Beyond the Stage: Taylor Swift's Unseen Ties to Decentralized Tech and Aoki's Co-Marketing Efforts

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Marketing Meets Web 3, a podcast that helps marketers navigate the news trends, opportunities and insights surrounding Web 3. Today's conversation is for information purposes only and does not constitute legal or investment advice.

Speaker 2: 0:23

Hello Nick, how are you doing?

Speaker 3: 0:26

Hi Alberto, I'm doing well.

Speaker 2: 0:27

How are you? I'm doing fine. I was just looking at opportunities to be found in the realm of concerts music to be listened to. I came across this story from Taylor Swift, which talked about the ethos of Web 3 and the principles that inspired this technology. I found it to be a very interesting article, so I figured that this could be one piece of news that we could be covering today, mainly because I know that you love Taylor Swift, Isn't that the case?

Speaker 3: 1:08

It's always been the case. I'm a long time Tay-Tay fan. Everybody knows it, everybody on the team knows it. Yeah, so let's talk about this article. Well, first of all, it's not from Taylor Swift, right? It's an article by Sandy Carter. She's the COO at Unstoppable Domains, which is a Web 3 digital identity platform. They're a pretty well-known name in this space.

Speaker 3: 1:34

Sandy Carter actually came from Amazon AWS. She has her roots in more traditional cloud computing and obviously sees the future with Web 3 and has moved over to Unstoppable Domains, and so she penned this editorial piece for Forbes Magazine, and throughout this article, she's basically making the point that the way that Taylor Swift has approached her engagement with fans mirrors some of the underlying principles of Web 3. And so she talks about this idea of direct to fan engagement. She talks about how Taylor has used some of the same mechanics and principles. Things like fan ownership, things like participation in community involvement, to really bring her fans closer into her circle and actually to take back a lot of control financially of her business empire from what have been traditionally centralized type of approaches with things like publishers, music studios, etc. So you want to unpack this a little bit for us.

Speaker 2: 2:43

Yeah, well, yes, as I said, a couple of things here that were interesting even before I read the article, and the main thing was that what is written in a published in Forbes, so it's already telling you something about the quality of the writing and the level of the story. And just what I liked is that starts the story talking about the history of Taylor Swift in her creative endeavors and in the way that she's been battling, in a way, with corporate, with corporations that she feels sometimes, I guess she feels that that are not following the same interests that she likes to follow, and in the article you can see that that, well, taylor Swift tried to get back to their, to their, to their, to get back to her audience, so basically, get closer to them and retain ownership of her own work. They talk about the sale of her first six albums from one corporate, one company that had them, to a VC fund that bought them, and that she wasn't happy about this. So, throughout the article, the beginning of it is speaking of, well, how Taylor Swift feels like she would like to be closer to her fans and make content available to them that is directly accessible to them from Taylor Swift, so it doesn't have to go through any kind of intermediary. And you can read there about this movie that she created about her concerts that is easily accessible to the people who couldn't or want or went to the concerts and just wanted to relieve them. Anyways, she created a movie about this and made it accessible to the fans, and just so, basically she's speaking.

Speaker 2: 4:46

In the article they speak about all these ways in which Taylor Swift is trying to get closer to the fans without using Web3, but, in a way, doing everything that Web3 allows artists to do. And this is how he's connecting the dots here between what Taylor Swift is doing and what Web3 is doing and coming to the conclusion that, well, it's actually the same thing. It's just that well, swift in this case has done it without expressly using Web3, but at the end basically following the same ideals. So interesting article, I think, philosophically speaking, and also we can talk a bit about some of the ideas that are covered in the article that are also relevant for Web3.

Speaker 3: 5:37

Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about some of the ideas you know. So this direct to fan idea she digs into a bit and just the way that Taylor has sort of created opportunities for fans at different levels. So you know you can. Obviously the lowest bar is probably you hear Taylor, taylor's music, and that happens through a variety of platforms, as we all know, very accessible. You know that's probably like you know, the lowest bar.

