Rare Patrons: Exploring Radical Markets, Patronage & Collecting.
At Ujo Music, we recently launched the ability for fans to buy collectible badges from their favourite musicians. We are still polishing up some details about it, before we write a blog post on it & share it in earnest. From first experimenting with this in July 2017, we are excited to keep expanding ways for musicians to make new money, and for fans to connect.
Besides building a decentralized licensing engine, we’ve explored what new kinds of patronage can look like: especially around the act of collecting experiences.
With the blockchain, we can provide new conduits for fans to participate in supporting artists. What it enables is the ability to create new economic games that end up supporting the artist.
With this blog post, I want to detail another proposal: the idea of a rare patron: building, curating, trading & collecting patronage itself.
Radical Markets & Harberger Taxes
In another domain, an idea that has been picking up steam lately is the concept of Harberger tax. It’s recently popularity came from the book “Radical Markets”, and introduces a way to allocate property & ownership such that it improves efficiency in the market, and thus overall: general welfare.
It works by introducing two concepts to how property ownership works:
- Citizens value their own property and pay tax on that value. A self-assessed tax.
- At any point in time, anyone else can buy the property from you at that price, forcing a sale.
That’s all that’s important for now. For a more in-depth read, I wrote up more extensively on what it is, here:
What’s been interesting is that people have started producing interesting ways to utilize these ideas in the domain of the creative industries.
The gist is this: any information or intellectual property that is not committed to the creative commons (or permissive licensing in open source), should have a license where the private derivative works are required to pay a tax that funds the commons.
Here’s a great article from Luke Duncan on this concept:
In the context of music industry, it would thus allow permissive re-use & remixing of music as long as any derivative works are also in the creative commons. However, anyone at any time can then commercialise & privately own a derivative of the music created in this commons, as long as they keep paying a tax back into the commons.
Rare Patrons
Given these concepts/ideas, I want to propose a variant on the usage of radical markets that combines collectibles with such funding schemes. It works as follows:
- Every musician has a single patron seat.
- Anyone can buy the patron seat (to become the singular patron & gain the privilege of being the patron).
- Upon buying it they have to self-assess the value of this seat (being the patron).
- During the tenure of being a patron, this patron has to pay a percentage fee (say 5%) of the self-assessed seat value per year as their patronage to the musician.
- At any point in time, someone else can buy this patron seat at this self-assessed value, changing ownership.
- Upon being “dethroned” as the rare patron for a specific musician, that patron earns a collectible “Post-Patron” badge, signifying that they were a patron at a certain point in history. They just join the “Patrons Club”.
- They can choose to sell this collectible if they no longer want it.
This combines the game of being a patron, with curation & collecting. Some seats might become more valuable over time as others want to own the right to be the rare patron to a musician. During tenure as the rare patron, the musician earns revenue from this patron. After the tenure, the patron earns a collectible badge that is their proof of patronage. The musician can thus grant privileges to the rare patron & old patrons.
Conclusion
With the blockchain we can entirely re-imagine how we fund & support the creators. With radical markets we can envision a world where we can more readily fund a creative commons. On top of these ideas, we can experiment with concepts like a “Rare Patron”: combining funding, collecting & radical new economics to support musicians.
Addendum:
Matthew Prewitt also asks questions around how to economically deal with “artificial capital” (such as intellectual property) in a similar light, that’s worth reading!
