Fanbase Wants To Reward You For Contributing
Blockchain has promised to solve problems and change the world since its birth in 2008. It definitely has the potential to be more than a disrupter—it can fundamentally change the way the world spins. And chances are it will. The technology is being explored by businesses focused on everything from politics, gambling, counterfeit drugs and even the global refugee crisis. It’s bigger than contracts, transactions and record keeping. But how quickly it seeps into our lives depends on us—me, you, everyone. And that’s kinda the rub. Significant change like this happens gradually, and that’s because the idea of blockchain still seems like a novelty to many—and it’s definitely a complex idea to wrap your head around. The good news is that it has been moving forward at a slow and steady pace.
The music industry has a lot to gain from this technology… Blockchain startup Fanbase is looking to change the way traditional social-media marketing for music is done. Individualized artist-branded tokens are what drives the business model. When a fan buys a token, a portion of the funds get deposited to the artist’s account. Which can be very disruptive considering the fact that many DJs and producers on top of the game today have more powerful brands than the labels releasing their music. It’s not a crazy leap to envision a scenario where labels get cut of the process like a lot of other intermediary “middlemen” will surely fall victim too as cryptocurrency and blockchain technology move past the novelty stage and adopted by the masses. We are just about there…
Speaking with Music Ally, Fanbase advisor Scott Cohen had this to say:
“I believe that the existing social media platforms are less effective for the things that we want to do in the music industry,” he says. “Running campaigns on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram just isn’t that effective anymore. It’s not that we don’t do them; it’s that we’re just not seeing the results. People aren’t there solely for [music] and you are interrupting them to ask him to come to a gig, stream a song or buy a piece of vinyl…
In a tokenized environment, people who are contributing to the network are rewarded,” he says of the core thrust of Fanbase. “That contribution can happen in any number of ways. It could be just spending time on there, it could be helping other people, reviewing stuff, sharing stuff. And the tokens could be redeemed for any number of things. What happens is that the people who use the network and contribute to it get those rewards. In the simplest way, it could be things like merchandise and exclusives; but the tokens could be redeemed for anything moving forward.”
