Auditory history

According to Lu, the SSO's NFT undertaking was never about generating revenue, but about engaging with audiences. The orchestra also saw it as a way to introduce its stories to new audiences.

"We felt that our NFT had to be something unique. It could not just be a contemporary music album that people can find on Apple Music or other music apps. That would be no different from releasing another digital album," said Lu.

"We then read about the recording of El Amor Brujo and realized that we have a program list of the concert in our museum collection."

The recording was made by the German music label Odeon, which had sent audio engineers to have the performance recorded before producing the vinyl back in Germany, as the technology was not available in China at that time. According to a music historian in Germany, this was likely the first complete recording of El Amor Brujo in the world.

Xu Buzeng, a translator and music expert, had acquired El Amor Brujo in the 1940s. Before his death in 2019, he instructed his son to donate the symphony recording to the SSO. Zhou Ping, the director of the SSO, called the recording "one of the most treasured objects in the Shanghai Symphony Museum."

"But just keeping it in the museum cabinet meant that not many people could listen to it. We thought that turning it into an NFT would allow us to share its story and this chapter in China's music history with more people," said Lu.

According to Zhou, the SSO is considering releasing new digital music albums in the form of NFTs in the future.