The hype around NFTs has died down slightly this year as crypto has taken a hit, but they’re not going anywhere, and in some ways, this slowdown has allowed NFT projects with real appeal and value to break through the noise and build communities that are passionate about the offering.
One such innovative project is launching via SuperNFT, a new company founded by Bonnaroo and Outside Lands creator Superfly in partnership with Velvet Sea Ventures and Autograph.io. SuperNFT’s first project aims to build a community of passionate music fans who will be able to contribute to the design and planning of SUPERF3ST, a new decentralized music and arts festival that will be taking place next year for the first time.
Fans can join the community and become SUPERF3ST Founders by minting one of 3,000 SUPERPASS NFTs (an additional 333 NFTs are reserved for artists and industry founders, bringing the total up to 3,333). At the time of writing, 948 NFTs have been minted, and over 2,000 are still up for grabs.
Superfly co-founder Rick Farman has followed the gaming industry and web3 space closely over the last several years, and he notes that other experience-based web3 projects, such as golfing community LinksDAO, served as inspiration for SuperNFT.
“As I was watching some of these things and thinking about where things are going, it felt to me that it was a prime moment to be able to create a festival where the audience has agency and input into what's being created,” he tells XLIVE. “It’s very exciting for me at this point in my career to try and think about doing things differently and in many ways, reverse engineering the way that we normally work.”
Now is also a particularly good time to launch this project, as people are coming back together post-pandemic, and Farman notes that there is a desire to experiment and think about doing things a little differently. “That's one of the things we're trying to tap into,” he says. “There’s a bit of an evolution of how creation happens because people are just naturally thinking differently right now, and this is a great opportunity to try something like this,” he says.
As SUPERF3ST Founders, NFT holders can truly feel a part of the project and have special voting rights (one SUPERPASS Founders NFT grants one vote) to influence creative decisions and the overall outcome of the event. NFT owners are able to transfer or sell them if they wish to, but Farman shares that most are holding on to them for now.
“Luckily, we're seeing a very small number of people listing them — most people are not getting into this for some kind of crypto frenzy where they can buy something and flip it and make money. Most people that already minted our passes are specifically interested in helping us build something of value,” he says. However, if someone decides down the line that they no longer wish to engage, they can pass it on to someone else who is interested, thereby ensuring a high level of continued engagement in the project.
SUPERF3ST will be the first major endeavor for the community, and SUPERPASS allows fans to get in on the ground floor, but there will be more exciting things to come. “SUPERPASS is really just our first offering,” says Farman. “It's this idea of people who want to come and be co-founders of the festival with us, and who want to have that very specific input from the beginning — helping us define what we are doing, why we're doing it, and how we are doing it. But there will be many other offerings from SUPERF3ST as we figure out exactly what the community wants to build with us.”
Farman explains that his team’s job is to facilitate the planning of the event and provide the knowledge around how to build a festival to ensure that ideas and suggestions are practicable. They are bringing thoughts and concepts to the community, and fans — and artists — are also encouraged to submit proposals for ideas they want to contribute.
“As we're building this community of fans, we're also building a community of artists,” he says. “It's really a three-way partnership, where you have an artist community, you have a fan community, and you have us as the producers.” One of the main goals of the project is to go beyond the traditional transactional relationship between these parties.
Instead of artists simply showing up and getting paid to play a festival, and instead of fans simply buying their ticket and attending with no input on the show itself, SUPERF3ST is driving a paradigm shift. “We're really hoping that through this incremental change, even if it's just a little bit of a mental shift of how both the artists and the audiences are thinking about their relationship to what we're creating, it becomes a little more than transactional,” says Farman.
The community is already getting off the ground with fans connecting on the community’s Discord server and artists performing virtual shows and getting real time feedback. SUPERF3ST will be the annual culmination of the project, but the goal is for it to be an always-on festival. The community also published a set of values, which was one of the first steps towards moving forward with the wider vision.
“My aspiration for this is that we really innovate on the format and the concept of what a festival is and how people can join it, following a lot of the ethos of web3 — something that is interoperable and decentralized and that has a different orientation to how it gets built,” concludes Farman. “I’m sure we won’t accomplish all of that at the beginning, but hopefully we'll be on the path and we'll continue to build more towards something that’s truly innovative and different.”
