What motivates music fans?
Untangling extrinsic and intrinsic motivations to unlock growth
This blog post is part of an ongoing series unveiling SOUND token and Stakeholder Rewards at RCRDSHP. The series is filled with details about how we plan to engage mainstream music fans and employ game mechanics to keep them coming back. Part 1 introduces our vision and is located here.
Despite creative claims to the contrary regarding community and utility, most new NFT projects exist for one reason only: to make their founders rich. Supporters tend to ape into them in hopes of quick profits, sometimes without even knowing what they’re actually buying.
RCRDSHP is not a charity, but our main focus is principled and we’re on a mission! We want to change the way that the music business works, to push it in the direction of being more favorable and sustainable for working musicians, and to give those creators a brilliant new platform for engaging with their fans—all their fans around the world, not just those dabbling in crypto and NFTs!
So as we come up on our one-year anniversary, we’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for someone to be a music fan and what motivates them the most. What do music fans tend to find valuable? And what would be their strongest motivations for buying digital collectibles and engaging with their favorite artists at RCRDSHP?
We’ve identified a number of important motivations, and the least important are related to personal financial gain. That’s an important consideration for where we go next.
Music as a spiritual gateway
Aside from meditation, and perhaps psychedelics, music is one of the most powerful gateways connecting us to our spiritual nature — some would say our divine source —and to the universe. Nowadays you don’t even have to be religious to believe that, just ask Sam Harris.
You know one of the main reasons that so many of us are huge fans of electronic music at RCRDSHP? Because we encountered transformational experiences at events featuring this kind of music. Those life-altering experiences were first steps in making the leap from ego-driven selfishness to feeling a sense of unity with our fellow human beings. Whether it’s losing your sense of self at a rave or just singing together around a bonfire, music fans can agree that the enjoyment of music tends to make the world a better place, at least for a little while.
Music is among the most powerful gateways to connecting to our spiritual nature.
Greed does the opposite. Sadly, the crypto world is full of greedy people doing greedy things. It’s not only a PR challenge either, it’s a serious obstacle to adoption by the mainstream. For example, video game fans are known to avoid NFT projects like the plague. Why? In a word, most NFT projects suck. They suck in the same way that Ponzi schemes and gambling addictions suck.
Saying these things as the CEO of a music NFT platform might be considered career-limiting or somewhat controversial, but these are not new sentiments. I have been warning “flippers” / pure speculators (people who don’t care about our mission) on RCRDSHP that they would not be happy with us right from the start of the project. Last fall speculation drove prices in our marketplace to astronomic heights anyway. While rocketship growth was exciting and helped us get initial publicity, it was also completely unsustainable and made a lot of our early adopters lose money and faith in the project. Not good.
The aftermath and consideration of what part we played in those inflated expectations has given us the benefit of hindsight, and we think that we understand where to go next. First, we need to satisfy a healthy mix of player motivations with our game dynamics. The ultimate goal should be fun outcomes for all players along with long-term market stability. A fun and stable foundation gives us a shot at revolutionizing the music industry over the course of the next five to ten years.
In order to properly satisfy those player motivations, we’re going to need a clear understanding of who is involved with RCRDSHP as a player and what they want to get out of the experience.
Let’s talk about motivations
The reasons why we as humans voluntarily do things can be divided into a couple of major categories.
Extrinsic motivation comes from external factors, such as rewards or punishments. People are extrinsically motivated when they are driven by external rewards, such as money, grades, or approval from others.
Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, comes from a personal interest or enjoyment in the task itself.
Pure intrinsic players (A) are absolutely vital to our long-term health as a platform. As long as the music is good, the community is friendly, and the game play is fun, they’ll stick around. Unfortunately, we get the sense that many of them don’t generate significant revenue.
Mostly intrinsic (B) players do spend money on RCRDSHP, but for the most part they focus their attention and purchasing power on artists that they personally enjoy as opposed to speculating on everything. Many of them are NFT enthusiasts, and see the promise of this technology for achieving lofty goals such as revolutionizing the music business.
Mostly extrinsic (C) players are at RCRDSHP because they like music, but they like the speculation game more than they like music. We find that this group is large and essential, even if they sometimes have irrational expectations of what we can do to generate profits for them.
Finally, there is a pure extrinsic (D) contingent that is at RCRDSHP only because they think they can exploit us for financial gain. They don’t usually engage with the community unless they’re trying to manipulate the market, and for the most part they’ve wisely moved on to other projects with better short-term prospects.
Finding a sweet spot of players
Pure intrinsics (A) are generally happy with us. We plan to keep them happy and engaged with tons more artist engagement, exclusive content, and offline utility features —things that make RCRDSHP take on more and more attributes of a traditional music portal. Those features include artist homepages, music storefronts, and interactive creation of playlists, mixtapes, and even derivative works such as mashups and remixes.
Pure extrinsic players (D) exited en masse at the end of 2021, so we don’t really have to worry about them anymore.
That leaves two intermediate player demographics (B & C) who both love music and are interested in NFTs. Together they’re also our biggest demographic, so all things considered let’s call them our core players, our sweet spot.
The next two blog posts in this series dive deep into how we plan to engage that sweet spot with game elements that combine intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in innovative ways that make advanced elements of RCRDSHP take on attributes of a play-to-earn game.
Love the sound of our plan? Sign up at rcrdshp.com
