NFT
With millions of albums sold and a significant global following, heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold is arguably the largest music act building in the world. Web3 space today—launching its own NFT-based club to help ticket giant Ticketmaster to 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 Decrypt‘s gm podcast. He explained how the long-running band first embraced NFTs and why it continues to build with the technology despite fluctuating 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 wider plans.
The collectibles, each featuring a unique bat illustration, were launched in December 2021 outside of an album’s release cycle to “educate fans” and help them “find their way”. Deathbats Club members get access to exclusive merchandise, giveaways and can join a dedicated online community that also includes band members.
Putting up the token and building a community around it allowed the band to discuss next steps with major players in the music industry, Sanders said.
He cited Ticketmaster, streaming music leader Spotify and online shopping platform Shopify as the kind of companies that needed to get on board to provide real value to holders. All three companies have dabbled in the space so far, including with Enabling NFT sales, collectible giftsor token gated benefits.
Ticketmaster introduces NFT-gated ticketing, starting with Avenged Sevenfold
Ticketmaster was eventually the first such giant to join Avenged Sevenfold and its Web3 technology partner Bitflips, announced in March that they had teamed up to launch the ticketing platform’s NFT-gated ticketing integration. Avenged Sevenfold are the first band to offer the option to fans, having successfully trialled it prior to its public launch.
“We thought pure Web3 tickets, like pure NFT tickets, were a bit too much of a step for people right now,” Sanders said. “Sell out the Forum or [Madison Square Garden] and tell people they have one MetaMask Wallet didn’t seem like a good idea to us.”
But Avenged Sevenfold isn’t just meant 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 been rapidly expanding its Web3 efforts over the past few months via free NFT mints and passes that provide tokenized utility to anyone associated with the band.
If anyone is wondering how Avenged Sevenfold’s ‘NFT Scam’ is faring…
After a seamless ticket-purchasing experience, I just redeemed my free-meet-and-greets-for-life and skip-the-line benefits, and New York is getting IMMEDIATE.
Thanks for ripping me off, @DeathbatsClub! 🙌🏻🖤 pic.twitter.com/0y7sCsbeDO
— Sophie Garrett (@sophigarrett) Apr 22, 2023
Earlier this year, the band held it a large-scale alternate reality game (ARG) challenging fans to collect clues – both digitally and in the real world – to eventually discover details about Avenged Sevenfold’s upcoming album, “Life Is But a Dream…” As part of the experience, fans earned more than 900,000 free NFTs on Ethereum scalable network Polygonsaid Shadows.
And following the initial Ticketmaster announcement, Avenged launched Sevenfold 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 interact with the band, whether it’s attending concerts, buying physical merchandise, listening to streaming music and other potential links. Over time, the fans most connected to the Avenged Sevenfold ecosystem will reap greater benefits.
“You can think of it as a rewards program that has been accelerated to the limit,” Bitflips founder Joe Totaro told me Decrypt in an interview.
The goal of all these efforts is not to force fans to buy NFTs or use cryptocurrency. It’s a bonus feature, Sanders said, powered by blockchain — a sweetener that could reward those fans with exclusive opportunities and possibly even strengthen their bond with the band.
“It’s not asking the fan to do more than what they’re already doing,” he affirmed.
TicketPass is a blockchain-based verification and rewards system for anyone who chooses to participate. It’s free, eco-friendly and requires very few steps to ensure you get the tickets you want.
We will break these passes into “layers” over time and… pic.twitter.com/3l7DdI0eZr
— Avenged Sevenfold (@TheOfficialA7X) Apr 9, 2023
Since the launch of the Ticketmaster integration and TicketPass, Sanders said he’s seen interest from other artists in launching a similar program. In the past, other bands have raved about NFTs when “the price got high,” he said, but the band “didn’t hear from anyone again” when NFT sales and prices started to decline last year.
For the Avenged Sevenfold frontman, creating a better fan-buying model than the current scalper-dominated barrage will require more artists and bands to take a risk and bet on new technology – and to take matters into their own hands.
“I think it takes some people with big balls to jump in and say, ‘Okay, we’ll see what happens here,'” Sanders said. “We see an opportunity here where we can really mold what the landscape looks like to the artists, because it comes from an artist. We don’t want to let that opportunity pass us by.”