Entrepreneur and software developer Tom Norwood has been working in blockchain since 2017, initially focused on building products for Terra, until it completely collapsed in 2022. The crash prompted the Australian to pivot and focus on how real people could benefit from the tech.

Norwood and his team then ran an afterparty at the 2022 Cosmoverse Conference in Colombia—a crypto conference based on the Cosmos ecosystem—where afterparty tickets came in the form of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) that allowed people to pay at the bar using their crypto wallet. Norwood saw this as the real world use he was looking for and some of the attendees from the music industry loved the concept. They suggested Norwood and company build a product for them and Loop Fans soon came to be. 

“We modified our technology—which was an NFT marketplace—and created a cloud wallet login, allowing users to login with socials,” Norwood, chief executive officer of Loop Fans, said to me in a recent interview. “There was no need to download an extension or memorize a seed phrase or anything like that. We created gasless transactions and had credit card integrations—almost a web2 user experience for blockchain technology with everything represented by NFTs.”

Loop Fans recently launched a beta version of the product they’ve been building for a year and a half, where they’ve onboarded 1,500 artists to the platform in the last month. The company has a strong web3 community that it aims to bring together with artists to help with its next steps toward monetization. 

“The prototype of Loop Fans is music, but the idea is to become the WordPress of blockchain artist-fan engagement,” Norwood said. “We’ll provide the tech, the experience and everything else that’s needed and then let other people build their communities or bring their existing communities on to this technology.”

Currently, artists can release an NFT collection with Loop Fans to which they can attach music, exclusive content, tickets, merch and even physical items that can be rewarded to fans. But the company is still very much in its early stages.

While the company is still trying out new features and figuring out what artists want, part of that exploration is catering to Norwood’s interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and its intersection with blockchain—an intersection Norwood hopes will harness the technology in a positive manner.

Some of Loop Fans tools include an AI mastering tool where artists can drop in tracks and have them mastered. The company is also looking into an AI mixing tool and music video generation tool that are designed to help artists with their creative process. On the blockchain side, Loop Fans’ NFTs allow the artists to create digital products and generate revenue. 

“The balance of what's on chain and what's off chain and how those elements can interact with each other will empower new kinds of experiences for fandoms of all kinds,” Eben Matthews, co-founder and chief executive officer of Macroverse said to me over email. “Over time it will all become blended, but on-chain assets and the ability to reach dedicated fans based on their on-chain activity opens the door to incredible new engagements from loyalty and rewards programs to surprise thank you's to increased incentives for additional activity with your core product.”

Read more: ‘This little garden of weird creatures’ How Nifty Music’s Milo Lombardi Wants to Protect On-Chain Music

The idea is to empower artists with both technologies to gain better control over royalties and rights to their music as well as increase their ability to interact with and reward their fans.

“So much of the ‘creator economy’ is about utilizing other people's platforms to create and curate an audience of supporters and then hoping to stay one step ahead of the algorithm to get a tiny portion of the revenue the platform generates,” Matthews said. “Blockchains allow you to own the relationship with that audience and to unlock new types of fan interactions. It's like a new super power when you approach it in the right way.”

Fans can then participate in the career of the artist through the collection of the NFTs and by engaging with the artist’s community.

“It’s a more meaningful level of participation than traditional forms of music consumption, such as simply streaming music,” Norwood said. “Fans can own a share of the master (which is intellectual property) or acquire an NFT from a limited collection with the idea that as the artist grows in fame and prominence, so too will the value of the NFT increase just as the value of physical assets increase. Because the history of every purchase is visible on-chain, artists can see who their early supporters are and who their most active supporters are and reward them with tickets to an upcoming event or exclusive merchandise. Blockchain allows for a more active and engaged relationship between artists and fans.”

Since fans own actual assets, albeit in digital form, they can keep them, trade and sell them on the Loop Fans marketplace. The hope is that eventually the NFTs can be transferred to other chains via the Inter-Blockchain Computation (IBC) protocol—embedded within Cosmos—or that other developers will build on Loop Fans’ chain, which will provide the NFTs with additional use cases and utility.

“As a consumer product, we didn’t want any of the risk or any of the volatility that a lot of public chains experience—such as increasing gas fees or network upgrades,” Norwood said. “When you’re dealing with normal people—not degens—you need a really reliable service. People in the crypto space have learned to embrace the ongoing evolution of the technology, but normal people get pretty upset pretty quickly if things aren’t working exactly as they expect them to.”

That’s because the average person isn’t going to wait around if technology is clunky: They’re simply not going to use it. 

“If it’s not working immediately, they’re not going to use it,” Norwood said. “If it’s too complicated to use it, they’re not going to use it. We’re used to an incredible level of service from the platforms we use everyday—such an incredible user experience—and I think web3 really needs to start providing the same if it’s ever going to reach mass adoption.”

Next up, Loop Fans is releasing the $FANS token, which will power the community and provide rewards to participants in the community—a model blockchain has been experimenting with for awhile. 

“We need to move away from products and programs that are short sighted and largely driven by speculation and towards those that align digital collectibles and experiences with fans that are already engaged for the love of the artist and the work they do,” Matthews said. “It's got to be a fair exchange for both parties and it has to be something that offers a unique take on things people really want.”

Loop Fans is thus just one of what the company envisions as many tokenized communities in the music space and other industries where people want to use the technology. The company hopes to become a template for other music communities to follow and wants to experiment with the concept of tokenized communities in other industries like sports and fashion.

“Most decentralized applications (dApps) have tokens which then reward their users, but there’s still very few real world communities that have been bootstrapped in this way,” Norwood said. “We’re very focused on experimenting and proving that this model works, and then providing the technology to other communities to do the same thing.”

lead image: Tom Norwood