A.R. Rahman Launches Music Metaverse Platform ‘Katraar’

Oscar-winning Indian music director and composer A.R. Rahman entered Web 3.0 on his 56th birthday with the launch of 'Katraar', a metaverse platform for other musicians. Besides featuring his work, Katraar will also showcase musicians across the globe.

The immersive platform, which is in the development stage, will enable musicians to upload their work and mint money off it, making it a long-term sustainable revenue model for upcoming talents. Non-profit organisation HBAR is partnering to build the project, which will be available on its Hedera Network.

Katraar will combine music, art and storytelling with metaverse features, including NFTs. In Tamil, the word Katraar means "a group of learned people who can change the world", said the 'Roja' music composer. 

The evolving music metaverse

Several celebrated artists in the West have dabbled in the music metaverse. To create NFTs from her concerts, Katy Perry partnered with Theta Labs, a blockchain video streaming company. Nowadays, metaverse concerts are also quite popular, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. Justin Bieber, Travis Scott, and the Astroworld team are among the musicians playing on Decentraland, Sandbox, and other virtual worlds that put up an amazing performance on the game Fortnight. In the world of digital art and NFTs, music videos also have the opportunity to be a lucrative tender. Canadian musician Grimes, for instance, sold original video NFTs for a staggering $6 million. 

Back home, earlier in April 2022, Tamil singer Karthik announced music NFTs on India's first NFT marketplace Jupiter Meta. Notably, the metaverse is changing the music landscape, with a myriad of opportunities for new, independent musicians, from filling in the gaps in streaming services to NFT bands. The metaverse is surely the internet's future.