We believe musicians create magic and shouldn’t have to give up their intellectual property to get funding for their budding music careers.
By leveraging new social norms, such as crowd funding principals, we see the potential for music lovers to fund musicians and prevent them from signing standard record deals (bad record deals).
We’re building a GoFundMe for musicians on blockchain. We’re using the same token standards that make NFT collectibles possible. We’re putting our own spin on how the tokens are valued in the market. Rather than assigning value to NFTs within a collection randomly, we’re assigning value in chronological order, early supporters are more valued, and these supporting fans are grouped together in generations. Musicians are free to control when a new generation of fans is demarcated, and to reward their supporters however they want. This is NOT a quid pro quo mechanism. There is no promise made by the musicians to give back specific rewards for supporting. In terms of musicians giving back to supporting fans, special edition vinyl, concert tickets and even gated music content streaming services are a few of the ideas we’re thinking are both relevant/valuable.
For music lovers, there’s something special about the artists, albums and songs that come into our lives. Our music collections, carefully curated over time, are made up of sounds and emotions that define and shape who we are. We listen to certain songs and reminisce on who we were. We contemplate in solace with our headphones on at work. We sing along loudly with friends in the car because “moments like this never last!”. Through music, we can momentarily escape the world or we can embrace it and jump straight into the mosh pit. We hit the dance floor looking for love or shake loose the accumulated stressors of our overly complicated world. Music is our companion in mourning and heartache. The soundtracks of our lives are a part of us and we honor those who make all of that possible. We are musicians, we are fans. We are FanSociety.
Musicians give up their intellectual property, or portions of it, in exchange for up-front cash to fund their music careers. Historically, record deals (record contracts) are bad deals for musicians. The risk/reward ratio is in dramatic favor of the record company. Independent labels aim to be more fair, but have limited resources to help musicians. In just the last 20 years, the music industry evolved from selling physical copies of albums, tapes and CDs, to selling digital copies from Apple Music, to streaming a vast collection of music on a variety of apps for a small monthly subscription. While it’s true that these apps do not pay much in royalties for these streams (~$0.003-$0.005 per stream paid to the owner of the recording, not necessarily the artist), we’re not drawn to the method of simply building a more generous streaming service or building a streaming service with complex crypto tokenomics as a means for instantiating change to see musicians earn more for their productive efforts. Record companies have long been a necessary evil for music artists to chase their dreams. Musicians are looking for alternatives. Every year, new platforms for funding content creators are introduced into the market. But we’re left wondering, “Are they any more beneficial than the legacy music industry systems?”
Over the last decade, a range of funding solutions have been introduced to the content creator market. GoFundMe, Buy Me a Coffee, Patreon, and Bandcamp which is built specifically for musicians, are a few of the many companies that have entered into the market. Twitch has also become a conduit for funding content creators, in a live/streaming format. Many of these platforms provide subscriptions and one time donation options. But what does the donator get for their generosity? Publicly recognizing supporters is one common way, by saying “thank you“ to each person that contributes in a public arena. Giving contributors access to exclusive emojis that are locked to a platform is big on Twitch and becoming commonplace in many applications. These are fun, but tend to be locked to each platform that issues them. Exclusive access to a chat room is also another popular way for content creators to give back to their donors. This is also popular in NFT projects. The idea is to create an exclusive community free of trolls, true fans only. Giving early access to content is another popular way to entice contributors to subscribe to a media channel and is being used heavily in independent podcasts and YouTube channels to secure a sustaining revenue stream. Some of these methods are more enticing than others. What they all have in common is that each has been the result of the success of the internet and the proliferation of high speed internet and mobile connectivity. If we agree that the legacy methods of funding music careers are broken, and possibly always have been, i.e. “the record deal”, how can these relatively new technologies and new cultural norms inform new methods of funding for musicians that are more beneficial for them than the legacy music industry provides? And can we strengthen the special bond between musician, their creative progeny, and fan?
Considering the musicians’ dilemma and the emerging cultural norms, FanSociety was started as a conduit to make new connections in an evolving landscape. Legacy financial mechanisms in the music industry emerged from a state of coordination failure; the technology of the times could not connect artists and fans outside of record sales, live events and the postal system. The internet, the web, high speed internet, mobile devices, blockchains, token standards, and a growing resentment for centralized systems are pushing our contemporary culture to face the truth about our coordination failures and their effects on our culture and our lives. In the music world, fans want to see musicians be professionally and financially successful, so much so that they’ll donate money to the cause receiving little in return. And musicians are looking for ways to coordinate their community of fans. They are experimenting with any new methods of capturing funding to drive their careers forward. Our approach is a bit like building the Chunnel (the Channel Tunnel from France to UK), we’re starting on the fan side and the musician side and aiming to meet at a specific point in the middle. That point of connection we’re aiming for is a maximally mutual beneficial exchange, a novel coordination of an already existing special relationship between music artists and fans.