Speaker 3: 6:04

In terms of what you have to do to be a fan, you just listen to the music and then, as you progress through her sort of fan ecosystem, there are different ways to get involved, with Taylor all the way up to, you know, going to a live show which, during the height of ticket sales for her concerts and you know, if you think back, this was half a year ago there was a whole debacle with Ticketmaster and they weren't able to support ticket sales and prices spun completely out of control. At one point, I think I was seeing headlines of tickets going for, like you know, $40,000, which is just insane, and she knew that. She saw that and she wanted to make sure that fans who enjoyed her music and wanted to be a part of her community still had an opportunity to access that experience. And so, while she's been on this Ares tour, which has been extremely successful, and she's been, you know, touring around the world and engaging fans who can afford those higher price tickets, she's also been creating a film of that concert, the Ares movie, and she's been releasing that through studios, you know, selling tickets for $20 a piece, where anybody can come and enjoy the same kind of experience obviously not live, but you still get some interaction and what's been interesting to see is how those fans show up at the theaters. You know, obviously Taylor has a fan demographic that leans female and a younger age, but you see people of all ages. You see people coming to these events at movie theaters, dancing, dressing up in their favorite Taylor outfit, and so it's a really interesting take on how she's created these different entry points to her fan ecosystem for all levels of people, regardless of, you know, financial means or their ability to get to a concert, and she's using that to really power her community participation. And so, you know, going forward, it'll be really interesting to see how she continues to embrace this community she's building at all different levels, whether it's in person, live at a movie, or you're a listener. You know she's really been savvy about creating this sort of dynamic fan base and this dynamic outreach, which in a lot of ways, mirrors some of this, the sort of patterns that we've seen in Web three, where you start with something that is seemingly simple, like an NFT, but that serves as your entry point into a community and then from there you have different levels of participation, whether that's, you know, getting involved in a discord channel, or becoming more active in the community and organizing events, or, as an NFT holder, creating, as we've seen with the types you know, variations of the brand and creating products that are associated with that brand. So you know, I think there are some parallels here that are interesting between Web three and what Taylor's doing. I wonder where we go next with this.

Speaker 3: 8:52

And in this article they talk she, sandy talks a little bit about how other companies like Spotify and Ticketmaster have started to at least take a look at some of these sort of Web three interactions. So, in the case of Spotify, they have these token enabled lists. So if you have a certain NFT, you can unlock a playlist, which I think is, you know, a very, very straightforward and very clear use case for an NFT. As a music fan, you know, if you have a Taylor NFT which, again, these things could be free or very inexpensive there's no reason to necessarily limit that, other than, you know, trying to triage people by their engagement level, but then using that as access to music. What a great use case.

Speaker 3: 9:37

And then you know NFC ticketing, obviously with Ticketmaster in the mix.

Speaker 3: 9:41

Ticketmaster is, you know, they're the big bad wolf when it comes to centralized ticketing.

Speaker 3: 9:46

But they have started to experiment in Web three. They recently did a ticketed event for Avenge seven fold, which is a heavy metal band, and it'll be interesting to see if they can start to get their hands around some of these ideas as well, because I think you know, as the physical gatekeeper of these events, ticketmaster is in a position to either be, you know, kind of a gatekeeper for the entire Web three integration when it comes to ticketing, so either they can embrace it and suddenly we could see some really cool things happening with artist NFTs and access to physical locations and events, or they could throw their hands up and say we don't want anything to do with this, and then artists will inevitably find a way to continue driving around Ticketmaster. So I hope artists looking at Taylor's approach here are inspired by it. I think you know mashing what she's doing up with some of the Web three principles could lead to a pretty potent mix for artists that are looking to be disruptive and rethink the way that you build fan bases and engage with your community.

Speaker 2: 10:48

Yeah, actually Sandy the author, you can tell that she really likes, she really sees the promise in Web three and at some point in the article I'm going to quote her because she expands on the things that could be happening in the future following the ideas that Taylor Swift is exploring and taking them even farther thanks to the usage of Web three.

Speaker 2: 11:14

And she says, thanks to Web three quote there could be found novel ways for fans to get involved will be complemented by fractional ownership of assets and opportunities, immense reward schemes that thank you and excite you in equal measure measure, and the new ways to support your favorite content creators so that they can remain independent. Close quote so you can see that that sending here is seeing what Taylor Swift is doing and thinking farther of things that could be done thanks to the Web three technology and that anybody could be taking advantage of. Because I think what you talked a bit about the inspiration that Taylor Swift had in here Having here for other companies like ticketmaster and Spotify, but again, those are big companies and I think this this can also speak to smaller artists and companies that can see in what she's doing something that they would like to try and that it could be more accessible thanks to Web three than without Web three.

Speaker 3: 12:21

Yeah, completely agree. This is. It'd be interesting to see how fandom unfolds over the next decade.

Speaker 2: 12:28

We'll be right back after the award from our sponsor.

Speaker 1: 12:32

This podcast is brought to you by step three, an engagement marketing platform that helps brands build deeper customer relationships. Step three makes it easy to design custom branded membership programs that include rewards like exclusive content, vip event passes, merchandise discounts and more, unlock new revenue streams. It enhance customer lifetime value with step three's easy to use, no code tools. Go to step three dot IO to learn more.

