Heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold has been a longtime Web3 enthusiast, launching its own line of Deathbats NFTs and building out token-gate ticket sales through Ticketmaster.
Now the band has launched Season Pass, a decentralized fan rewards platform that it calls the “culmination” of Web3’s efforts, allowing Avenged Sevenfold followers to collect rewards by participating in activities connected to the band. It’s similar to the battle pass for the popular video game Fortnite, but with a focus on bands.
Frontman Matt Sanders (aka M. Shadows) said: decryption By slowly introducing fans to the benefits of Web3, “they become evangelists for Web3 because they go to other concerts or other artist communities they enjoy.”
“You could compare it to, ‘What fandoms do I enjoy being involved in?’ By showing them all the positive aspects,” he said, adding that this could be balanced against Web3 issues such as cryptocurrency wallet security. “If you take the good and the bad and weigh them together, you are playing the long game and letting it be explained to others,” he added.
Built on the Ethereum scaling network polygon, Season Pass rewards fans who exchange digital stubs for concert tickets, stream the band’s music, and purchase NFC chip merchandise. Those points can unlock a variety of tiered rewards, from digital collectibles to merchandise discounts and previously unreleased demo tracks. Top rewards for the band’s most devoted fans include free concert tickets and meet-and-greets.
Because they are distributed on a decentralized platform, fans have true ownership of those rewards and can trade them on third-party marketplaces. Avenged Sevenfold had the advantage of working with an already established fan base, Sanders said.
“We’ve had a good relationship with them for 20 years, and they knew we weren’t doing anything crazy to ruin our reputation with them,” he said. The band added, “We leveraged the goodwill we had with them and brought them to something we wanted to do.” “It’s cooler than I thought.”
Sanders said many bands are “waiting on the sidelines” to see how Avenged Sevenfold’s Web3 gamble plays out. Two years after the release of the Deathbats Club NFT collection, the benefits of what he calls “real come-to-Jesus moments” are starting to become apparent as the band plays the second leg of its LIBAD tour.
Now, he said, “the fans will speak, and the artists will have to listen.”
Sanders expects Web3 adoption in the music industry to be driven by established bands like Avenged Sevenfold and emerging artists with fans who have grown up with cryptocurrencies. “The fact that we’re in our 40s and trying to do this almost breaks the matrix,” he added. “Normally the way this should happen is for these young kids to create a whole different music industry, the one we’ve been trying to create for 25 years of our careers.”
Where Avenged Sevenfold has had to invest a lot of time and effort educating its fan base about Web3, he said the next generation of musicians and fans will grow up with the technology. “It will be harder to convert our audience to this than it would be to a kid trying to build an audience in a Web3-based way,” he said.
Sanders said that for the time being, the negative press surrounding NFTs and Web3 has made some artists cautious about adopting the technology. “You just have to use it and have people stand up and get through,” he said. “Otherwise you become a slave to your fans, and I don’t think that’s a healthy relationship.”
He added that Avenged Sevenfold are “kind of unusual” considering they are “willing to shake trees and ruffle the feathers of our fan base” at this stage of their career.
“I could literally ride off into the sunset and just keep writing the same type of record and spend the rest of my day playing stadiums,” Sanders said. Instead, he added, the band wants to prove that Web3 has real utility for musicians and fans.
“We want to set an example that we can create a better internet and a better future for artists,” he said.
Editor: Andrew Hayward