Where Do 'Superfans' Fit into Web3 Music? The Latest Water and Music Wavelengths Session Asks
Why it’s still difficult to discover and cultivate deeper connections between musicians and their fans.
Last week about 100 people gathered in a high-ceilinged room at the top of 100 Shoreditch, a hotel and events space in the London neighborhood of the same name. Wood panels lined two walls while the other two, fully windowed, looked out upon the London skyline. The group was convened for the third edition of Wavelengths, an event series organized by the inimitable music research decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), Water & Music.
A wavelength, in physics, is the distance between crests of a wave. In more casual parlance it's a term for the way someone thinks or communicates their ideas. At once, it is both the gulf between here and there and the space between you and me.
Fittingly, this Wavelengths was dedicated to superfans – the Swifties and BTS Army types willing to cross the crests and go to battle for their artists. They’re the ones willing to transition their “emotional relationships to financial relationships,” said one of the night’s panelists, Tersha Willis, the co-founder and CEO of merchandising platform Terrible. And they’re “the nerds” and the “niche 5 percent” capable of carrying 50 percent of an artist’s support, said Robin Shaw, fellow panelist and founder of fan engagement platform iiNDYVERSE.
But beyond those largest of superfan forces, there are millions of artists just trying to find their few, and assuredly there are fans looking for that artist for whom they’ll pick up arms. In the infinity of the Internet, in the ever-sought realization of the 1,000 true fans prophecy: how do we find each other?
Typically, we start looking on social networks. But “have we hit peak social media?” asked moderator, Kat Bassett, Water & Music’s community lead, painting our Instagram-colored digital environs as the “Times Square of the universe,” where it’s so easy to get caught up in the bright lights that we miss all the passersby. Without context, one may even forget that Times Square does not equal New York City.
Mainstream social platforms are much the same. We take the glitz and glam at face value and forget that Instagram is meticulously designed to dazzle us. Ostensibly, its purpose is to provide a space to gather, but black-box algorithms and zero-sum-game mechanics encourage scale, not intimacy. They aren’t built to support the needs of superfans, or for artists to find them.
Neither are streaming platforms. Spotify experimented with a number of more intimate social tools during its nascent stages, remembers Josh Dalton – community manager of the digital collectibles platform Serenade – but they were cut for the sake of optimizing the user experience. “It’s not that there’s not a demand for that,” he said. “[Spotify] just wasn’t interested in fulfilling that demand.”
In the end, Spotify opted to build scalable infrastructure oriented around consumption. Today that looks like a one-size-fits-all pricing model and a dearth of social tools, which forces artists and fans to look elsewhere for deeper connection.
Read more: The Beat: Universal’s Weak Sauce on Web3 Music, A Tough Playbook and Scalability Issues
In this way “the music is the marketing,” said Willis to more than one guffaw from the audience – no doubt people rebutting a dystopia where music is a pathway to something else and not enough by itself. But that’s not a new idea. Peer-to-peer file sharing was “successful” for artists in a similarly non-intuitive way.
Dalton recalled an online community in the early aughts that pirated the Arctic Monkeys (and other indie rock darlings) in droves. On the surface it was burglary, yes – “you wouldn’t download a car” – but the far-reaching connectivity of the Internet helped elevate the band to A-listers that could sell out stadiums.
Today, though, there are 100,000 songs uploaded to streaming platforms every day. And without an effective music-focused social platform that can be customized to accommodate unique artist-fan relationships, it’s very difficult to discover and cultivate those deeper connections.
Here’s where web3 comes in. Blockchain-powered tools can facilitate sovereignty from the prevailing streaming and social platforms by enabling direct audience ownership. Things like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can function as proof-of-fandom and gateways to closer engagement.
But is ownership always good? Dalton pushed back on the notion, suggesting people don’t want to feel “owned,” or even watched. The sentiment becomes that their data is being “harvested” and used to exploit them – which isn’t unfair, it’s basically Instagram’s business model.
Serenade uses on-chain digital collectibles to deliver that deeper fan engagement, and their biggest partnership to date was with the band Muse. The English rockers released their ninth album, Will of the People, on the platform. When the drop was announced, Dalton observed the band’s Discord server, where fan response was largely negative. There was concern that they were being “watched by Warner” and even some death threats to lead singer Matt Bellamy.
It’s an indication that stigma is still rampant. Web3’s negative reception is likely a facile – but not always incorrect – media representation, which casts crypto as an exploitative cash grab. It’s hard to blame an audience for being afraid of feeling owned.
Blame can also be placed on overly technical marketing, where acronyms like NFT and DAO can feel exclusive. “You need to be able to explain it to a seven-year-old,” said Willis. “No one likes to feel stupid.” The more forward thinking organizations are omitting jargon – note that Serenade offers collectibles, not NFTs – and weaving web3 tools into existing marketing strategies to make life easier for artists.
“There’s lots of effort dedicated to telling artists to create more content,” quipped Dalton, who referenced patronage sites like Patreon that demand artists create additional content to earn cash. “You should spend that energy on finding the fans that are willing to pay more.”
The panelists’ organizations are all helping artists to either identify or earn more (or both) from their superfans, but not every artist feels comfortable transacting with their community on such financial terms.
We still have a tendency to romanticize the ‘starving artist’ tale, where art should be about art and not money. But we all live in a capitalist world and we all gotta eat, and everybody else is making money from their work.
“If you can make money, make money,” said Shaw. “I sit in an office and write emails all day for money – how bleak is that?”
“We’re all motivated by money, and that’s not a dirty word for artists – they need it,” said Willis. “Every successful artist who has made a long career was focused on the bits that made them cold hard cash.”
Those artists understand that for the superfans, they are the product. People have gravitated to them because their wavelengths resonate, and there’s nothing wrong with leaning into that connection. It makes sense to pay more for the things we love, and it’s a beautiful thing to find another person who makes you want to feel something.
“The best way an artist can sell is to stand up and create a beautiful moment,” said Willis. “That’s the way it’s always been.