FirstPick: A Ticketing Marketplace Rewarding Fans

By: Spencer Chemtob, Calista Reyes, Nicole Salazar, Nhi Nguyen, and Nassir Sayda

Fandom has always felt like a one sided relationship. Even though musical artists often share or tweet that they wouldn’t be able to do their work without their fans, it appears that ticket distributors for concerts (Ticketmaster/AXS, SeeTickets, etc.) and media resellers (Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) act as intermediaries between allowing artists to truly engage with their fanbase. FirstPick focuses on giving fans NFT collectibles alongside acting as a main ticketing platform so that users can track their concerts, see when their artists are coming to town, build their fandom portfolio, and see which concerts their friends are going to as well.

Why Concerts?

For many musicians, their main source of revenue is going on tour. In a 2018 Business Insider article, they cite that musicians make 95% of their income from touring and just 4% from streaming. In the current market, artists most often promote their concerts by advertising on their social media accounts and a lot of the work is done by the venues themselves. Large venue networks, such as Bowery Presents in NYC and Goldenvoice on the West Coast will run large mailing lists and flyer cities local to their concerts as marketing plans.

Firstpick attempts to place more inherent value into concertgoing by making tickets truly collectable. At the intersection of art and concertgoing, Firstpick will encourage fans to develop a portfolio of NFT collectables that signify their fandom and track musical artists’ latest tickets designs.

The Need for Web3

While “decentralization” seems like a hearty buzzword, the beauty of Web3 is that it gives agency back to the people. In the status quo, companies like Ticketmaster charge their consumers an average of 27% in fees but don’t often disclose the why these fees are so high. In other words, there is a market for radical transparency in the ticketing industry.

Transparency and decentralization don’t often go hand in hand because the verification of the NFT is anonymized to different wallets. However, the lightweight infrastructure required to securitize a NFT no longer requires the massive fees required to prevent ticket fraud and customer support infrastructure.

In other words, consumer reliance on Web2 infrastructure has allowed companies like Ticketmaster to have near monopolies on the ticketing industry, so much so that the option to have a collectable ticket mailed to your home or picked up at will call is no longer an option.

Firstpick, Rewarding Fans

Firstpick is a ticket marketplace that allows artists to create collectible tokens for engagement experiences. The main focus for Firstpick in its first iteration is for fans to collect NFTs that represents their fandom. In a way, fans will build a portfolio of collectibles with the opportunity to share their fandom and explore new fandoms as well.

Using a feed feature, people will be able to swipe through their friends and followers profiles to see which artists they have engaged with the most. Users will also have the opportunity to integrate their Spotify and Apple Music libraries to have suggested engagement opportunities appear in their feeds whether new vinyl releases are coming up or a band that they like is coming to town soon.

How Firstpick is different

While artists won’t be charged to list their upcoming engagement, Firstpick will take a 10% fee on the sale of concert tickets on its platform and split it in half onto the seller and the buyer to cover the cost of gas fees as well as internal growth requirements. This is well below the 27% fee that Ticketmaster places on its consumer. From this, we hope to see that artists who are on Firstpick brand themselves as consumer friendly and more willing to engage than those that use platforms with higher fees.

While we understand that the ticket value will drastically decrease after an event takes place, Firstpick will offer consumers the opportunity to print and ship the NFT straight to their doors to have a physical representation of their experience.

Finally, fans will be able to showcase their fandom with tokenized proof of engagement. Moreover, artists will now be able to track and reward the fans that engage with them the most and have a dataset to show which engagement opportunities and NFT is driving their content and revenue creation.