above: Ed Vincent

Many will remember the ill-fated – but, for a time, sublime – MoviePass. The company offered a subscription-based service for movie tickets: pay a monthly fee for digital vouchers and get entrée to any participating cinema. At one point, members could pay $6.95 per month to see an unlimited number of films – a ridiculous offering of which I took full advantage.

Various acquisitions, spin-offs and corporate machinations later the company declared bankruptcy (though there are whispers of a comeback).

Now imagine MoviePass but spread across the entirety of the entertainment industry – with membership that’s supported by non-fungible tokens (NFTs). That’s festivalPass. The Austin-based company touts its Festival Family Founders NFT as “the first NFT of its kind providing immediate value that grows over time.”

When an NFT is purchased, the holder unlocks $1,200 worth of credits – which can be redeemed for tickets to over 80,000 live events like concerts, festivals, sporting events, and Broadway shows or for stays at 600,000 hotels – that renew every year as long as the person holds the NFT.

I spoke with festivalPass CEO Ed Vincent, who previously founded Predict Analytics, a data-driven consulting firm that counted MoviePass as a client. While there, he gained a lot of insight into how to (and how not to) structure a sustainable, dynamic business model. We talked about how he’s using web3 to elevate the MoviaPass model and achieve his vision of an enduring, community-driven marketplace. (This interview has been edited and condensed in places.)

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DeCential: I always like to start at the beginning and learn about you. Where did you start? What was your web3 ‘a-ha’ moment?

Ed Vincent: Sure, I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years. I was at school but left that in 1999 to start an eCommerce company and then sold it in 2001. The next company was an experiential marketing company, and that's where I started falling in love with live events, from a business perspective – I’ve always enjoyed live events. 

We helped bring big brands to big events, do big concerts…we helped launch a few festivals. We owned a film festival down in the Dominican Republic. We built a hotel down there with Maxim Magazine.

Fast forward a little bit and my next company was in the retail and multi-unit space – sold that in 2014. And then following that, the next company I founded was called Predict Analytics, which did a lot of television and film – big companies like A&E Networks and AMC Networks. 

We helped create and craft their audience intelligence platform to aggregate data from sources across their entire ecosystem. We worked at a lot of film studios across various projects and film assets and festivals.

During part of my time at Predict, this company MoviePass kind of had a meteoric rise and fall. I learned a lot. I was in there for about 18 months. They hired our company to go in and understand a little bit how their data might be monetized. 

So in that whole process, I started seeing that there are very valuable and sustainable models in membership and subscription, being in love with the live event space, music, film, food, and wine, all the above…I thought there'd be a better model for the future of live entertainment. It's a $200 billion industry across the globe and I thought there's a better way to do it. So that's when we set out to build what festivalPass is today.

DC: That was going to be one of the comparisons coming in – it feels like MoviePass. I had MoviePass for a while and I loved it, and I was going to like 20 movies a month. How similar is it to that model and how does it leverage web3?

EV: So it's a markedly different business model than MoviePass was. The MoviePass path was: how do we provide some concept of unlimited something in hopes that a portion of the collective membership gets great benefits, but the majority gets bad benefits and hopefully, some way, it levels out in the end.

And when I started thinking about building festivalPass, I promised myself that I would never build a company where if I ask people to do more of the reason they came there to engage, I would lose money. That's just an unsustainable path and process. 

ClassPass had a lot of the same problems. MoviePass did early on and burned through a few hundred million dollars to get to the place to realize that, ‘hey, a credit-based currency allows us to control gross margin metrics on every transaction.’ So what that means is people pay a monthly subscription fee, they get credits, and they can choose how to use those credits.

It also allows for dynamic pricing, so we adopted that credit-based currency model for sustainability long term. To me that's the right model. ClassPass [has] since changed [to that] and sold for one and a half billion dollars. They were able to actually sustain that. And what that means is it gives everybody an ability to win.

It's a win-win across the board. The people who are members are getting value because they're getting things for less costs and a bunch of benefits that they might not get if they went in directly on a single transaction. And the providers are getting value because they're moving more tickets. And the business is able to predict revenue because of ongoing recurring revenue coming from subscription or annual or monthly subscription. We take lower margins because we have more predictable revenue and we give that back to our members – who then now get more value out of being part of this membership.

DC: Got it. And that membership happens in this case through an NFT, right?

EV: No, everything we've been talking about to date is purely a web2 business. When we set out to build a company, everything was all about this membership and community concept, right? It was the predecessor to where the philosophy of web3 really is today. 

