With tens of millions of albums offered and a large international following, heavy metallic band Avenged Sevenfold is arguably the biggest music act constructing within the Web3 area right this moment—from launching its personal NFT-based membership to serving to ticketing big Ticketmaster roll out token-gated ticket sales.
Avenged Sevenfold frontman Matt Sanders (a.ok.a. M. Shadows), himself an avid NFT collector and CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club member, not too long ago 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 unstable market.
Sanders described the push as a protracted recreation, with the unique Deathbats Club—a set of 10,000 Ethereum NFTs—designed to function the “connective tissue” for broader plans.
The collectibles, every that includes a singular bat illustration, have been launched in December 2021 exterior of an album launch cycle to “educate followers” and assist them “get their footing.” Deathbats Membership members achieve entry to unique merchandise, ticket giveaways, and might be a 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 trade, mentioned 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 up to now, together with with enabling NFT sales, collectible giveaways, or token-gated benefits.
Ticketmaster ended up being the primary of such giants to align with Avenged Sevenfold and its Web3 tech accomplice Bitflips, announcing in March that they’d 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—have been slightly an excessive amount of of a step for folks at this level,” Sanders mentioned. “Promoting out The Discussion board or [Madison Square Garden] and telling folks they needed to have a MetaMask wallet did not seem to be 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 journey, 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 12 months, the band held a large-scale alternate reality game (ARG) that challenges followers to piece collectively clues—each digital and in the actual 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 mentioned.
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 achieve better advantages.
“You possibly can consider it like a rewards program accelerated to the max,” Bitflips founder Joe Totaro informed Decrypt in an interview.
The aim with all of those efforts is to not power followers to purchase NFTs or deal with cryptocurrency. It’s a bonus function, Sanders mentioned, enabled by blockchain—a sweetener that may reward these followers with unique alternatives and doubtlessly even strengthen their connection to the band.
“It would not ask the fan to do something greater than what they’re already doing,” he affirmed.
Since launching the Ticketmaster integration and TicketPass, Sanders mentioned that he’s seen curiosity from different artists in launching an analogous program. Prior to now, different bands have been enthusiastic about NFTs when “worth go excessive,” he mentioned, however the band “did not hear from anyone” as soon as NFT gross sales and costs started dropping last year.
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 wager on new tech—and take issues into their very own palms.
“I feel it is going to take some folks with huge balls to type of leap in and go, ‘OK, we see what’s occurring right here,’” Sanders mentioned. “We’re seeing a possibility right here the place we will actually mould what the panorama appears to be like like for the artists—as a result of it is coming from an artist. We do not wish to let that chance go us by.”
