“Worldbuilding is creative resilience.” 

That phrase – the title of an essay by Metalabel’s Yancey Strickler – is a powerful call to arms. “Artists excel at creating worlds,” he begins, borrowing words from the designer, artist and writer Laurel Schwulst. “They do this first for themselves and then, when they share their work, for others… World-building means creating everything – not only making things inside the world but also the surrounding world itself – the language, style, rules and architecture.”

The presentation of that “everything” requires tools, and a container to deliver an artist’s certain je ne sais quoi. The blockchain, with its mythos of immutability and interoperability, can ostensibly unshackle artists from exploitative, siloed platforms. It can enable them to build ex-platform universes so that, across sundry Internet locales, their story seeps into the hearts and minds of world travelers.

An enticing new arrival to the worldbuilding tool suite is the Bonfire Season Pass, a “time-bound membership” built around moments. Through custom web3-enabled websites that leverage gated content and digital assets, Bonfire has been empowering creators to gather their communities for a couple years now, finding inspiration in its namesake.

As I wrote in my 2023 feature on Bonfire co-founder Matt Alston, the word “bonfire” dates back to the 15th century, when the priest John Mirk compounded the words “bone” and “fire” in his Book of Festivals, describing a communal blaze that celebrated St. John’s Eve.

In the half millennium that’s followed, even in this technological age of blockchains and AI, we still honor the bonfire as a sacred gathering space, saluting its primordial ability to bring our bones to the fire.

Read more: Testing Supercollector, the Bandcamp-like Platform Championing a ‘New Value’ for On-Chain Music

Season Passes are an extension of that act. They’re intended to gather folks around a release, a tour or a physical product. And unlike memberships elsewhere, they exist on artist-owned domains and can be branded in the artists’ styles.

Importantly, they’re also interoperable, attached to a fan’s wallet so that people can unlock benefits from anywhere digital bones gather – away from the lurid lights of TikTok and Instagram, where the digital and physical worlds can come together to create something neither of them can do on their own.

Season Passes – still in limited beta – are the latest focal point of Pariah Carey, my music series that reckons with the woes of self-promotion in a TikTok-colored world. The intention is to provide a transparent framework – full of my own anecdotes, blunders and (hopefully) some wisdom – for others looking to ‘go from pariah to Mariah,’ so to speak.

In this latest episode, I’m testing the new feature, and using it to birth the incipient Braneworld – a space I first built for myself that, now upon sharing, will be for others, too.

The Braneworld Backstory

As a child I had a debilitating stutter. It was impossible to trust my voice. Singing and writing were the only ways to cheat it, but even then, I was bullied and forced to turn inwards. In time, a rift emerged between myself and my self image, and they grew in tandem until I could no longer tell them apart. I named the image, Moon Man.

My music manifested as a conversation between these selves. Through therapy, meditation and songwriting, I discovered other characters, too. In time, these characters gained backstories and likenesses, and then a storytelling container – the digital realm, Braneworld – for their paths to cross and lore to grow.

As I began sharing my music, I realized that everyone has a Moon Man inside them. Each of us has a “meridian,” that liminal space between the “true self” and the image we present to the world. And by combining live performance with digital co-creation, I discovered I could invite others to be part of the healing process, and to build Braneworld with me.

---

In September, I piloted an interactive performance concept at a festival in Portugal, inviting 60 participants to reflect on their meridians as I played. 

The response was profound – some folks were moved to tears, sharing personal stories about their own struggles with identity and self-expression. These reflections – expressed in writing and drawing – were collated and, via AI, transformed into the first Braneworld character. The community then named that character Voz, and helped build her backstory. Subsequent shows will generate new characters.

What I needed, though, was a way to document that journey and gather people in a digital space – to extend the intimate connection formed IRL. Here’s where Season Passes come in.

Season Passes

“One of the key differences between season passes and a traditional artist membership is that, whereas a traditional subscription requires an artist to commit to providing consistent value indefinitely to fans… the season pass is built around an existing campaign,” says Alston in a demo of the feature. “Think of this as the white label Patreon, if you will.”

Worldbuilding on creator platforms like Patreon often means creating extraneous premium content that has little to do with what people actually create – a content treadmill that takes time away from the art itself. One thing I appreciate about Season Passes is that they act as a layer atop the art. For me, they provide a digital extension of my live shows.

In the Bonfire backend, I created a Season called Meridians to pair with my performance series of the same name. Within the Season, it’s possible to create passes with various collector benefits. You can also set a price, royalty percentage, and scarcity level – and you can contextualize the pass within the lore of the world.

For Meridians, the Moon Man Pass is the entry level membership – the initial point of connection between a traveler and me, so I set the price to free and offered basic benefits that include content access, early access to material and, of course, a first-class ticket to Braneworld.

I minted the Pass into existence as an ERC1155 – an efficient smart contract that can manage multiple types of tokens. Bonfire uses the Zora Protocol, which attaches an automatic 0.000111 ETH fee to each pass. That means it’s not technically free, but there’s a creator-centric intention behind that (I wrote about the Zora protocol fees here) – and Bonfire does offer an integration with ThirdWeb, a no-code platform that enables creators to create on-chain collections on other blockchain protocols (and these can be imported into Bonfire). Additionally, Bonfire offers a native free membership tier, which is off-chain and email-based.

What I then wanted to do was create a digital good for each show – to house the generated character and gate it to attendees of that specific show. For Voz, I created a separate page with an embedded digital good: the Voz non-fungible token (NFT). I gated page access to holders of the Moon Man Season Pass. Ideally, I could then add a subsequent gate to the email addresses of that show’s attendees. I could create gates via proof of attendance protocols (POAPs) and other on-chain mechanisms, but I also wanted an off-chain on-ramp.

While it’s possible to create a gate to all free members (i.e. anyone who has joined my community via email), it’s not currently possible to gate to a subset of that membership. I worked around this by hiding the Voz page and sharing the URL only with that subset of people (i.e. the Portugal show attendees).

Bonfire still offers a lot of flexibility, though. You can have up to five active pass tiers at a time, offering varying levels for collectors to engage – from cursory interest (e.g. free tier) to hardcore fans. Collectors can pay with credit card, Apple/Google Pay or crypto.

And there are myriad features that can be layered into the passes: exclusive content (audio, video and text posts); gated livestreams; and my favorite, unique promo codes – customized at the tier-level – for things like private ticket sales (via Ticketmaster integration) and merch (via Shopify integration).

“Rather than sending fans to a platform you don’t control, it can be to your own site,” Alston says. “You can fully customize your experience.”

Custom domains, though, are a premium feature and require a Lite subscription (which also comes with advanced analytics, more context storage, more customization options and more pass types). Bonfire doesn’t take a cut of revenue generated via their platform – they make money through that subscription model. 

It’s an exacting balancing act, as Bonfire seeks to dovetail the worldbuilding suite of a website builder with the support and fandom features of a creator platform. Concurrently, they’re trying to thread the needle between on- and off-chain audiences. Inevitably, that adds some friction.

While they do provide a number of guides and resources in their Bonfire Academy, there’s still a higher degree of difficulty here than with other website builders. There are still bugs, and it can be difficult to navigate at times – especially for the non-crypto native who may find it difficult to differentiate between Membership Passes, Digital Goods and Gates, and to decide how best to balance off-chain and on-chain mechanics.

I haven’t pulled the trigger on a subscription yet (they do offer a one-month free trial), but the opportunity to gather digital bones to the fire on my terms – i.e. maintain full control over my audience data and dictate how I interact with my fans – is a good one. For creative resilience, it seems like a price worth paying.

Until next time, here’s to you Mariah.