Gm music fans,
I always thought that Web3’s breakout moment would come from an artist breaking new sales records and hitting a critical mass.
But what if the tipping point is actually fans making money?
How can fans make money in Web3?
This hasn’t happened on any big scale yet, but there are three paths starting to emerge:
Street teams getting paid to create content.
NFTs appreciating in value - fans are rewarded for discovering music early.
Fans and curators make money from NFT referrals.
Let’s go through each one:
1. Fan street teams getting paid to create content
Fans are already the biggest marketing force for any artist. They make free content, they share the music, they evangelize for an artist.
What if they could get paid for doing it?
One artist in Web3 is already testing this theory.
TK recently launched the Petal Power street team. His fans can make content from TK’s live streams, share it on TikTok and get rewarded in crypto tokens.
Launched in February, TK’s campaign has already generated 51,000 plays on TikTok and 2,700 likes.
More interestingly, it generated $5,100+ in rewards for fans.
It’s easy to see how this scales up massively. Imagine if Rihanna, Beyonce or BTS launched a monetized street team…
I think we’ll see a lot more artists experimenting with this model.
2. Get rewarded for discovering music early
What if you could get a financial return for being early to discover Billie Eilish?
Lots of people will laugh and say it’s impossible to find ‘the next Billie Eilish’… but it’s not.
Here’s Chad from the music blog Hilly Dilly who discovered “Ocean Eyes” at 100 plays.
Billie and her brother / producer Finneas still talk about how Hilly Dilly helped break them, but the blog never had a direct way to benefit financially from that.
Imagine you could collect the track when you first discovered it and prove forever that they were there first. It’s hard to imagine what the cultural value of the Ocean Eyes NFT would be worth today.
This is slowly starting to happen on platforms like Sound.xyz, Zora, Decent and Catalog where new artists are minting their early music as NFTs. Collectors can prove they were early and potentially benefit if the artist is successful and the NFT accrues value.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that any NFT grows in value or that a Web3 musician breaks out. But the mechanisms to make it possible now exists:
Emerging artists + verifiable proof of early fandom + free market.
By the way, Chad and the Hilly Dilly team are in Web3 today (currently launching a record label NFT pass).
3. Get paid to share your favourite music
Fans can also make money in Web3 directly through referral links.
Every NFT on sound.xyz now has a referral link (if the artist allows it). If someone buys an NFT using your link, you get paid.
Curators and communities are already using this to generate revenue.
Rae Isla made 0.35 ETH for her community sharing referral links to a recent music NFT drop.
It’s happened before… in crypto gaming
The reason I started thinking about this is because this pattern has happened before in crypto…
Back in 2020, Axie Infinity started making waves as a play-to-earn crypto game.
Gamers were rewarded with the cryptocurrency $SLP for playing the game, and many set up small businesses by ‘breeding’ characters and creating ‘guilds’ to loan them out.
For the first time ever, you could make money from gaming.
Families in the Philippines were making enough cash to pay their bills during the pandemic by converting the crypto earnings locally for pesos.
“It’s food on the table, it’s money for their families and it’s saving them when they cannot even leave the house during this pandemic.”
Later on the hype came to the US.
YouTubers discovered Axie Infinity and started making money, too. The network effect was spreading and videos like this began appearing.
In other words… the tipping point only came from the network effect of *gamers* making money.
It was a flawed model…
Ultimately the model was unsustainable.
The tokenomics were broken which meant the $SLP rewards spiralled downwards, eventually worthless.
But it helped trigger the huge wave of interest in NFTs and laid the groundwork of what gaming could look like in the future if it could be built sustainably.
Is there a similar model for music?
It’s not hard to imagine a similar trajectory for music where *music fans* can get rewarded and maybe even make money.
What do you think?
Is there a future where music fans are rewarded for supporting their favorite artists? Or is it an unsustainable model waiting to happen? Let me know on Twitter.