Peter Kafka, Recode:

Here is the straight news headline: Square, the financial services company run by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, is buying Tidal, the streaming music service founded by Jay-Z.

And here is the question you, a normal person, may have about this deal: WTF?

I had that exact reaction. WTF?

Kafaka follows with some speculation that really clicked for me:

It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with Square + Tidal rollouts in the future: A Square-enabled way for artists to sell T-shirts on tour, or even when they’re not on tour, for instance.

Yeah, I do see the fit there, but seems like there’s got to be more oomph there.

More intriguingly, given Dorsey’s love of All Things Blockchain, and the current mania over NFTs, it won’t be surprising to see Square + Tidal work on their own NFT scheme.

And:

So you can picture the Jay-Zs of the world selling songs, or snippets of songs, or the digital version of a lyric scribbled on a napkin, as NFTs, in deals that let Square and the artist get part of the deal.

Boom. This makes so much sense. Are NFT’s a way for digital artists to better capitalize on their work? A backroom bubble, cooked up by billionaires to create new revenue streams? Why can’t it be both?