Welcome to RCRDSHP
Hi, I’m Obie Fernandez, the Founder and CEO of Let The Music Pay, Inc., creators of RCRDSHP (pronounced “record shop”).
This is the first post in a new publication intended to help RCRDSHP players to understand why their digital collectibles will be valuable in the months and years to come, as my team adds more and more functionality to the product.
The blog posts in this publication will together comprise a reflection of my personal vision for RCRDSHP. This inaugural post contains what I consider to be the most fundamental information along with a high-level product development roadmap extending into 2022.
As our product development plan and strategies evolve over time, I’ll try to make a habit of describing those changes and the thinking behind them in this publication.
Prologue
I don’t mind admitting that my original idea was simply to make an “NBA Top Shot for music.” As I developed the original idea, gathered investors and and recruited additional team members, the vision began to take focus and one of our very first realizations was that RCRDSHP would need more than just collectible moments. In fact, moments are by necessity one of the smallest categories of collectibles distributed on the platform.
To understand why, imagine a big EDM festival, perhaps in a giant stadium or arena. There’s a superstar DJ on the mainstage, building up the tension and then finally unleashing a monstrous beat drop on an adoring crowd. Let’s call it the EDM equivalent of an NBA player sinking a crucial three-pointer in the playoffs, or something like that.
Now, a video moment capturing that particular drop consist of the camera panning from the DJ to the crowd, with additional edits highlighting colorful ravers having the time of their lives dancing and getting lost in the music.
To sell EDM video moments as digital collectibles requires complex licensing arrangements. So-called identity rights would need to be secured from anyone whose face appears in the recording, including anyone on stage and the superstar DJ themselves (no small task). Reproduction and publishing rights for the song being played during that moment would have to be licensed too. The contract with the film crew that shot and edited the video itself would need to be compatible with selling their work, as opposed to just using it in promotional fashion. Oh and by the way, did the video include shots of visualizations playing on the giant mainstage screens? Those are copyrighted by their creators too. And finally, the festival promoter and even the venue itself might also demand a cut of revenues from sales of the moment. In other words, moments were going to be nearly impossible to get in any significant quantity.
What if we focused our creative energy on designing artist and DJ cards instead? Record labels and audio equipment? What about re-envisioning how music itself is released? Could RCRDSHP artists release virtual 12" vinyl singles, and CDs, and mixtapes? Box sets?
The more we explored different kinds of cards to make, the more the platform started taking on elements of a collectible trading card game. Could judicious use of game mechanics make RCRDSHP into more than just a platform for collecting and completing sets? Could it draw more than just players interested in speculating on price movements? Could it turn EDM fans into digital collectors in the way that NBA Top Shot (NBATS) turned basketball fans into digital collectors?
If we added game mechanics, how would we make them fun and authentically related to the experience of being an electronic music fanatic, DJ or Producer, and attending clubs, festivals and underground raves?
Before getting into any complicated game mechanics, I want to cover the simplest possible kind of game on RCRDSHP: completing sets.
Set Completion
Every published collectible on RCRDSHP belongs to a card set. Card sets have a name and a cover image. The back of a collectible indicates what set it belongs to, and all collectibles in a set have the same back.
The nascent RCRDSHP community cares a lot about completing sets, and discuss it on a regular basis on our Discord. I understand that there’s a sense of satisfaction drawn simply from completing a set, but another key factor in why our players complete sets appears to be related to the utility of set completion. Players expect that completing sets will bring them benefits.
They’re not wrong, and there are two kinds of benefits currently contemplated for set completion.
The first benefit of completing a set is that it serves as an indicator to the creator of the set that a particular player is a devoted fan, worthy of gifts and special access. To that end, creators on our platform are in the process of getting access to tools that allow them to identify the holders of their cards and completed sets. We’re encouraging those creators to consider those holders as patrons, and to engage with them in more than just superficial manners, like for instance by “airdropping” (aka gifting them) special gifts. The gifts might be collectibles, or information, or free guestlist access to one of their shows,or pretty much anything else that they can come up with.
