** **

If you’re unfamiliar, in 2019 preeminent pop-country musician Taylor Swift declared war against record executive Scooter Braun. He was withholding the masters (i.e., original recordings of her songs) of her first six studio albums, so she fought back by re-recording her own songs. 

** **

She first re-published her second studio album, “Fearless,” through her record company and asked fans to listen again on streaming platforms. The move was a way to declare her independence from Braun. 

** **

This is a classic tale of the power imbalance in the music industry, and goes far in explaining the most talked about use-case for music NFTs: connecting fans and artists. With crypto, middlemen like Braun have much less power over artists like Swift from the start. 

** **

NFTs are like signatures for digital media, etched onto a blockchain. They’re a way to conclusively show who owns what online, and also give a unique digital identity to infinitely-reproducible files.

** **

“Taylor’s Version” is more-or-less identical to Braun’s original, except for its purpose. Swift urged fans to rebuy or stream music they may have already owned, because she was waging war against an exploitative music industry under the veneer of being personally victimized by Braun. 

** **

And it worked. “Taylor’s Version,” according to Billboard, earned more equivalent album units in its first week of release than Braun’s version earned in total over the past year. 

** **

Swift, like many modern-day celebrities, has a lot of influence over her fans. Her ability to sell albums and successfully advertise products has made her a multi-millionaire. But now, decades into the social media age, there’s a growing realization that the relationship between celebrities and followers is parasocial, and possibly exploitative.

** **

NFTs stand as a key way to level the playing field between fans and artists. They enable people to directly finance artistic production, as well as share in the wealth generated whenever an album is streamed or purchased. When she announced “Red (Taylor’s Version)”, Taylor mentioned in a tweet that “Red is about to be mine again, but it has always been ours.” Has it, though?

** **

Swifties, who streamed the 10-minute version of her hit “All Too Well” non-stop, earned absolutely nothing. I was one of them. To call a spade a spade, there’s some overlap between Swifties and TSA dogs: they all know they’re not getting paid.

** **

If “Taylor’s Version” was released as an NFT, she’d be able to share that money with her fans while still achieving her goal of regaining control of her music, opening the door to a financially-incentivized fanbase. But why should she?

** **

Getting political

The reality is that Taylor, and most artists, don’t need to share earnings with their fans, because why would you pay a TSA dog? They’re doing their job well. They’re happy. They’re very, very loyal. In fact there’s an overabundance of loyalty that, in an artist’s view, is unlikely to become scarce in the near future. Why fix it if ain’t broke, right?** **

Even if we operate under the assumption that Taylor Swift isn’t a greedy cash-grabber, and wants to reward her followers, there’s still a reputational cost for her to enter the NFT space. It would be a burden for her PR team to tediously explain how smart contracts work or why they’re important.** **

It would also require her to dip her toes into an area within politics that’s foreign to her, such as the overblown environmental concerns and the bizarre idea that right-leaning crypto bros represent the entire crypto community. We’re talking career self-sabotage, if not suicide.** **

Despite Taylor’s absence from public discourse on crypto in general, it would be naive to assume that Music NFTs haven’t crossed her mind. She probably saw a number of celebrity friends endorse crypto in the preceding year’s bull run. As of recently, her current record label purchased a Bored Ape. Not to mention Bella Hadid, one of Taylor’s closest friends, launching her own NFT collection. Even if Swift had not heard about NFTs in 2019, she almost certainly has now. ** **

But the political factors alone make for a good business case not to move forward with it. ** **

In fairness to Taylor, not publishing NFTs was the easiest way to go. If she just wanted to sell music and share her success with fans, why should that require her to prove that Liberals can enjoy the benefits of crypto just as much as Conservatives? She would get lost in translation and ask for too much.

** **

Swift, at the time of releasing “Taylor’s Version,” may have been attacking the status quo in the entertainment industry. Though a cynic may say she was merely portraying herself as a victimized girlboss who generated sales under the veneer of independence, altruism and feminism. 

** **

Real rewards

** **

Today, there’s a viable way for popstars to take a principled stand against the traditional music industry: introducing the financialization of fandom. Is it surprising that that hasn’t happened yet in a meaningful way? Not really, considering the people we’re talking about.

** **

Celebrities are not absent from the crypto space, they’re just in it for the wrong reasons. Madonna purchasing a $300,000 Bored Ape NFT is no different from her purchasing a Birkin bag and Steve Aoki’s personal collection of 10 Bored Ape NFTs is not contributing to mainstream adoption. 

** **

It stuns me how celebrities are handed all of these investment opportunities without caring about mass adoption. They’re being handed a first-class ticket to the metaverse, and the people they’re bringing onboard basically end up underwater. 

** **

I was at the NFT LA conference in March 2022 and one of the panelists was Charlie Sheen, the actor, who had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. 

