gone way up in price. Not everybody will be able to buy a CryptoPunk and become the second best CryptoPunk rapper. But are lessons that any artist can take and apply.
I bought myself membership into a community by buying a CryptoPunk. I also bought into the Bored Ape Yacht Club pretty early on and I’m a very active member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. I spend a lot of time with that crew in Twitter Spaces and in Discord and on Twitter, talking like friends do online. I’m very active with another community called the Gutter Cat Gang. I have a few of their NFTs. Not everybody can just do what I did because I think that diminishes what we did, but anybody can embed themselves in a community.
Find a community, find a niche in this NFT world. If you’re interested in NFTs, find a community that you’re interested in, buy into that community, spend time with that community. If you’re a songwriter, maybe you can’t afford to buy into that community but you could write a song that’s going to celebrate that community and they’re going to show you love and reciprocity. That’s what I did. I wrote a song. “I’m Spottie” is all about being the first CryptoPunk Rapper. I wrote a song “Christie’s (PUNKS Anthem)” which was to celebrate the first time that Christie’s had an auction of CryptoPunks and that was well-received. I wrote a song called “Elite Ape,” which is sort of celebrating the Bored Ape Yacht Club culture. I’m figuring out the best time to do something with the Gutter Cats musically. Anybody can do that. It’s not just even musicians. Anybody can celebrate this new niche subculture that’s growing. And they will show you love in return. It’s one of the most open and loving communities online for artists that there is. That’s the thing that anybody can do.
I encourage an artist to innovate. NFTs open all this possibility about how you can form a relationship with your fans, how you can reward your fans by dropping them content in the form of NFTs. What we did was that gumball machine approach that I described, and that vinyl record, people really latched onto that. If you hold one of Spottie’s NFTs, people see it as holding a piece of music history. Not a piece of NFT music history, but a piece of music history. I think for artists, come in, observe, listen, learn, see what’s out there, see what’s working and then get familiar enough with the ecosystem and the market to understand what you can do. Like Lupe said, “Did you improve on the design, did you do something new?”
I think I have a nice collection of skills, but I’m not going to say nobody else could’ve done what I did. A lot of people could, but you notice, I bought my CryptoPunk in February. I didn’t ask anybody to invest or purchase anything from me until August. I spent six months just enjoying these communities, spending time with these communities, and writing songs that celebrate them.
It seems like this worked because all these things came together. Who are the Spottie fans? Are they fans of music? Are they more buying into the collectible piece and the NFT world? What have you learned about these people?
That’s a really good question too. To set the table a little bit, the NFT community is really interesting. You have artists, you have crypto people that were into crypto for a long time and now they’re naturally getting into this. You have traditional finance bros, and then you have tech developers and engineers that are like, “Oh man, this is where it’s at now, this is a cool new opportunity.” And maybe they have some artistic tendency that they never really explored so they’re trying to hone their own artistic impulses. You also have the artists who maybe dabbled in coding a little bit and now they’re trying to learn smart contracts. It’s a real melting pot.
My fans, my 700 collectors, I’m still getting a feel for them. I spend a lot of time in the Discord chopping it up with them, talking about music and the future of content, stuff like that. They’re more into music than the average NFT collector. They love music. They love talking about what my sound could be like in my upcoming releases, who I could collaborate with. They’re very savvy when it comes to music. They’re probably music fans as much as any other passion point.
I know you are purposeful in how you reveal Spottie’s story, what can you share about his origin?
Spottie grew up in the metaverse—the digital world. Coming up he was an underground rapper and then to pay the bills he was a cable repair guy, internet repair guy. That’s how he got the name Spottie WiFi and that’s why in “I’m Spottie” he says ,”For a payday, I’ll reset your router.” He’s a cable repair guy. He discovered a portal or a way to go from the metaverse to the real world that you and I inhabit. And that’s the core of the story that we’re gonna be telling—how Spottie went from this underground rapper in the metaverse with a cast of apes and cats and a skeleton DJ and all these crazy metaverse characters, and how they came to be on top of the music world in the real world.
What does the future look like for Spottie WiFi?
Spottie is the NFT community’s rap star, but Spottie is not just a rapper. He’s going to be a movie star, he’s going to be a TV star. Spottie has a whole backstory that most people don’t know anything about. Spottie has characters around him in his world: his DJ, his band, his hype man, he has a lot of Bored Apes in his orbit. We’re working on new music, we’re definitely trying to collaborate with mainstream artists and get some opportunities to bring new fans to the world of Spottie.
Also beyond music, we’re working on a lot of content right now to tell his story and the story of his universe, the Spottieverse, in ways that go beyond music. You’ll be seeing a lot of video content, a lot of animated stuff coming out. If not later this year, early next year.