Expanding Patronage Collectibles for Creators
With the rise of collectibles (non-fungible tokens) on Ethereum, there’s a lot of interesting ideas arriving. It’s a very exciting time to see innovation happen in this space & it’s all being accrued towards creators of art. It’s phenomenal!
One angle I’m particularly interested in is the usage of collectibles for patronage: a new way to support creators.
At Ujo Music, in July 2017, before the whole collectible craze took off with CryptoKitties, we realised the power of collectibles and issued a collectible badge for every person that purchased a copy of Grammy-Award winning artist, RAC’s. album: EGO.
In MetaMask, you can see the badges we issued.
The article showcased a lot of reasons why patronage badges are useful:
- Proof-of-fandom.
- Rewards collectors & super fans.
- Can provide new forms of access to collectible holders.
Given that it was before the rise of the NFT ERC721 standard we didn’t quite have the capability to fully explore the possibilities. This is however something that’s a key feature we want to provide to artists & fans, besides utilizing Ujo as a decentralized licensing platform.
We are going to issue badges for various interactions fans take on Ujo. In fact we are already issuing badges every time you buy a release, but it’s not currently visible on the platform. More importantly, we feel that in order to experiment with how economics are changing in the way we support artists, we are most excited about issuing patronage badges.
Currently, you can tip musicians on Ujo, but very soon you will be able to earn a badge for every time you tip over a certain amount. Instead of buying a release, you can simply choose to support the artist by buying a digital, collectible badge directly.
This badge, conforming to the ERC721 standard means it can start utilising all the existing innovations that has popped up already. For example, all the fans of a particular artist can immediately chat with each other using UserFeeds. Ujo doesn’t have to build this functionality ourselves.
You have an instant, proven fan club. The only way to get access is to buy the badge directly from the artist. It will have a unique number, signalling how early you bought a badge. Fans can resell this badge if they don’t want it anymore.
Continuous, Rare, Patronage Collectibles.
Whilst patronage badges from tipping allows fans to reward the artist, accrue a collectible and participate in fandom of the artist through the access it provides, there’s more interesting schemes where it could generate huge new demand for musicians (and other creators). An example I want to share is the continuous, rare, collectible.
This rarer collectible can not be minted upon every tip or purchase. Instead, every week, a collectible will be minted that is auctioned off. Any fan can bid on it. All the proceeds of this rare collectible goes to the artist.
The fan then receives a unique, rare collectible. Like with tipping patronage badges, they also have unique IDs signalling how early you supported an artist. These rarer collectibles can provide more VIP access to fans who were willing to pay & bid on it.
These weekly, rare, patronage collectibles will be auctioned off every week. At any point in time, the musician can choose to imbue a specific collectible with unique characteristics in order to keep it interesting (like a unique image or giving a fan unique access to pre-listen to specific music). For example, every week, Kanye West can sell a rare, patronage collectible that’s a default, generic one: his face on it (because it’s Kanye). But, with his new album releases, he can upgrade a specific upcoming collectible with a different image.
Demand & the Super fan.
Our belief about the economics of music is that it currently doesn’t allow for super fans in the digital age to support artists beyond what’s available. The super fans are the ones who buy concert tickets, merchandise & vinyls. These super fans are often the 20% of fans who will make any creator 80% of their revenue. The current music industry does not provide enough opportunities for these fans to support artists digitally in this context.
If you are a super fan living in South Africa, listening to an indie band in New York, you can’t support this artist unless they come tour down in Cape Town. You can’t easily buy merch, a vinyl, or a concert ticket. Even if you could, there’s still quite specific, limited ways to support artists above and beyond the music they make. We feel that we should be allowing super fans to participate on scales that weren’t possible before. Industries that are getting this right are for example, live streaming gamers on Twitch, allowing fans to tip streamers whilst they play.
Tipping is thus one example of that ability that we want to bring to the music industry in a new, super-powered way.
Whilst on Ujo atm we do that through allowing fans to buy the music vs just streaming it (as a show of support and demonstrating our licensing engine), we believe that a large part of this new economy will one one side come from creating *new* demand for supporting artists.
We are also for example, looking to experiment on the usage of curved bonding on media access. Gage Valentino recently wrote an article of exactly the experiment we have in the pipes at Ujo. Our version that we drafted in March is very similar.
In the circumstances where the media access is relevant to the equation, we rely on Ujo’s work on building out a decentralized licensing platform. This latter component has taken a lot of time and will take more time to get 100% right. We still ultimately feel that both parts are necessary going into the future.
The combination of new forms of demand and the ability to reduce the cost & time to license music will generate a lot of value for musicians. We are excited.
Give Ujo Music & spin and join us on this exciting journey! Patronage Badges will be coming soon.
Other Reads:
Jacob Horne has a very good article on the value of collectibles in creating a paradigm shift for creating & sharing new forms of value.
