Early signs of mainstream adoption is back
Coachella and Sean Paul announced web3 activations this week — the first signs of mainstream music usage for a while. Meanwhile, memecoins continue to overshadow NFTs.
What's inside today's issue?
Headlines: Coachella onboards 15k fans to crypto
Broader Web3: Over a million new coins created in the last month.
New music tool to try: Sonata - share your favorite music and earn tips.
Music Headlines
Coachella onboards 15k fans to crypto wallets
Coachella launched a series of quests across the festival site this year, encouraging fans to scan QR codes to collect nft stamps and complete scavenger hunts. More than 15,000 people participated, creating new wallets on the Avalanche blockchain and helping the festival gather more data about its festival-goers.
I've been critical of Coachella before — its first NFT collection got trapped on FTX when the crypto exchange blew up in 2022 because they used custodial wallets. Their second collaboration with OpenSea saw lacklustre interest, but this on-site campaign found more success, and a more natural fit for the tech — it's playful, engaging, and free to participate. Most importantly it brings more music touchpoints onchain so we can build social graphs around our music identity. (Read more).
Sean Paul's Web3 fan club
Sean Paul is the latest artist to launch a web3-powered fan club community (joining the likes of Interpol, Disclosure and Jungle). Fans can connect their Spotify account to measure their fan status, then unlock free VIP tickets, merch and rewards. It's powered by a Privy wallet integration and Camp 2 — a crypto network that aggregates web2 data. Most fans will have no idea the membership is powered by crypto. (Read more).
Friends With Benefits Reveals Stacked Festival Lineup
The original crypto social club Friends With Benefits has announced its FEST24 lineup including hyper-pop legend AG Cook, Perfume Genius, Jacques Greene, Verité, Latasha and Iman Europe. The festival takes place in Idyllwild, California on August 1-4. (Read more).
Quickfire music roundup
Beatport and Deadmau5 company Pixelynx team up to launch KOR protocol — a new chain for entertainment and IP built in collaboration with Animoca Brands. (Read more).
Songcamp is building a music client on top of Zora. (Read more).
Crate opens for beta — a new platform to tokenize and trade songs, including AI-generated music. (Read more).
Zooming out: broader crypto news you need to know
Over 1 million new tokens were created last month as memecoin hype continues across Solana and Base. Platforms like Pump.fun have made it trivially easy to launch a memecoin or token. (Read more).
Web3 social platform Lens Protocol launched its own L2 called Lens Network built on ZKSync. (Read more).
Zora acquired an NFT aggregator website called Mint.fun and teased a new mobile app. (Read more).
Fantasy Top goes viral - the trading card game on Blast which allows users to trade Crypto Twitter influencers surges to $36 million weekly volume. (Read more).
Base dominates 46% of all socialfi transactions. (Read more).
Rare Crypto Punk (with zero traits) sells for $790k. (Read more).
Rug.fun — a new memecoin generator game — attracted $4 million in TVL after launching. (Read more).
Polymarket raised $70 million — the crypto prediction market is now the leading betting market for the presidential election. (Read more).
New tool to try: Sonata
Sonata is a new platform to share music and get paid for your recommendations. You post a song and other users can "tip" you in the platform's native points token called "NOTES." Sonata is built on top of a web3 social protocol called Farcaster.
Think of it like building a music app on top of your existing Instagram following. I've been calling this "music legos" where new music apps click seamlessly into other onchain platforms, taking our music identity across them all. It's something that is uniquely possible with crypto. Like many things inn crypto, Sonata is still in a very early stage, but go try it out.
Creating $100m brands out of nowhere
In case you missed it, don't forget to check out our research report on Scenecoins and the story of Higher — a headless brand that went from zero to $100m valuation in two weeks.
Thanks for reading, see you next week!
Disclosures: We may own assets and NFTs mentioned in this article, have previous or current contracts with companies mentioned and may earn referral income from links to music NFTs. This newsletter is purely informational and should not be considered financial advice. Nothing in this content should be considered a recommendation to make a particular investment, only an expression of our opinion.
