Last November, Santigold became the most recent major artist to join Medallion, a blockchain-powered platform for building personalized fan clubs. The musician joined a diverse cadre of artists – including Sigur Ros, Tycho, Jungle and Greta Van Fleet – just six weeks after canceling her tour in protest of “an industry that has become unsustainable for, and uninterested in the welfare of the artists it is built upon.” 

At the time, I wondered if Santigold’s path could be a template used by more artists, and if and how that template could be replicated in effective ways at scale. So I tracked down Medallion’s Chief Strategy Officer Stephen Vallimarescu to find out more. 

Vallimarescu, who started the renowned All Things Go festival in D.C., co-founded Medallion with Derek Davies – co-founder of Neon Gold Records, the label responsible for elevating indie darlings like Passion Pit and Vampire Weekend – and Matt Jones, the former CEO of the ticketing platform Songkick. 

The trio used their industry clout and wherewithal to close a $9 million seed round last May, with Jones promising that Medallion’s web3 opportunity “is about building long lasting connections, not short-term financial gains.”

Medallion is banking on those long lasting connections, refining their offering – a customizable publishing platform that serves as artists’ “home base” – with artists they know before opening the floodgates. Each custom site caters to the distinct relationship an artist has with their fans, and they’re designed to give artists the data – so often withheld by platforms due to misaligned incentives – they need to cultivate those communities. 

This year, Medallion is planning to expand their scope from 10 to 25 artists, and in 2024 the plan is to transform the platform into a scalable, self-service tool for thousands of artist communities. The company operates by taking a percentage of anything sold on-chain.

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From Medallion’s New York office in Soho, Vallimarescu shared his story, from aspiring musician to Capitol Records intern to Songkick Director, and through the myriad music industry frustrations that have led him to build a more equitable solution. 

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Decential: I always like to start with the person I'm talking to – hear more of your story, where you're from, where you grew up, when your relationship with music started.

Stephen Vallimarescu: Totally. Music definitely started as a passion. I grew up playing in bands as early as middle school and through high school, mostly playing guitar, very ingrained in punk music and pop punk music. And through high school into college, I really became obsessed with the idea of being in a band.

And then when I realized that I probably wasn’t good enough to take that to the next level, I decided that the next best thing was to work in music. I ended up taking an internship when I was in college at Capital Records, where I got a firsthand look not only into the label side of the business, but also during a really interesting point in music where labels were getting hit really hard – just as Napster was devastating the industry and CDs weren't selling and labels were restructuring and freaking. 

So it was a really interesting time to get a glimpse into the industry – this was 2006, 2007, and then from there start to see how new trends in tech – but also music – were starting to reinvigorate the whole system.

I've always been obsessed with how new technology can make artists have better relationships with their fans. And for me, what I think Medallion represents is this idea that, for the first time, technology can tangibly create a truly direct relationship between an artist and a fan that is free of intermediaries.

That creates not only better experiences for fans, but it opens up a new class of artists who are able to create meaningful and sustained livings without any of this traditional infrastructure around them. That's the long-term vision – though I think we're still a ways away from there.

D: Cool, thank you. So how did you come to be at Medallion? How did you meet the rest of the executive team – your co-founders, etc? 

SV: So the two co-founders other than me are Derek Davies and Matt Jones. Derek and I grew up together. We went to high school together and we kind of followed a similar path in music.

He started a record label called Neon Gold Records out of college, which ended up putting out records by everyone from Ellie Goulding, Charlie XCX. He found Passion Pit, Vampire Weekend – a lot of those indie darlings of the 2010 era. And we've always been really close.

On my end, prior to Medallion I was working with Matt Jones at Songkick for many years. And we were working to not only help fans discover concerts that were near them, but also help artists sell tickets directly to their biggest fans.

So we worked with everyone from Adele to Ed Sheeran to the Rolling Stones. And what we were doing was essentially saying, “Hey, ticketing isn't a great experience. Why don't you sell tickets directly to your biggest fans from your website in a really white label experiential capacity?”

And long story short, that company ended up getting acquired by Ticketmaster, we all went our separate ways, and then about a year ago we came together and started seeing what was happening in the music NFT space, and we saw a lot of artists that we were close with start to recoup a lot of the revenue that they had lost touring during covid. 

And we started to think, how could you use this technology to create an interesting fan experience that's not just based around transactions and not just based around speculative assets – which to me and to us is just not very interesting.

For us it's not necessarily about creating unique and rare collectibles. It's more about using that technology to create an identity layer around a fan and allow artists to be able to understand who their fans are, how they interact with them, and reward them and benefit them in different ways.

Read more: The Beat: Too Much Music? 1,000 True Fans and Progressive Decentralization

D: Awesome. I’d love a 10,000-foot view of Medallion. I thought the Sigur Ros partnership was particularly fascinating, and then seeing Santigold cancel her tour and then like one week later announce the partnership with Medallion. That’s really interesting. 

I'm curious how you go about business development in terms of seeking out artists who you want to work with – and then how you customize that experience. And are there plans in the future to templatize this experience so that you can operate in a less ad hoc way?

SV: Yeah, absolutely. Right now we're a hundred percent focused on building a product that can be scalable and can be self-service in the long term.