I've always been interested in the blockchain – to utilize it from a business model perspective as opposed to purely defi or digital assets from a value-exchange perspective.

I always understood how web3 is an infrastructure for the future. It’s what the new economy will be built on in three to five years. And every industry is going to be affected by web3. But what was great for us is we built this model prior to the adoption of NFTs and web3 in a more consumer perspective.

In 2021, when it started being more prevalent, what was really a gift for us is it was a way to take our original philosophy and roll it into a place where we were totally aligned. Not only were there technical capabilities within an NFT and a smart contract, but we also had the philosophical meeting of the minds – the ability to have shared ownership within the overall business. 

From a table stakes perspective, we accept cryptocurrency for subscriptions and for tickets. But that's just the beginning stage. The next stage is what we're in today – we created a lifetime founder NFT. 

Every holder gets hundreds worth of credits to our platform where they can redeem it for up to 80,000 live events or over 600,000 hotel rooms globally every year in perpetuity. So the moment they buy that NFT it instantly has a utility of $1,200 a year – every year, in perpetuity – and provides them access to events they wouldn't be able to get anywhere else.

And there are things we're going to be producing and curating ourselves – could be a concert with a well-known artist for a few hundred people. It could be a celebrity chef cooking dinner for 50 of our NFT holders. It could be going to a luxury box at an arena and then afterwards hanging out with the players.

We have a lot of relationships and contacts across that space – we even have a professional hockey player as one of our investors. There are a lot of interesting, fun things that we're going to provide uniquely for our holders.

image: Unsplash

DC: Could you walk me through how that process works? So I want to mint one of the founder NFTs so that utility automatically kicks in and I've got access to $1,200 worth of credits. How do I transact with those credits?

EV: Festivalpass.com today is a viable web2 business that has 80,000 events on the platform and 600,000 hotels. So once I buy the NFT and connect my wallet, I can choose an event. If I pick a concert – say Justin Bieber at Madison Square Garden – maybe that costs 200 credits. As I go to checkout, I choose the payment method as my NFT and all of a sudden you'll see credits sitting in the account and I'm able to simply use that as a payment method.

DC: And have you thought about leaning into any type of collective governance? Are there plans to decentralize at all and share governance with any of the 10,000 founders who own these NFTs? 

EV: As an initial thing we'll be doing quarterly events. We'll be asking them to choose what quarterly events they want us to produce. Should we be doing a music event in Austin? Should we be doing a culinary event in Los Angeles?

And we'll know based upon where our holders live and let them choose – if we had these five opportunities, which one would you guys want? Going forward, we'll see. I'm fully pro decentralized contributions from the community. So I think input we can take from our community is important. But are we going to turn into a DAO yet? No. But could we actually consider selling a portion of the entire company to a DAO that is controlled by holders? I absolutely would be open to it.

There's nothing more powerful than having a community that is your customer and owner all at the same time.

DC: And is that something that you'd be personally interested in? Moving in that direction in the future?

EV: It will be interesting to see how some of the current projects play out, right? There are certain DAOs I can talk about. Some are in the golf space where there's a DAO to purchase golf courses. There’s, effectively, an NFT project in a DAO to own and manage soccer teams.

So there are a lot of interesting paths and I'm learning a lot from those and happen to know a lot of the people that are participating in those projects. So there could be really cool things that we can learn from in that capacity. 

We could produce a curated large event for a ton of people like Superfest is doing. And we could then enable some of the folks in that space to create a separate DAO just for managing events we own and curate. We could potentially purchase a venue in the future and let that be controlled by the DAO. I think there's a lot of ways to share the overall decentralized experience.

So yeah, I'm totally open to it. To me it's the beauty of web3 – there's nothing more powerful than having a community that is your customer and owner all at the same time.

DC: I saw that the first tranche of NFTs is available already – how's that going so far? 

EV: Good. We're selling the NFTs in a pretty unique structure that I haven't seen done before. The entire collection will be 10,000 total NFTs. We'll never sell a founder NFT again after. 

But the way we're selling them is in tranches of one thousand, so each drop will be a thousand NFTs and each drop will have different art – call it packaging, however you wanna look at it.

The current one has an image of ‘Legend,’ the rocker. And there’s different art for each of those 10 tranches. And the reason for that is we want people to identify with the collection that they're really interested in and makes them feel a certain way – but they all have the same core underlying utility.

Every time we sell out each tranche, the next tranche will be higher in price. Currently we're selling tranche number one at 0.95 Ethereum ($1,285). And you can imagine how amazing of a deal that is to get $1,200 every year for life.

