With millions of albums sold and a significant global following, heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold is arguably the biggest music building in Web3 space today – from launching its own NFT-based club to help ticketing giant Ticketmaster roll out token-gated ticket sales.
Avenged Sevenfold frontman Matt Sanders (aka M. Shadows), himself an avid NFT collector and CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club member, recently joined Decrypthis gm podcast. He described how the long-running band first embraced NFTs and why it continues to build with the technology despite up-and-down hype and a volatile market.
Sanders described the push as a long game, with the original Deathbats Club– a collection of 10,000 Ethereum NFTs – designed to serve as the “connective tissue” for broader plans.
The collectibles, each featuring a unique bat illustration, were launched in December 2021 outside of an album release cycle to “educate fans” and help them “get a foothold”. Deathbats Club members get access to exclusive merchandise, ticket giveaways and can join a dedicated online community that includes band members.
By establishing the token and building a community around it, the band could begin discussing next steps with major players around the music industry, Sanders said.
He cited Ticketmaster, streaming music leader Spotify and e-commerce platform Shopify as the types of companies that needed to come on board to provide real value to their holders. All three companies have operated with space to date, including with enables NFT sales, collectible giveawaysor token-gated benefits.
Ticketmaster ended up being the first of such giants to align with Avenged Sevenfold and Web3 technology partner Bitflips, announcement in March that they had collaborated to launch the ticketing platform’s NFT-gated ticketing integration. Avenged Sevenfold is the first band to offer the option to fans, having tried it successfully before the public launch.
“We found that pure Web3 tickets — like pure NFT tickets — were a little too much of a step for people at this point,” Sanders said. “Selling out The Forum or [Madison Square Garden] and telling people they had to have one MetaMask wallet didn’t seem like a good idea to us.”
But Avenged Sevenfold isn’t just aiming to serve its collector base of approximately 5,300 unique Deathbats Club NFT holders. The band wants all Avenged Sevenfold fans to come along for the ride, and has rapidly expanded its Web3 efforts in recent months via free NFT coins and passes that provide tokenized utility to anyone who engages with the band.
Earlier this year the band held a large-scale alternate reality game (ARG) that challenges fans to piece together clues—both digital and in the real world—to ultimately uncover details about Avenged Sevenfold’s upcoming album, “Life Is But a Dream…” As part of the experience, fans created over 900,000 free NFTs on Ethereum scaling network PolygonShadows said.
And then after the initial Ticketmaster announcement, Avenged Sevenfold launched TicketPass, a free-to-claim polygon NFT that allows fans to access token-gated sales – albeit after paying Deathbats Club members.
It’s part of a larger initiative by Avenged Sevenfold and Bitflips to reward die-hard fans who consistently engage with the band, whether it’s by attending concerts, buying physical merchandise, listening to streaming music, and other potential connections to come. Over time, the fans most connected to the Avenged Sevenfold ecosystem will reap greater benefits.
“You can think of it as a rewards program accelerated to the max,” said Bitflips founder Joe Totaro Decrypt in an interview.
The goal of all these efforts is not to force fans to buy NFTs or handle cryptocurrency. It’s a bonus feature, Sanders said, enabled by blockchain — a sweetener that can reward fans with exclusive opportunities and potentially even strengthen their connection to the band.
“It’s not asking the fans to do anything more than what they’re already doing,” he confirmed.
Since launching the Ticketmaster integration and TicketPass, Sanders said he has seen interest from other artists in launching a similar program. In the past, other bands were excited about NFTs when “prices go high,” he said, but the band “didn’t hear from anybody” once NFT sales and prices started to fall last year.
For the Avenged Sevenfold frontman, creating a better ticket-buying model for fans than the current scalper-dominated gridlock will require more artists and bands to take a risk and bet on new technology – and take matters into their own hands.
“I think it’s going to take some people with big balls to jump in and go, ‘OK, we’ll see what happens here,'” Sanders said. “We see an opportunity here where we can really shape what the landscape looks like for the artists – because it comes from an artist. We don’t want to let that opportunity pass us by.”
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