The rock band “Portugal/Portugal. The Man” that won the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Pop Group released their own cryptocurrency last month. They wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine explaining how people in the art world can use crypto Dongfeng builds a solid fan club.
Written by: John Gourley and Rich Holtzman, lead singer and rhythm guitarist and band manager of Portugal. The Man
Traditional fan clubs driven by artists need new design models. After years of searching, we finally found a way.
Photography: Maclay Heriot
Fan clubs have existed since the advent of popular music: The Grateful Dead band is the pioneer in this field, and has perfected it, and then others have realized it. Grateful to Die firmly believes that the fan club should be fully controlled by fans and allow the community to play as they please-so with the birth of the Shakedown Street album, the nearby speakers are open to diehard fans, mail-order concert tickets and ticket exchanges. With the development of technology, they even created a virtual community ” The Well “.
But after that, fan clubs are no longer fans. Although bands such as Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, and Phish have tried to give fans an important position, modern fan clubs have gone from a thriving community to a revenue-generating organization focusing only on membership fees. Although not necessarily formed under unselfish ideals, these clubs have evolved into something that rarely considers fans. They sell tickets immediately, promise “community”, exclusive content or sell merchandise. This is all purely profit-driven activity. Although many artists have provided real value to members, many more have not done it at all.
“Fans” should not be regarded as ATM machines here
Portugal. The Man band has always been afraid of our fan base being taken advantage of, and has resolutely refrained from engaging in fan clubs. The idea of ”monetizing” fans (this is not our word) makes us sick. A few years ago, we saw a young fan posting on Myspace and he bought five color versions of our same album. This kid doesn’t have a lot of money and knows that he is an avid fan. Just because we released these, it feels necessary to collect them all, which makes us feel very scared. We did not provide him with any real added value-just another color scheme. It was this moment that changed our view forever. These fans are not our ATMs, this is not the relationship we want to build with them.
We have reached a crossroads. How to serve the core of the well-being of fans, while not scoring bad money? In the end, we drew inspiration from the path of gratitude and forging: in-depth research on projects that might be generated by fans.
Some of our careful supporters have been building a database of live performances of our band. Portugal. The Man, as a live band, has performed more than 1,600 performances without any computer, accompaniment tape or other auxiliary means, so each performance has its own unique atmosphere. The live performance establishes a special bond between the artist and the singer. Two of our fans, Chris Haats and Josh Grant, wanted us to give them permission to publish the audio archive and sparked a conversation about how to publish it to the community.
We have been focusing on blockchain and cryptocurrency for some time. We like the decentralized core of encryption and the overall punk atmosphere, but the timing has not been appropriate. In the last year, the world’s attention to encryption has greatly increased, and blockchain technology has also made great progress. The public can access and understand blockchain and encrypted currencies. We see a unique opportunity to build a fan community, which will be fully controlled by fans and the band will support it. Most importantly, by using our own cryptocurrency, we can share ownership with the fan base and allow them to hold investment and value with the band.
No longer need to cut leeks on fans. We will create value together, and we will all benefit from it.
Therefore, last month we cooperated with fans to launch our own cryptocurrency PTM Coin, inadvertently becoming the first rock band to launch our own social token. No fees are charged. As a fan, you are part of the community and you can even get rewards for participating. You don’t need to know any knowledge involved in encryption, it only takes less than a minute to buy PTM Coin. People with at least 10 PTM Coins can access the audio files and get a series of benefits and experiences, including text and video chat, co-watching experience, access to new products, etc.
Portugal. The Man
Just last week, the band appeared on our Discord channel and answered questions from fans for more than 90 minutes. The most fun part is that if someone decides not to like PTM anymore, they just need to cash out the token and get their money back. PTM hopes to have a more coordinated relationship with its supporters, and PTM tokens allow this to happen.
We did not do this by ourselves. For several years, we have been discussing the possibility of getting involved in the blockchain with Josh Katz of Yellowheart. It was his matchmaking that allowed us to meet Rally’s Mahesh Vellanki and Kevin Chou. Rally itself is driven by the community, it has created the next generation of virtual economy, allowing us to interact with fans through cryptocurrency. The integration of our experience will eventually build our ideal future fan club.
With PTM Coin, we first contacted a small group of closest supporters and gave them tokens. We also encourage them to share with their friends-people they see in our performances, even just people chatting with them on fan forums or Reddit. We hope that the community can support, interact with each other, and be excited about this token issuance and the experience they can get with PTM Coin. This is the positive feeling we hope to generate in the community, and hope that people will continue to embrace each other.
We have a grand plan for PTM Coin and our Discord server. We will eventually create more opportunities for people to use the token for transactions, and eventually may launch NFT, but the core of this line will always be the community and database, and the community and information will always be controlled by fans. The feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive, and fans knew that we were opening up a new way to interact with them. We know that everyone has a learning curve for cryptocurrency, but we believe that others will follow suit and will soon become second nature. We hope to see other bands take the same steps as us and refocus their attention on fans.
Source link: www.rollingstone.com
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