Speaker 2: 13:07

And it will be interesting to see what happens with dreaded foray into web three and crypto in general, because the next news item is about Reddit retiring. It's a crypto project the community points due, according to them, to scalability users. So Reddit is it's discontinuing in this cryptocurrency project called community points. I don't know if you had any of these points. I didn't. Well, they were launched in 2020 and this program just recently was a shutdown for reasons about scalability. But I want to talk a bit about whether scalability was really the issue and what took Reddit here and what could be the way forward. But first, let's start with hearing what you think about this announcement.

Speaker 3: 14:06

Yeah, it's a little bit tough to read the tea leaves on this one. So Reddit's been in the crypto game, I think for a little longer than the brands that are currently experimenting with web three. So they actually created this initiative again back in 2020. And I believe community points I do have some of those. I think community points are actually running on the Ethereum blockchain. So they were pretty early and they launched when things like layer twos I'm sorry rollups, things like that, the arbitremes, the optimisms, the things that are making life easier, even things like polygon, before those L2s were available, they launched on Ethereum and which means that there's potentially high friction for users because of some of the gas costs associated with those transactions. So if you're going to use something like crypto to facilitate community point system, you would hope to have something very fluid and very easy to move points between community members, because it becomes a form of social currency and the idea is that you want to use that social currency to encourage participation, to reward people, and if there's any friction in that process or if there's a cost associated with that process, it's going to be a lot harder, I think, to achieve any kind of virality or network effect, because people will just be kind of bummed out by the fact that they have to pay to move these points around. So what I think could be going on here is that we've been following Reddit for a while. We know that they're active in the NFT space with their collectible avatars. They're continuing to build on that program. So, in addition to rolling out more collectible avatars, they're starting to integrate functionality within the app. I noticed recently that you can now react with your collectible avatar, which means they're starting to give life and interaction to those NFTs within their community experience.

Speaker 3: 16:00

And so what I think could be happening here is that Reddit got an early start, earlier than some of the recent optimizations were available, and now they're realizing to make this as seamless as possible. We need to take a step back, and I think that's something that we're starting to see in the space. We're starting to see some of these early experimenters who got started because they were curious and ambitious and wanted to be on the bleeding edge, have realized that you can't just bolt Web 3 on. It's not just a feature, it's not a checkbox. You can't just say, ok, we're Web 3. Now you actually have to build Web 3 technology into the core of your value proposition.

Speaker 3: 16:40

So we know that Web 3 is great at certain things like incentive systems, and that's a really hard thing to bolt on to an existing community if it's not baked into the fabric of the way you're building that community. And so I think what Reddit could be doing here is just taking a step backwards and saying let's jump back up to the 40,000 foot view. What can we actually do with the core of our value prop that's going to integrate some of these Web 3 principles and facilitate a really great community experience? So I think at the outset, people saw this as kind of negative and they said well, if Reddit's withdrawing their crypto points and walking this back, what does that mean for Web 3 and big brands? I actually think this is just a step backward. To take a bigger step forward.

Speaker 2: 17:26

Yeah, well, I don't really know what to add in here, because you covered all the main points and I just have to agree on the fact that a lot of companies, and Reddit in particular, was very fast in jumping in here and seeing the opportunity, and a lot of them also followed in the steps and maybe realizing today that, as you said, you don't become Web 3 just by flicking on a switch. You have to do some work and you have to think it through, and I don't think this was the case in most cases. I think Reddit probably thought about it quite a lot more than a few others, for sure, but still, yes, as you said, it's not the same environment today as it was in 2020. And I think the opportunities now are different. And, yeah, if you want to create, probably if they had launched community points in 2022, they will, for sure, still be around and that would be using them because they will probably be living in a more scalable chain.

Speaker 2: 18:39

And, yeah, so the rationale for shutting this down is not that they don't see the value in this. Well, as they say, the fact that they're doing it in a way that probably doesn't add the value that they were hoping for. And I wanted to speak a bit about the fact that, well, reddit has been very fast on everything and, as you said, they jumped on this with the crypto points, but they also jumped into the NFTs with the avatars and, well, despite them saying no to crypto points, they didn't say anything about the avatars, which again, I think, reinforces the idea that it's not like they don't want to have anything to do with Web3. It's mostly that, well, they think that Web3 can be done in a way and it can be at value in one way, and maybe it doesn't have any value done in a different way, and that's why they're maybe shutting down one project while keeping a life the other and working on it. We've talked a lot about Reddit avatars, so I guess you agree on this, or do you have anything to add in there?

