With thousands and thousands of albums offered and a large world following, heavy metallic band Avenged Sevenfold is arguably the most important music act constructing within the Web3 area as we speak—from launching its personal NFT-based membership to serving to ticketing large Ticketmaster roll out token-gated ticket gross sales.
Avenged Sevenfold frontman Matt Sanders (a.ok.a. M. Shadows), himself an avid NFT collector and CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Membership member, lately joined Decrypt’s gm podcast. He detailed how the long-running band first embraced NFTs and why it continues to construct with the tech regardless of up-and-down hype and a risky market.
Sanders described the push as a protracted recreation, with the unique Deathbats Membership—a group of 10,000 Ethereum NFTs—designed to function the “connective tissue” for broader plans.
The collectibles, every that includes a novel bat illustration, had been launched in December 2021 exterior of an album launch cycle to “educate followers” and assist them “get their footing.” Deathbats Membership members acquire entry to unique merchandise, ticket giveaways, and may be part of a devoted on-line group that features band members.
Establishing the token and constructing a group round it allowed the band to begin discussing subsequent steps with main gamers across the music business, stated Sanders.
He talked about Ticketmaster, streaming music chief Spotify, and on-line procuring platform Shopify because the sorts of firms that wanted to get onboard to supply true worth to holders. All three firms have dabbled within the area so far, together with with enabling NFT gross sales, collectible giveaways, or token-gated advantages.
Ticketmaster ended up being the primary of such giants to align with Avenged Sevenfold and its Web3 tech accomplice Bitflips, saying in March that that they had collaborated to launch the ticketing platform’s NFT-gated ticket gross sales integration. Avenged Sevenfold is the primary band to supply the choice to followers, having trialed it efficiently forward of the general public launch.
“We figured that pure Web3 tickets—like, pure NFT tickets—had been slightly an excessive amount of of a step for individuals at this level,” Sanders stated. “Promoting out The Discussion board or [Madison Square Garden] and telling individuals they needed to have a MetaMask pockets did not look like a good suggestion to us.”
However Avenged Sevenfold isn’t merely aiming to serve its collector base of roughly 5,300 distinctive Deathbats Membership NFT holders. The band desires all Avenged Sevenfold followers to come back alongside for the trip, and has quickly expanded its Web3 efforts in latest months through free NFT mints and passes that present tokenized utility to anybody who engages with the band.
Earlier this yr, the band held a large-scale alternate actuality recreation (ARG) that challenges followers to piece collectively clues—each digital and in the true world—to in the end uncover particulars about Avenged Sevenfold’s upcoming album, “Life Is However a Dream…” As a part of the expertise, followers minted over 900,000 free NFTs on Ethereum scaling community Polygon, Shadows stated.
After which following the preliminary Ticketmaster announcement, Avenged Sevenfold launched TicketPass, a free-to-claim Polygon NFT that lets followers get entry to token-gated gross sales—albeit after paying Deathbats Membership members.
It’s a part of a larger-scale initiative from Avenged Sevenfold and Bitflips to reward die-hard followers that constantly interact with the band, whether or not it’s by attending live shows, shopping for bodily merchandise, listening to streaming music, and different potential tie-ins to come back. Over time, the followers who’re most plugged into the Avenged Sevenfold ecosystem will acquire larger advantages.
“You possibly can consider it like a rewards program accelerated to the max,” Bitflips founder Joe Totaro advised Decrypt in an interview.
The objective with all of those efforts is to not pressure followers to purchase NFTs or deal with cryptocurrency. It’s a bonus characteristic, Sanders stated, enabled by blockchain—a sweetener that may reward these followers with unique alternatives and probably even strengthen their connection to the band.
“It does not ask the fan to do something greater than what they’re already doing,” he affirmed.
Since launching the Ticketmaster integration and TicketPass, Sanders stated that he’s seen curiosity from different artists in launching the same program. Previously, different bands had been enthusiastic about NFTs when “worth go excessive,” he stated, however the band “did not hear from anyone” as soon as NFT gross sales and costs began dropping final yr.
For the Avenged Sevenfold frontman, creating a greater ticket-buying mannequin for followers than the present scalper-dominated barrage goes to require extra artists and bands to take a danger and guess on new tech—and take issues into their very own palms.
“I believe it should take some individuals with huge balls to type of bounce in and go, ‘OK, we see what’s taking place right here,’” Sanders stated. “We’re seeing a chance right here the place we will actually mould what the panorama seems like for the artists—as a result of it is coming from an artist. We do not need to let that chance move us by.”
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