Fast forward to the future…
- A concert in the metaverse just finished. Millions of fans are freaking out about how dope the opener was. You hold her First Fan Pass and the floor price moons from a surge in demand. You have first access to purchase unreleased merch at her table. You scoop a t-shirt and hat for your avatar and receive access to meet the artist backstage. You can’t believe it.
- You check your wallet to see an airdropped, unreleased song from another one of your favorite artists — banger. As you’re listening, you receive a reminder about the upcoming vote to curate the next LÜM Showcase Drop.
- You check the market watch and see an emerging artist with a strong community and great music. The artist schedules their First Fan mint. As a top contributor, you skip the line and mint their First Fan Pass, while a percentage of sales goes back to the community pool to sponsor artist grants and community rewards.
- Next thing you know, you’re traveling to Miami for an IRL music festival for Access Pass holders. It’s a vibe.
This is a small glimpse of our vision for the future. One that empowers artists and rewards supporters. A global community of people connected over their passion for music. Artists control their destiny, fans are the investors, and music is an experience.
We realize this sounds like an ambitious goal. We agree. It will take time, effort, and community to make it all happen. However, it’s nothing that a sound roadmap and a strong community can’t accomplish 🤓. After all, community is everything.
The Foundation
The first “act” to our roadmap is providing an easy on-ramp for artists and fans into blockchain — which is easier said than done. The space moves extremely fast. Projects come and go, technology evolves, and the vernacular changes overnight. To help ensure longevity, we need to establish a simple yet strong foundation.
Enter LÜM’s Access Passes. LÜM will act as both the publisher and marketplace for the artists we work with to mint their First Fan and VIP Access Passes. These collections will be standardized and comparable across all of the artists in our ecosystem, making them easy to grasp for consumers and easily tradeable for early adopters.
These Access Passes are the foundation of our project and the starting point for establishing LÜM as a long-term partner for artists in blockchain. We are not here to do just one NFT project with an artist. We are creating a strategy that enables every artist to reward fans in the real and digital world, create a launchpad for future drops, and unlock the actual value of their community.
By owning an Access Pass, you hold the ticket to everything an artist does in the web3 world, plus the additional benefits of being a stakeholder in their career trajectory. You receive access to all future drops, custom utility and rewards from the artist. Additionally, because these NFTs are comparable between artists, we can create a gamified experience allowing fans to build rosters of different artists’ Access Passes (but more on this later 😋).
By starting with “The All-Access Pass to owning your fandom”, LÜM assures both artists and fans that we are a long-term project designed to stay ahead of the technology. As vaulted content, metaverse experiences, dynamic NFTs, wallet-to-wallet messaging, and other exciting developments continue to take shape, artist Access Passes act as the digital key to unlocking those capabilities within the context of the artist-to-fan relationship.
Artists own their relationships, fans own their access, and both have an aligned incentive to add value, participate in experiences and strengthen the community.
The Community
Providing the underlying tech infrastructure to build vibrant, incentivized communities is one of the foundational concepts of web3. But to strengthen and grow a community, there needs to be trust, interoperability, and collective value created. For LÜM, fans must believe that there is a future beyond the initial drop and that the artist is committed to providing sustainable, long-term value to their pass holders. And artists need to provide a safe on-ramp for their fans and be diligent in making sure the value exchange between fan and artist is two-sided.
Limiting community to siloed fanbases, however, significantly limits the potential of the broader LÜM network. We must create collective value by unifying artists and fans in a larger community so that artists can move beyond just trying to monetize their current fanbase alone. If the artist is the network, the value is limited to that artist and their fans. However, if the network is the broader community of artists on LÜM, all boats rise with the tide. By allowing for comparability and tradability between different artists’ Access Passes, we can create this broader community that generates collective value for all participants.
The Game
LÜM is a multi-dimensional system where collectors derive value from the project and the artists. As an analogy, think about a blockchain. You have projects built on the blockchain (in our case, the artist), and you have the protocol itself that supports these projects (in our case, LÜM).
Each project has its own incentives, community, and value, but tying these to the more extensive network brings value to all network contributors.
With LÜM, you receive platform rewards and utility for being your own “A&R” and building out your roster of artists. You can complete challenges, make bets on who becomes the next hit, and earn money just by participating in the game.
The broader game is critical to bringing about the larger adoption of music to blockchain. When is the last time you’ve solely listened to one artist for a whole day? Fans need interoperability between different artist camps, and our gamified marketplace will provide the standardized framework to enable this activity.
How We Get There
While more specifics around our roadmap will be released in the coming weeks, for LÜM to become a reality, we must build the foundation, strengthen the community, and grow the game.
To do so, we need to structure our system in a way that supports the multi-dimensional aspects of community — the artist’s community and the broader LÜM community. We will be scaling the project early on by working with select artists who believe in the vision and can provide long-term, sustainable community value.
As the artists and our community grow, we’ll begin tying in the broader game to incorporate the interoperability between artist-specific communities. We’ll also be leveraging partnerships to create new and exciting experiences and utility for the LÜM fam.
From there, the world of music changes.
— The LÜM Team