We're working with about 10 artists at the moment, and we're gonna open that to probably 25 over the next couple months. But for this year, it's really about working with a very select number of artists who we can learn from. We know these artists and their teams are committed to having that closer relationship with their fans, so we’re starting with this pool of artists that aren't necessarily in it for a one-off opportunity, but are looking for a new home base for their fans. 

And that's how a lot of managers are talking about this: “Medallion is our new home base – we have all these other channels, but Medallion is where our core fans live, and this is where we can talk to them in a way where we know there are no algorithms, there are no restrictions on content and communication and we're building this alongside them.”

We have communities up with Illenium, Jungle, Palaye Royale, Sigur Ros, Tycho and Greta Van Fleet. Each of these communities is essentially white labeled. Some of these don't have them on their website yet because they just went up and some of them are still in beta.

But if you go to Tycho's website, you can see that you can click into the community from there. And there's no Medallion branding. It's fully within the artist’s world. And the goal here really is to give fans a place where they can join a community. They can claim essentially an NFT that is a membership card to that artist. It's entirely in the background. It's free. You don't need a wallet. It's on Polygon. 

We create this world where fans enter, and then the artists can really create different experiences based on what's most interesting to them. We literally launched this [next feature] yesterday and it's just been going absolutely gangbusters over the last 24 hours, but check out this Greta Van Fleet's community [he shared his screen with me, and you can explore the community here]. 

This new surface in the community is called Studio. Basically Studio's a place where fans compose content that's special to them, and then the artist can come in and essentially co-sign things that they love.

This is very much in beta for this one, so the artist hasn't picked which ones they want, but the content that we're seeing in here is insane – like fans are posting memes, they're posting content, they're posting AI art in here. There are thousands of posts from fans in here.

And we really see this as the future of what we're building, which is that the artist doesn't need to be in here to power this. It doesn't have to be on the content treadmill. This is a place where artists and fans can coexist. 

We're gonna start having prompts in here – like design your own set list. Things like allowing artists and fans to work together on content, whether that's album art or merch or potentially music down the line. So this is really where we see the power of our platform – giving a place for the first time where all this incredible fan art can live.

Because right now it's scattered across the internet. It's on Instagram, it's on Twitter, it's on Facebook, it's wherever. But it's also not in an officially sanctioned place. Instagram owns that, Discord owns that, et cetera. Here we really want this to be the artist's home, and Medallion,  we're just the technology in the background that's powering it.

D: So what is the process like? You know, from the moment you engage with an artist through what you just showed me. 

SV: Yeah, so from an artist standpoint I will say that we are very fortunate that between myself, Derek and Matt – having worked in the industry for basically our entire professional lives – we have a lot of strong relationships with artists from our previous ventures.

We have this layer of trust where about a year ago there were so many different startups going into the music space, and we would go talk to managers who we've worked with in the past and be like, “Hey, have you talked to these guys? Like what are your thoughts?” This is as we're building a company, and they're like, “They lost me after like three to four minutes.”

They're like, I understand their goal. But putting this into practice, artists and artist managers are some of the most risk averse people on earth. As much as artists take challenges, they're terrified of their fans. Right? They're terrified of their fans. You potentially see backlash if [what you do isn’t] coming off as authentic.

So for us it's really about coming to artists from a place of trust and explaining that what we're trying to do here is to create a new surface where artists truly have control over the experience. and truly have control over how they monetize and what that looks like.

I'm a huge fan of Sigur Ros, but Sigur Ros has no idea how many shows I've been to over the years – how many festivals I’ve seen, how many records I own. What we want to do is create a profile where every artist can essentially create their own version of Spotify Wrapped where [you can say], ‘Hey I'm the biggest Sigur Ros fan,’ and I should be able to show that on Instagram, on Twitter, that I have this really compelling relationship with the artist. 

D: And then do you just present a suite of options, like – we can do this, we can do that, what seems right for you and your fan base?

SV: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, right now we've built a relatively rigid structure that can almost be re-skinned in different ways, so this is like a publishing platform where artists can publish new content.

And then within that platform we have different experiences. So with Sigur Ros, we had a record experience where the fans can actually purchase a digital record. 

If you're going on tour, you can check in on the tour and you can actually claim a limited additional collectible that'll show up in your profile via QR code. This electronic artist Illennium just put off this insane arena tour today. After fans registered for the tour, they had an opportunity to claim a registration collectible. And the idea is now we're starting to collect tour data for artists coming from the live space.

On my end, one of the most frustrating things is just understanding that artists – when they go on tour – get none of the data in terms of who actually bought a ticket, so you have artists selling hundreds of thousands of tickets across a tour. They come home at the end of the day and their manager wants to remarket to these fans or start to build an audience and they don't have access to that data.

And that's by design. So for us, what's really important is starting to figure out how to get [tour data] into artists’ hands because it's the most valuable data in terms of spending. If you are a business and we told you you're not gonna know who your biggest customers are and you're expected to build a business, it would be impossible. 

And artists are expected to have these thriving businesses, yet literally do not know who their fans are because there are so many intermediaries that are incentivized to not share that information with them – because they want them to work with them again.

So, you know, the music industry is so fucked that I think there are a million problems to solve. But we're trying to start with the most basic, which is: let's give artists access to who their fans.