Someday we will allow completed sets to be “burned” in order to create a single rare collectible encapsulating the whole set. That rare set collectible might be worth more than the floor price of its individual component collectibles, simply by being rarer and more difficult to attain. I don’t have a timeline for set burning functionality yet, because it’s technically complex and we have a ton of other more important features in the backlog.
As for when sets are closed, what players need to realize is that it’s not fully up to RCRDSHP. There are real artists and record labels behind the content on the site, and their numbers are growing every day. Each and every one of them has a slightly different idea of how much content they want to drop and how often. So if you’re expecting to know exactly what’s in a set quickly once that set is introduced, sorry, but it’s simply not going to happen. We’ll mark a set as closed (no more new card designs to be introduced) once we’re sure that the creator is done adding designs to that particular set.
Important note: Sets can grow horizontally (more card designs) and/or vertically (more minting). Just because a set remains open does not in any way mean that we plan to continue growing the mint size of its designs. In the vast majority of cases, it simply means that we plan to continue adding new card designs (horizontal growth.)
Some players have expressed concern that RCRDSHP might suddenly issue thousands of new mints of existing card designs from our early drops. To which we can only respond, why on earth would we do that?
Utility
“Utility” refers to the usefulness of a digital collectible as more than just an asset that may or may not remain interesting or valuable over time. Utility can range from so-called IRL (in real life) functions, like access to the VIP section of a club, to “in-game” utility, that is, functionality that directly affects the way that the “game is played” on the RCRDSHP platform.
One of the conscious design choices that I made when we launched RCRDSHP a few weeks ago, was to not reveal the utility of any of the cards released. In keeping with the marketing strategy for the whole project, I allowed the functionality of the cards to remain a mystery.
Quite a few cards featured downloadable music, and listening to music you’ve purchased is a very understandable form of utility. But beyond that, the utility of everything else was left open to speculation amongst community members. A constant topic of conversation in our Discord is what the function or a particular card or set of cards might be. A couple times a day on average, I personally interact with players on Discord to answer questions, and sometimes I drop “nuggets,” bits of information that hint at the utility of cards.
For the moment, the main way we are implementing utility and game mechanics is via the use of Artifacts, cards that tokenize concepts and things drawn from electronic dance music culture.
Artifacts
Gamification on RCRDSHP is implemented primarily via “artifact” cards, illustrated cards meant to capture and tokenize little bits of electronic music dance culture. Artifacts provide utility, that is, they function as more than just pretty artwork. Depending on what they are, they could represent access to IRL (in real life) benefits for the holder, or they function as tools that enhance the RCRDSHP player experience when they’re activated.
Our backlog of artifacts numbers in the hundreds, each providing a fun piece of functionality that affects a RCRDSHP player in large or small ways.
Some of that functionality is easy to guess. A lighter is used to set something on fire (aka burn). Burning is a thing in the NFT world, it’s when you destroy a digital collectible as a step in achieving some other result. Burning is definitely a big thing in the RCRDSHP game.
The main reason that we are not sharing comprehensive information about what every single artifact card is used for is simply that I don’t want to. As the creator of the game, I think it’s more fun and interesting to drop hints and let the community speculate.
I know that if you buy a physical card game it comes with rules that tell you what the cards do. RCRDSHP is not a physical card game in this sense. It’s a newer thing, that combines elements of collectible trading card games, with aspects drawn from alternate reality games, along with elements of many other genres.
Also note that RCRDSHP is not intended to be a single monolithic game, but rather a platform for making all sorts of mini, macro, and meta-games possible. Along those lines, we’re working to make RCRDSHP interesting for all sorts of players: the Achievers, the Explorers, the Socializers, and the Killers, and I plan to dedicate a future blog post specifically to how we provide fun for each of those player types.
Non-artifact utility
I consider artifacts to be canonical or archtypical implementations of the utility they represent. Let me give you an example: a lighter card is used to burn other cards. We’ve dropped a couple of lighters already, and our third drop featured a matchbook.
The artifacts I just mentioned are implementations of fire, but they are not the only ways to use fire for burning on the platform. Assume at some point we dropped a collectible containing Ferry Corsten’s famous classic tune titled “Fire”. Even though it’s not an artifact, we could give you the ability to put that card “in your hand” and use it to burn another collectible in the same way as a lighter or matchbook.