** **

Macy Gray, the Grammy-nominated R&B maven who dabbles with music NFTs herself, said verbatim on another panel that she “does not know much about crypto.” Some are better at parroting talking points, but few understand the seismic shift crypto could represent for art.

** **

People do, in fact, say all’s well that ends well. At this point, it’s hard to believe most celebrities have not been introduced to crypto. But do artists like Taylor Swift have a strong disbelief in the concept of smart contracts and music NFTs, or do they simply not care? 

** **

I suspect it’s a mix of both. Do Swifties know deep down that they deserve some level of compensation for blasting “Taylor’s Version” 24/7, or are they content with seeing a girlboss succeed? 

** **

I guess we’ll never know for sure why Taylor turned a blind eye on NFTs but I suspect, or dare I say predict, seeing the mass commercialization of crypto and NFTs by celebrities once the dust settles and the political collateral damage is no longer a factor. 

** **

I can already hear Kris Jenner’s upbeat voice announcing a collaboration with an arbitrary Layer 1 – “We’ve partnered with Cardano for the Kardashian Koin digital collection” – or Taylor Swift finally releasing a utility NFT collection to “finally be able to share success with my fans, available exclusively on Polygon.” After years of ignoring us, would this count as gaslighting?

** **

TSA dogs will never realize that they aren’t getting paid but in 10 years, maybe even five, fans will. A new era of music and creativity will emerge once they do, adding another memory for Taylor to remember and maim her all too well. 

I recently created an assessment for a Blockchain-focused company about influencer & community marketing in the crypto world, and decided to publish it for everyone to learn.

Objectives, Initiatives & Goals

The objective of both influencer & community marketing for most crypto companies is to educate people about the new internet, and create awareness about Blockchain technology and the decentralized web.

For influencer marketing, this would be done by hand-picking and working with digital creators and influencers to really tell an authentic story, and eventually develop a relationship with these digital creators with the ultimate goal of tapping into the growth market (i.e. young people, Zoomers) and creating mass adoption into the decentralized web.

For Community Marketing, the objective is to create awareness and brand visibility for the abundance of emerging crypto companies that can be quite confusing for the average user. We achieve that through interacting with the diverse crypto community through both proactive and reactive engagement and being on top of emerging trends in the crypto world and social media, for the ultimate goal of strategically developing a reputation for these brands in the crypto world.

This article will only cover influencer marketing in the crypto world, but I will publish the Community Marketing part in the coming days.

The Creator Economy & Crypto

The good news is that it’s a great time to work with creators, especially when we are targeting a niche audience. As of this year, according to Josh Constine from SignalFire, there are more than 50 million creators worldwide across thousands of topics and verticals, making it easier for brands in the crypto space to find an influencer to work with. Companies can now find a spokesperson for almost any topic and, in our case, we can find people who speak to early crypto adopters, NFT artists/buyers, or really anyone who’s interested in learning more about crypto.

These creators are mostly young, thus making them both logistically and financially efficient. They are motivated to monetize their talent and effectively work with brands.

Influencers & Creators are incentivized to migrate into the decentralized web to own their content and interact directly with their fans.

What I personally find interesting is how decentralization and the Creator Economy very much go hand-in-hand. Because these creators are selling everything: pain, art, ideas and they don’t know they’re not getting paid enough due to over-reliance on tech giants like Instagram & TikTok. So it’s safe to say that eventually, creators will want to establish a decentralized presence, own their own content, and engage with their fans directly.

Influencer Marketing Program 101

The general process to develop an influencer marketing program

To those of you who are unfamiliar with how brands establish an influencer marketing program, I’ve broken down the basics and used examples for the sake of this discussion. Below is a sample of what a crypto/blockchain company would do to create an influencer marketing program.

The process of launching an influencer marketing program for any company, not necessarily a crypto company, is divided into 3 parts: Sourcing, Execution, and Reporting.

Find

The first part of sourcing is to find creators, and we have 2 options to approach this, each with their pros and cons: we can either work with an agency and build a crypto influencer roster. The pros here are that it’s faster and easier; we tell the agency what we are looking for, and they find it for us. The con is that it can be more costly than our second option, which is to research in-house and deal with creators directly, which can be quite time consuming especially for someone who doesn’t have the necessary skills to do deal with influencers.

Benchmark

Once we select influencers we want to work with, we filter them more by asking about their audience, their demographics, story views/link clicks, conversion rates, reach; and any other metrics that fits the campaign.

In the influencer landscape, numbers can be deceiving. I wouldn’t just look for 1 single metric but rather a collective review of the influencer. That’s not to say that followers don’t mean anything, they do. I like to look at follower count like the SATs; it’s not everything, but it definitely is something.