So the resale price of the NFT with that kind of utility is going to be much higher than the current price, so each tranche will be a little higher in price. By the time we get to tranche 10, it will likely sell for two and a half to three Ethereum.

And one of the cool things is we're partnering with some pretty cool, well-known people to make the art of those tranches unique. One of those characters may be a sports figure. One of those characters might be a celebrity chef. One of those characters might be a famous DJ. 

The festivalPass NFT minting page

DC: For each of the characters that you're creating for each tranche – are they based on a real person that you’re partnered with?

EV: Some will be – not all. The current character is not based on a real person – it's based on the mythical character of Legend. The second character will likely be a female, which won't be directly correlated with a real life human. Half of the ten will be connected to real life humans.

So when we look at festivalPass, we have music, we have film, we have sports…so the concept of the personas is really to identify with the types of people that make up our member base. I think it creates some fun gamification for post-mint in trading the NFTs in some of the secondary exchanges. They might trade the chef for the sports player because that person is into sports specifically.

DC: Are there any particular events from an industry perspective across the live event space that you're going to focus on primarily?

EV: The majority of stuff on the platform today is music and sports – just because of the sheer volume of those categories. More attention in the future will be for some of the culinary stuff. But we have thousands upon thousands of music shows – small to large festivals, professional sporting events, college sporting events…they're all currently there on the platform. 

DC: And fourth quarter of this year is when you’ve earmarked the first community-driven event for NFT holders –  do you have any sense of what that's going to look like? Have you gotten any community input already? 

EV: I'm not sure yet exactly. It will likely be a music performance in an intimate setting with an artist. Or it could be a sporting event where we go to a luxury box of a specific arena and then have an experience after. That experience could be hanging out with players. That experience could be special access to the arena. Or it could be we have one of our celebrity chefs cooking dinner for 50 people and hanging out. We're gonna let the community decide.

DC: If you could pick any one event personally that you would love to see hosted by festivalPass, what would you pick? 

EV: That's a good question. I’ve been lucky enough to have experienced some really cool things in my lifetime – I've been to the Super Bowl, I've been to the World Series. But I've never been to the Kentucky Derby, so I definitely need a fun Kentucky Derby experience.

But I think anything that provides something you just can't get elsewhere is super special. So when it comes to music, I love intimate performances. I'll be happy to go to an arena with 50,000 other people, but what really gets me super excited is when I'm in a room of a hundred people, 200 people, 300 people in a really intimate venue. And I feel like I'm experiencing that with the artist. That to me is super special and unique. 

It's not just a meet and greet or get an autograph kind of thing – it’s like ‘let's just do this together, let's experience it.’ And the cool thing is athletes and chefs are all super curious about web3 as well, right? So they're looking to see, ‘how is this going to affect my future life and career? I need to be figuring out how I can interact with other people that are living in this web3 world.’

DC: Which artist would you put in that room with you and the hundred or 200 other people?

EV: So I have three daughters – 17, 14, and 10 – and there are very few times where my 17-year-old and I will agree on something, but I think something like the Lumineers. Whether we're able to get them for the right price in the right place at the right time, we'll see. But that's something that would be special to me. I could bring my daughter and it'd be special to her too. 

DC: Love that. And final question: what is your vision for festivalPass? Where do you want festivalPass to be three, four, or five years from now?

EV: Our mission of festivalPass as a company is to really increase the engagement of a passion-connected member experience. When I think about everything we're doing, the first thing is to really make this web3 push into NFTs really special and exciting.

I think over time we'll continue to migrate the traditional subscription web2 model into web3. So currently as we speak, we're only going to be selling 10,000 founder NFTs. But once they're fully sold out, we do have other levels on our platform.

We have a gold membership and a platinum membership and a free basic membership. I can see a time where we help onboard people into web3 by saying to a basic member that if you get a crypto wallet and connect it, we'll airdrop some kind of NFT to you to teach you how this makes sense.

We have a section of our website called festivalPass University, which is all about crypto education and sharing what web3 is – how do you get a wallet, what are the benefits, etc. So we see us being an advocate for onboarding people into web3 that don't traditionally fully understand it – because we're an entertainment asset. 

As an asset in entertainment, people get it: I can get tickets to a show. I just want more and more people to realize that true utility in web3 is what it's enabling. The underlying technology and philosophical concept of community is really where the future of business is going. And the more we can enable people to get there by doing something they love – like going to a concert – that makes me happy.