Non-fungible tokens — digitally reproducible photos, videos, and audio — will fill a void in 2022 for brands looking to connect with loyal consumers. 

Artists, celebrities, and musicians like Ozzy Osbourne and companies like Campbell Soup, PepsiCo and Nike have created non-fungible tokens.

Sales of NFTs have already totaled about $14.1 billion during the past year, according to nonfungible.com — up from only $65 million the year before.

Consumer behavior will support the rise in interest. Google searches rose for NFTs in 2021, but marketers can expect major spikes in 2022.

Searches hit record levels this year, with traffic surpassing search terms related to many crypto assets ranked among the top ten.

The spike in interest in NFTs surpassed keywords that have dominated crypto-related search traffic, like “DeFi,” “Ethereum” and even “blockchain.”

MusicFX, a music fan club on a NFT platform, provides a place where fans can buy a piece of digital history.

The site is powered by CurrencyWorks, a financial technology and blockchain company working in partnership with Crown & Ace, a music manager and events company.

Country singer and songwriter Parker McCollum will release his 2022 Fan Club NFT on MusicFX. Parker is the singer-songwriter behind the platinum-selling single ‘Pretty Heart,’ and has just released his latest music video, ‘Falling Apart’ from his hit debut album “Gold Chain Cowboy.”

Media.Monks, a content agency created under Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital, this year began working for major fashion brands to explore NFTs.

“It’s the market opportunity to own a unique digital asset like art,” said Joe Olsen, Media.Monks chief growth officer, during an interview in October.

While the majority of NFT transactions have been retail purchases less than $10,000, there is still a range of collectors who buy between $10,000 and $100,000 with institutional purchases of more than $100,000, according to a study by Chainalysis.

The study estimates that between January and October of 2021, consumers sent at least $26.9 billion worth of cryptocurrency to ERC-721 and ERC-1155 contracts, the two types of Ethereum smart contracts associated with NFT marketplaces and collections.

Key to this trend is the ability “to move tokens across different blockchains.

For example, in the sports market, the NBA and NFL have partnered with Dapper Labs to mint NFTs on the Flow blockchain, while the MLB’s platform Candy uses Ethereum,” according to Joseph Genest, a contributor at Highsnobiety, who believes that 2022 will become the year consumers begin to understand why NFT are not just digital Beanie Babies.