With the content ideas we have in mind, we discuss rates as well as the guaranteed amount of reach/views/engagement.

One important part before moving forward is doing a run-through of their socials, see if there’s anything sketchy, or doesn’t align with our brand or values.

Test

An optional step to take is to test them out.

Before on-boarding them into our influencer marketing program, I would use them for maybe 1 or 2 campaigns. No commitment necessary.

If the results are satisfactory, I would then discuss a broader partnership and include them in our influencer program.

Once they check all of the boxes, we pass them onto the second part of the process: Execution.

Execution

I went ahead and pre-selected the influencers that we’ve “on-boarded” into our program for the sake of this article:

A sample of crypto influencers across various platforms and diverse audiences (metrics as of May 18th, 2021).

First we have Lea Thompson, AKA “Girl Gone Crypto”, you can see that she’s active on multiple mainstream platforms.

Next, we have Mack Lorden, who clearly isn’t as ‘famous’, but he utilizes Discord to interact with his fans. A key platform in the crypto space.

Finally, we decided to go with Maren Altman, an astrologist and crypto enthusiast. Maren is an interesting option because she’s able to encapsulate what Lea and Mack have. She has over 1M followers on TikTok and her content is relatable to both crypto early adopters and normies.

Here’s a breakdown of each influencer’s strengths and what sets them apart:

The reason I chose to move forward with Lea is because she’s able to decipher crypto jargon and translate that into digestible content for people who aren’t very familiar with the crypto world. She recently partnered with a Blockchain company to explain the decentralized web and the use of Blockchain domains. Here’s a video of her talking about Web3 and the Opera browser partnership with Unstoppable Domains.

Given her target audience, she’s able to deliver messaging that resonates with the average person. Inviting, relatable, uses simple language and avoids crypto jargon.

Unlike Lea, Mack arguably has a niche audience. So instead of trying to create digestible content for the average user, it’s fair game for him to use crypto jargon because his audience is assumed to be already familiar with crypto concepts. So Mack can casually tweet or talk about Pancake Swap, staking or yield farming without confusing his audience. Lea, however, is more filtered. His content revolves around on-trend crypto news and keeping his audience engaged and up-to-date with the world of crypto. I encourage you all to check out his TikTok.

Finally, Maren is an unusual influencer because, as mentioned earlier, she is an astrologist and if you’ve ever browsed TikTok you would know that astrology is a huge topic that resonates a lot with young people, especially Zoomers. She talks about astrology on a daily basis and links the moon and stars with the price of Bitcoin. I personally don’t believe in it, but nonetheless it’s clear from the followers amassed that she’s tapping to a unique audience.

Also, yes, she did predict the recent Bitcoin crash. Well, kind of. Here’s her tweet on the day of the crash for reference:

Podcasts + Crypto + Celebs

Before I move forward to Reporting, I can’t stress enough how valuable it is to have a Podcast in the crypto space and how many opportunities it can create. A potential idea would be to utilize the podcast by hosting an A-list celebrity, specifically one who is already in the crypto space.

Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan would be good examples given their relatively early adoption of NFTs. I understand how unattainable A-list celebrities can be, but the crypto space is so novel to a lot of people (celebs included) that they would be more open to establishing a media presence in. If I had a crypto podcast I would DM Paris Hilton, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kris Jenner. Yes, Kris Jenner.

It can even be one of the influencers that we work with, because when we have someone who is comedic or popular then their episode can be used for marketing purposes. Podcast snippets are common on TikTok and are effective in generating engagement and brand visibility.

Reporting

The reporting phase of our influencer program consists of post-campaign reporting, developing a cost-benefit analysis, and upgrading our influencer roster with creator-focused software

In essence, the questions we want to answer are:

Did we achieve our goals?”

How did the influencer perform relative to their average metrics?”

What was the level of engagement and how many followers did we get over the course of the campaigns?

Essentially, we want to know what worked and what didn’t to decide whether we want to continue working with these influencers or not.

A final step, and this is completely optional, would be to utilize creator-focused tools — my personal favorite is CreatorIQ (I am a little biased since I did data analytics for them last summer, but the CIQ software or any other creator-focused software really would provide more precise ROI measurement as well as future influencer campaign-based tracking.

Final Thoughts

The influencer landscape in the crypto world is different because simply not a lot of people understand crypto. I wonder when (not if) we reach a place where all the beauty & fashion bloggers on Instagram adopt crypto and utilize the decentralized web. It’s difficult to say when this will happen since most of these creators are drinking the Instagram Creator Kool-Aid, and have been for quite some time.

I’m not an engineer or a computer scientist and while crypto and Blockchain can be difficult to grasp and very confusing to follow up with, it is an exciting space and there’s a philosophical aspect behind advocating for a free internet. You can call Crypto anything, but you can’t call it boring.