Speaker 3: 19:46

You know, I think the only thing that I'll add is just kind of a meta observation, which is that throughout technology's history long running history of technology we always see this happen, where you'll see people that kind of front run and try to get out there on the bleeding edge and they learn things and then they walk things back, and sometimes that's the same organization.

Speaker 3: 20:05

I mean, how many times have we seen a company, a big tech company like a Google or a Facebook, launch something and then walk it all the way back because it wasn't ready or it wasn't time or the environment wasn't ready to support that kind of idea?

Speaker 3: 20:20

I mean, I look at Google Wave as the one that everybody likes to point to. Google Wave was this weird interface where you could do things like chat and share files, and it was supposed to be this combined workspace, and everybody laughed at it and said this is not a thing, and so they shut that product down and, lo and behold, a decade later we have Slack, which is just absolutely dominated corporate communications for companies big and small, and so it's interesting how timing can be everything with some of these ideas. But also, I think we have to give innovators a little bit of credit and a little bit of room to move when it comes to these technologies. And not every sort of change indicates even if it's a strategic change it doesn't indicate that the sky is falling and the technology is dead. It just means that we have to make some adjustments and change course to get back on track.

Speaker 2: 21:15

Yeah, and we're gonna get back on the music track, because the third item the first, the third piece of news for today is about Steve Aoki, steve Aoki and sneakers. So I don't know if you remember you probably do because you remember all of this but Steppen was a project launched, I think, in 2021 or something like that, and this was a project that launched the move to earn the move to earn movement. I want to say Sorry if I am repeating myself there. Basically, an idea that was behind this was okay, we can create a physical item that is then connected to a digital item and then we're gonna be rewarding your activity in the physical world with digital rewards. So that's where the Steppen app project started to live. And well, it's been a very successful project.

Speaker 2: 22:16

And we've talked before about Taylor Swift doing Web3 without Web3. Here we have Steve Aoki now partnering with Steppen. We're gonna be speaking a bit about the partnership in itself, what it consists of, but basically we have Steve Aoki partnering with Steppen in this case and doing everything that is available in Web3, steve Aoki is doing. We're gonna be speaking also about what exactly he's doing. But well, if Taylor Swift was following the ethos, steve Aoki is well, following the ethos and doing everything that Web3 allows. So yeah, what are your first takes on this partnership between Steve Aoki and Steppen?

Speaker 3: 22:58

Well, first off, I just shout out to Steve Aoki's business manager I don't know if it's him or if it's somebody else, but he manages to land partnerships with so many companies. It's unreal. He's a great business development person, but when it comes to this partnership, so stepping a little bit haha, no pun intended stepping backwards, step in is, you know they're claiming like 2 million monthly active users, which is big right, or you know, for this space that's large and particularly for a niche app. And I think it's really because they've created a system or a value proposition that's got wide appeal. Right, people who walk, people who run, people who move their bodies can participate in step in and they can get rewarded and they can interact with this system just for doing something that they already do. Right, as long as you're going to walk, why not be rewarded in some way for that? And so step in is tapped into something that's just. It's such an easy way for people to participate that they've really gone for this mainstream top of funnel and what they're starting to do now. The web three side of step in has always been a little bit in the background and it's a smaller part of the value proposition. You don't have to interact with crypto to get involved with step in, although once you do, interesting things happen like this partnership.

Speaker 3: 24:28

So, moving on to the Aoki piece of things, so Steve Aoki has the Aoki versus NFT collection, which is his NFT based membership club. It's a model that we're seeing all over the place now where people are creating these membership passes in his case it's an Aoki versus passport but they're creating these passes and then they're attaching some sort of value structure to those passes and it's generally tiered, so you generally have you know level one, two, three, and with each movement up the tier you get additional benefits. And so when you and I were looking at the Aoki versus page together, we noticed that about halfway down the tiers are halfway up. However you want to think about it, there's this introduction of access to Steve Aoki's digital creations, and so I think that's where these sneakers come into play.

Speaker 3: 25:17

So he's creating these partnerships and these opportunities to create these digital collectibles as NFTs, which then he's offering in two ways. He's offering them to the holders of the Aoki versus membership pass, which is his own membership club. He's also allocating a portion of these to the step in community that will be sold through the more marketplace. So it's an interesting way to think about growing audiences, because on one hand, with a membership club it's a little bit of a closed loop, right, you're going to grow that, hopefully, but it's going to take a little longer and you're not necessarily getting a lot of new user acquisition. On the other hand, opening this up to the more community gives him a new avenue to introduce people through his collectibles to the Steve Aoki brand and also potentially to the Aoki versus. It's an interesting way to sort of connect the dots between audiences and overlap them in a way that's all connected to this experience of walking and using a digital collectible. That then gets you some benefit in that experience.