We’re using blockchain. Why? Because it has a payment system built into the protocol. A programmable and immutable financial protocol allows us to evolve from “Don’t be evil” to “Can’t be evil”. We’re providing a web3 powered web app for musicians to raise money through donations and provide a receipt of donation as a FanPin (NFT). Through donations, that special relationship between musicians and their fans is strengthened and attested to on a blockchain, forever. The hope is for this to be a mutually beneficial relationship. The musicians raise capital without giving up a portion of their income or intellectual property to a record label, ever. This funding is needed to set up a tour, pay for recording an album, management, merchandise, and a variety of other services needed to have a successful career. The musicians then have the power to give back to their FanPin holders in whatever way they see fit. This is not a ‘quid pro quo’ agreement. Fans fund the musicians that they love, then the musicians decide how they want to give back to their fans over time. We envision a variety of ways to give back to fans: giving away tickets for their concerts or raffling tickets with on chain verifiably proven randomness, giving away special edition vinyl pressings, giving away special edition merch such as t-shirts and stickers. The one we’re most excited about is gated content. Early access to newly released tracks or albums, or exclusive access to alternate versions of tracks can be made possible with a proof of ownership of a FanPin. So rather than replacing the contemporary modes of music consumption, we aim to embrace them, augment them and build on top of them. We aim to leverage the existing streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music or SoundCloud. This feels like a natural progression for the contemporary consumption of music rather than a revolutionary, tear everything down and build something new approach. And because FanPins are NFTs, they can be sold on an open market. In other regards, FanSociety will be using a novel method of minting NFTs that differs from a majority of NFT projects that we’ve seen up until now. Rather than assigning value to NFTs randomly based on rare traits, value will be assigned chronologically via a generational system. There will be no pre set limits on the amount of tokens a contract has. The smart contract logic leaves room for personalization and gives each musician the freedom to control how their own FanSociety contract develops over time. This means that one contract can serve one artist (or group) for their entire career, tracking millions of token holders if necessary. By using a single smart contract we’re making it as easy as possible to integrate FanSociety contracts into existing and future platforms, such as ecommerce and streaming services. These large companies are already integrating NFTs into their apps, we’re looking to make the FanSociety contracts the standard for the music industry.
Cutting to the chase, we see FanPin (NFT) assets as lifetime holdings, and even multi-generational; and not a novel method for getting rich quickly. We’ve designed the funding mechanism to be as simple as possible; buying a FanPin attests to the world that you became a fan of a musician at a specific point in time and that you contributed to funding their music making venture. We’re using the Ethereum ERC1155 (semi-fungible tokens) token standard to handle the coordination of this funding mechanism. Owning a FanPin is like holding a membership card with a range of benefits depending on the club that it grants access to. It’s a one time donation with potentially lifelong benefits. Minting a Fan Pin is like betting on a horse race and watching the race in slow motion. Or like buying a stock in a company in which you wholeheartedly believe in the company’s mission; you aim to invest early and hold that investment long term, and possibly even invest more over time. We are treading very carefully to not get into muddy waters with the SEC or other regulating bodies in the US.
We’ve developed a novel smart contract logic. Contract owners can create generations of tokens throughout their career as they see fit. For example, the musician decides to be a part of Fan Society to generate funds for their first album by deploying their own smart contract. They create a token generation by providing token metadata and the price for minting a token; there is not token limit set. Over the course of time, they raise money, record their album and begin to tour (hopefully, fingers crossed). During this time they’re writing new material for a new album and decide to create a new token generation to distinguish the first supporters from the next batch of supporter funding (fans) that they will need to record the next album. Again they provide the token metadata and the cost to mint the new generation of tokens. At this same moment, the ability to mint tokens from the first generation will be removed and replaced by the ability to mint tokens for the current generation. Minting first generation tokens will be impossible for anyone forever into the future, including the musician and the FanSociety platform There’s no ability to create new tokens of old generations later. This is vastly different from how backends work on Web2 web applications. We are depending on blockchain technology to provide this level of trustlessness and security for the entire community, and it can provide this level of security and transparency natively.
This level of security and coordination from both sides of the exchange was not possible before blockchain technology (distributed ledger technology). In a web2.0 system, it could be possible for the musician or the platform (FanSociety) to adjust the token ownership data in the backend. New tokens could be created from old generations and sold into the market. This possibility undermines the tokenomics that the platform depends on, that earlier minted tokens will be deemed more valuable (earlier supporters, or fans, are valued more). The ability to game the system (cheat the market) would devalue the platform as a whole and keep skeptics (smart people?) from participating in the system. The ability for everyone participating in a market to see all aspects of the token contracts and events on a blockchain, rather than a veiled backend, creates a trustless foundation for new attempts of coordination throughout the world in a variety of markets. Because we’re musicians and have faced these issues ourselves, we are compelled and passionate about seeing this vision become a reality. We are FanSociety.
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