Next Level NFTs
Gamification unlocks ongoing conversations with fans, but comes with demands
FROM DETROIT TO BERLIN to the metaverse, electronic dance music has always had a symbiotic relationship with technology’s cutting edge. Now history is repeating itself as a mega-festival lineup’s worth of electronic artists — including stars like deadmau5, Steve Aoki and Claude VonStroke — have emerged as early adopters and innovators of non-fungible tokens. And some are pushing it a step further, unlocking the potential of NFTs to engage their audience though gamification.
Vivie-Ann Bakos — the DJ, producer and label owner who performs as Blond:ish — initially got into NFTs as a way of offering value to hardcore fans who were spending upwards of 12 hours a day on her Twitch channel, Abracadabra TV, during the pandemic. Bakos emphasizes that the value of many NFTs is not just the piece of music or visual art itself. Rather, NFTs — as programmable assets that can contain access to airdrops, events, merchandise and more — can offer continued value and create ongoing conversations with fans that aren’t reliant on the opaque algorithms of centralized platforms like Instagram or Facebook.
“It feels like music now has more purpose for the intended medium and message,” Bakos says. But the work on these sorts of NFTs is ongoing and demanding. “You can’t just put something out and [expect] it’s going to be successful,” says Bakos. “There’s this whole layer of gamifying, or leaving breadcrumbs along the way. You always have to keep the community engaged. Otherwise they’ll just sell the NFT and say ‘bye-bye,’ so it actually adds a lot of stress.”
Such gamification adds an interactive element that turns any given NFT into a sort of video game, with varying degrees of technical, conceptual and visual complexity. One example is a January NFT drop by German dance-world veteran Boys Noize, whose “Rave Pigs” collection featured 6,666 generative tokens featuring characters made in homage to Berlin’s underground electronic scene. Each of these 6,666 characters was assembled by its purchaser using combinations of 129 traits, spread out over 10 visual categories and five audio layers, making for over 50 trillion potential combinations. Thus, each token was ultimately one-of-a-kind, as designed by its owner — who is also that NFT’s rights holder.
“You think it’s just a picture, but then in the code, that’s where all the magic is,” says Bakos of the collection.
Gamifying requires partnering with a Web3 developer who, working in tandem with designers and 3D visual artists, can take the artist’s vision for an NFT — or help the artist create one — then turn it into something mintable, functional and, hopefully, cool and resonant. “There’s this whole new level of collaboration that happens,” says Bakos. “Artists can’t just do it themselves.” The amount of tech required to gamify NFTs is one of the reasons Web3 agencies, which represent development teams, designers, artists and others, are a gold rush area of the electronic music industry.
But while gamification is a fun way to make an NFT stand out, MODA DAO co-founder
Sean Gardner says the success of a gamified NFT is ultimately less about its entertainment aspect and more about how it creates the opportunity to be “an active participant in a creator’s ecosystem — with tangible outcomes” like the rights to music and artwork.
“By comparison,” Gardner adds, “the outcome of my contributions toward playlisting and referrals just adds value to Spotify.”