Are we going to make it obvious when non-artifact cards have in-game utility? No. I might be wrong, but I think a big part of the fun and ultimate success of the game will be figuring out the utility of the cards, especially when that utility is clever or unexpected.
Project Roadmap
This high-level, not comprehensive roadmap is shared in the interest of providing visibility into our product delivery plans, and a measure of accountability between us and our players. The specifics of this roadmap are subject to change, but what you are about to read reflects my current understanding of what we can reasonably be expected to deliver.
Note that the bullets within the time periods are in priority order, and they get more and more generalized the further we get into the future. At some point in early 2022, I’m sure I’ll do some sort of retrospective blog post considering how we did in relation to these predictions, and laying out a new roadmap for the year.
Without further ado…
Mid-to-late September
- 🕷 Flush out remaining significant bugs related to blockchain syncing that currently keep some collectibles from being listed in the marketplace.
- 🕷 Flush out remaining significant bugs related to authentication and marketplace purchases using email address different than primary account.
- 📧 Ability for support team to properly merge accounts for players with multiple email addresses in use.
- Warning the user when using more than one email is used to access RCRDSHP from within the same browser, so that players are less likely to “lose” their collectibles or not receive them at all.
- 📊 Significant new analytical capabilities related to card definitions added for certain players.
- 🛑 Formal closing of several GENESIS sets.
- 💩 WFU pack delivered (Deadline: September 17, 2021)
- Stress test featuring up to 50,000 packs priced at one dollar each.
- Ability to put cards in your hand and activate their in-game utility.
- 📦 Drop 4 will be announced along with information about how many packs will be sold and a summary of what they will contain.Plus full randomization, meaning equal chance for low serial number collectibles no matter the serial number of the pack.
October
- Performance optimizations across the board. (Site is super slow at the moment.)
- Initial versions of API access and CSV download for certain players.
- 💰 Balance purchases! Purchase collectible from another player directly using balance, skipping the marketplace, for certain players.
- First official rare cards begin appearing on the platform.
- Significant analytical capabilities related to card sets added for certain players.
- 📦 Drop 5 featuring priority access for certain players.
- Clarity regarding patterns related to mint counts and size of sets.
- 🎶 Audio player enhancements, mostly to do with playlists and more easily being able to listen to all the music in your library without having to go into individual collectibles.
- ✈️ First bonus airdrops accomplished via the platform directly by creators, versus informally via email.
November
- 📑 Initial rollout of KYC/AML regulatory compliance functionality.
- 💵 Withdrawal available for certain players.
- 🎁 Gifting and 💝 trading enabled for certain players.
- 💬 Integration of RCRDSHP with Discord to provide automated roles and channel membership based on holdings.
- XP scores for certain players, along with additional “built-in” game mechanics. (Similar to NBATS collector scores.)
- 🧐 Greatly improved searching and marketplace functionality.
- Themed and creator-specific pack drops, including those with featured content. (Probably means closing of GENESIS sets.)
- Additional clarity related to both official and implied rarity levels.
- First rare pack drop.
December and beyond (2022)
- Public player profiles and showcases.
- KYC/AML required for account creation.
- Withdrawal available for most players, subject to customary restrictions.
- Significant changes to how drops function.
- Additional clarity related to the RCRDSHP “metagame”
- Much more blogging by myself and other members of the team, especially in our engineering department.
- Introduction of significant new features related to curation and storefronts.
- First legendary pack drop.
- First RCRDSHP IRL events.
- Exporting to non-custodial wallets
- Integration with other Flow-based applications
Next topics
Subsequent planned blog posts in this publication will cover the following topics, not necessarily in this order:
- Thoughts on scaling: growth of the community and how it relates to mint counts.
- Retrospective on decisions and outcomes related to the first few drops.
- The evolution of pack drops from free-for-all ecommerce frenzies to events that draw inspiration from actual real-life music events.
- Why I think “flippers” will ultimately have a hard time staying interested in the game.
