I guess the moment it hit me was when Classic FM’s Alexander Armstrong was revealed to be getting into “NFTs tickets.” Whether or not these NFTs are just glorified QR codes—Curved Music, the company behind his new shows, didn’t respond by the time of publication—mere mention of those initials was enough to zap me back in time to the early 2020s: to a theater bar in Kraków, as an extremely enthusiastic musician tried to persuade me that NFTs represented the future for experimental jazz, and then to my moldy mid-lockdown bedroom in Manchester, scrolling along and confusedly schadenfreude-ing at all the “i been hacked. all my apes gone” memes, as people who had invested millions in this sketchy-looking, get-rich-quick scheme discovered just how sketchy it all was.
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