Whitney Houston Gets NFT Treatment Featuring Demo She Recorded at 17

Whitney Houston is getting the NFT treatment with a collection of rare items, including archival photos and a never-before-heard full-length demo recorded when Houston was 17.

Released by OneOf, the Quincy Jones-backed green music NFT platform, the new collection is a “OneOf One Iconic” item for the late singer. The rare recording will be auctioned in December with more details revealed on Dec. 1, and the winner will have personal access to it in their OneOf Vault, along with a digital video created by 17-year-old visual artist and activist Diana Sinclair, who was commissioned for the project.

Other items in The Whitney Houston OneOf collection feature thousands of affordable, fixed-price NFTs as well as Gold and Platinum items including rarely-seen archival photos from Houston’s early life and career, designed as a digital scrapbook. The Diamond tier features Sinclair’s video artwork inspired by many of her songs and music videos, including “The Greatest Love of All,” “I’m Every Woman,” and “I Will Always Love You.”

“Before shooting, I spent a lot of time consuming not only the music that Whitney sang but also the visuals that surrounded her,” said Sinclair in a statement, who pulled different themes from photoshoots around Houston’s music videos. “I saw a common theme in a lot of her work, the empowerment of Black women. One of my favorite examples of that was in the music video for her song, ‘I’m Every Woman.’ Whitney’s talent and presence stands out a lot to me as a young black woman in the arts. It’s empowering to me to see such positive, often playful, depictions of black women in media, and matriarchal love and perseverance, like in the ‘Greatest Love of All’ music video and song.”

Sinclair added, “In the artworks I created, I wanted to highlight those sides of Whitney in the upper tiers, and then create animation work that simply let Whitney shine while touching on the colorful playful energy she had throughout her career.”

Proceeds from the sales of the collection will go to the Whitney E. Houston Foundation, which helps support and empower young people through the artist’s work.

“Whitney is an icon for the ages,” said Joshua James, co-founder, OneOf. “We couldn’t be more excited to be releasing this historical song from the very beginning of her journey as an artist.”