Speaker 2: 26:21

Yeah, I think this is an old brainer. To be honest, everybody should be doing this, because this reminds me to the story of Farrell Williams, where he was designing these bags for Louboutin, probably. And here we have Steve Aoki, who is a DJ, so he's in the music thing, and he's designing these exclusive digital sneakers for Stepan. So the point is that once you have a persona and an audience, thanks to what Web3 is doing in here, it's very easy to create a community and service it in different ways. And while we're doing some research on this, I noticed that, well, just, you have the sneakers itself, which are, of course, nfts that, as you said, can be purchased through a platform, can be purchased through Stepan or can be obtained if you have a different NFT, in this case, the passport that shows which level, which fund level are you on right? Because, as you said, there are like five, four, six or seven fund levels, and if you are in the upper ranks of it, then you can get access to these digital sneakers or these digital NFTs that Steve Aoki is creating. So you just see NFTs that are like a ticket pass or like a pass that allows you to get in the experience and then part of the experience that you get is also an NFT, so it's a no, I think.

Speaker 2: 28:03

I think that there are plenty of ways to create value and to connect with your, with your fans, as well, as Taylor Swift's story talked about, and this story is talking about, and, well, it is interesting to see to see this and how some, how some NFTs are being built on top of NFTs, similar to what we were seeing in the days of decentralized finance remember, we were talking about the, the legal bricks that allowed for this finance to be created just connecting different protocols. Where in here they're connecting different NFTs and, thanks to this flexibility that NFTs offer, you can create quite a, quite a community and quite a system of rewards just using, just using Web3. So I don't know, very, very interesting to see, to see this happening, and that's why I think this is a no-brainer if you have a strong community, this is, I mean, this is why not do this.

Speaker 3: 29:03

Well, and you raise an interesting point when it comes to composability, which is the the idea that we've seen really take off in the world of decentralized finance, where you can have these different Lego bricks and you have, you know, one piece of the system that's generating interest and one piece of the system that's looking at other investments, or, you know, allocating funds dynamically based on what's happening in the market, and so you know if you're interested in finance. That's a really interesting approach that doesn't really exist in outside of DeFi today. It's a lot harder to do those things because you have these different closed systems. And when you start thinking, through the lens of composability, about fan experiences and the way that you engage with fans, I think that gets really interesting, because now you can start to think about, as an artist, who do I compliment whose? Whose fans can I connect my fans with, and what kind of interesting experiences can we create? That really wouldn't be possible any other way.

Speaker 3: 30:03

And you know, even beyond that, if we do create that experience, how can we make the people that have been fans for the longest or been our strongest supporters? How do we make them feel like VIPs? How do we make them feel special? How do we reward them differently? And the tools are here. You know, web3 gives us that. Nfts combined with tracking engagement and updating engagement dynamically via tools like the blockchain gives us the capabilities to have these composable experiences and I think that's pretty exciting.

Speaker 2: 30:33

As a fan, yeah, allow me to to give you my takeaway from today's episode because I was saying it very clear here, because we talked about projects that we're trying to find the way right when we talked about Reddit and we're looking at the technology and trying to see how to best use it, then if we go a bit forward, to the Taylor Swift story, what we see is a person trying to do something, but without the technology.

Speaker 2: 31:05

So she's already found what she wants to do and she's not using the technology that is available to do this in a very simple way. But she's doing, she's following these ideas that maybe were ideas that Reddit was going after when they first launched that project. And then we end up with Steve Aoki, which is who is basically following these ethos of Web3 and applying the technology right. So so I think we're looking at three different moments and three different projects, doing well, similar things, I think, but at different times, and making use of the different technologies and I don't know. I think I think, moving forward, we will see more of the Steve Aoki version and, yeah, I think that's my takeaway for today and I'm just gonna plus one your takeaway, because I think you hit the nail on the head yes, I was just seeing it very clearly.

Speaker 2: 32:06

I was like this is, this is the thread, okay, well, awesome being here with you. I guess I'll see you next time.

Speaker 3: 32:16

Sounds great, I'll talk to you soon thanks for listening to marketing needs, web3.

Speaker 1: 32:22

If you enjoyed today's episode, please like and subscribe in your favorite podcast app.