Please note this project is no longer active or mantained. The white paper is available as an archive for future builders and thinkers!
Supertrue is a web3 platform that’s revolutionizing fan to artist relationships. We reward fans for being early and engaged, discovering and supporting new creators. Our mission is to launch creators to their first 1000 Supertrue fans and beyond.
In its simplest form, Supertrue gives creators the ability make a profile in less than a minute, and for followers to pay for a numbered and dated NFT to follow them.
By building a followership with Supertrue NFTs, creators decentralize their fanbase and can take it across platforms. Supertrue NFTs unlock the ability for creators to message and gate content based on follower number. This encourages fans to support artists early, and creates a way to capture value for those followers helping the artists in their earliest days.
To see this in action, here is a case study of how one class of creators, musicians, go about their careers now and how it will change with Supertrue.
A career in the arts from the perspective of a musician
We spend a third of our waking hours streaming music yet only 1% of music artists are able to make a living – Chris Dixon
Why is something we value so much so poorly rewarded?
I’ve seen friends start music careers and run the playbook to make a living for themselves in the arts. Your first goal is to build a following. You want to get to 10,000 Instagram followers.
To get there, you have to work on your craft, and create a sound and aesthetic that resonates with people. Anything that I would say here would underplay how incredibly difficult this feat is.
From there, you have a second job which is to get yourself discovered. Today in the music world that starts with emailing your dearest friends and making your big ask: “Can you pre-save my song?” What this does is help boost you on the Spotify algorithm so your song can be added to discovery playlists. If you have a label behind you, and they’re a good label, they may help by adding your song to closed playlists where future fans are listening to similar sounds.
Once you’ve captured the ears and hearts of a fan, you then hope they start following you on Instagram or another social platform. Then one day you reached your goal of having 10,000 followers.
The problem is, once you’ve arrived there, in order to make a living you have to battle for their attention on a network that’s serving them ads in between vacation photos of friends. You ask them to come out to your concert and buy your merchandise. Out of those 10,000 followers, you may have at best 500 true fans who will buy or go to your shows. If those true fans receive your message through the noise, then finally, you can get some type of compensation.
The average income of an artist from their creative career is $12,860 per year for an independent artist and $23,913 for an artist under a label. That means they earn somewhere between $1,000-$2,000 per month.
It’s true that most are in it for the passion of the craft rather than only commercial success. That said, there still must be a way to give these artists a more respectable living.
The role of tastemakers and fans in an artist’s career
When you’re someone who loves music, you go out and seek new artists and sounds. You want to find new music that actually sounds good, music that hasn’t been discovered yet. Those are the gems. You’re excited when you find a new band on Spotify that has under 5,000 listens and you share it selectively.
This is strange because though you want the artist you find to succeed, you also want to maintain some type of privileged access. You want to be able to message them and be part of a smaller community of early fans. There is a certain type of energy that comes from being part of those early communities of music fans that then disappears when the artist becomes bigger and the masses join.
What it comes down to, is that you’re disincentivized to share the artists you find even though that would help the artist’s career.
While we highlight musicians in this example, the journey is similar for creators across mediums.
The Problem
- The path to building a following and making a living in the arts is windy and unfruitful
- Big corporations own the platforms on which artists build followings and can disconnect them from their audience. (Shadowbanning, deplatforming)
- Finding, recognizing, and rewarding true fans is not available with current platforms
- Tastemakers have misaligned incentives with artists and tend to share selectively
To address the problems above, and with the new technological unlock of what’s possible with the blockchain, we created a solution to better serve both artists and fans.
Supertrue. A platform that rewards fans for being early and engaged while connecting artists with their first 1,000+ true fans.
Supertrue works by giving fans a way to mint the discovery of an artist to add to their NFT gallery. Then giving the artists a way to reward the earliest and most engaged fans (described in more detail below). NFT galleries are supposed to be a place to express yourself and display your affiliations on the internet. What better way than to show the artists you’re backing and your taste in music.
In its simplest form, Supertrue allows you to mint a numbered and dated NFT to follow an artist. It’s a logarithmically-increasing price that goes from the price of a CD at $10 to the price of a concert ticket at $50.
As the artist builds their following and gets to 1000 Supertrue followers, they then have created an income of $15,000.
At 10,000 followers they have almost $250,000 USD – more than they’d make over a 10 year career as the average musician.
What’s in it for the fans?
Besides creating a nicely designed NFT showing your discovery date and your Supertrue #, permanently added to the blockchain, Supertrue introduces a new primitive: The follower count ordered list.
In the past, if you’ve followed an artist when they only had 5,000 followers, now they have 1 million followers, there is no way to figure out that distinction. From the artist or fan side.
Supertrue allows artists to message their earliest fans however they may see fit.
An artist is directly incentivized to make being a Supertrue follower a valuable proposition. This is where one of the true powers of web3 is unlocked. Because this is an NFT with a smart contract, a fan can sell their early follower position. As the artist grows their position can be incredibly valuable. In the smart contract, an artist gets 10% back of that secondary sale (or the maximum allowed by secondary sales platforms) of that early follower NFT.
Engagement Over Time
What if your earliest fans start ignoring you and are no longer interacting with you? For this, we’ve created an engagement NFT as an additional way to communicate with your followers. These can be airdropped NFTs to Supertrue followers who take certain actions and stay engaged through thick and thin.
While we may suggest ways to reward engaged fans – those who come to your shows or share your music – our main goal is to open up the ability to find out who is engaged and reward them.
Aligned Incentives
Supertrue’s solution aligns the incentives of tastemakers with those of a growing artist.
- Artists need support early in their careers when they are reaching their first few thousand true fans, and we’ve given a low friction incentive for those earliest fans to pay and claim their position.
- As the artist grows their following, they gain real conviction and monetary backing with each new fan.
- As a fan, you’re able to capture the value of having great taste and vision. Or even capture the value around your ability to spread the word and help an artist you’ve minted succeed. This is a way to capture value that was never possible before the technological unlocks of web3
Decentralized Followings
With Supertrue we see a real opportunity to shift building a following from a proprietary system owned by Meta or Tiktok to a decentralized following that anyone can build on top of.
Yes, it’s very cool to give an artist a monetary reward for every new fan – What’s even cooler, is by moving all their fan relationships onto the blockchain through NFTs, any future developer can build on top of that following.
Their follower count is unlocked and able to move across any communication or media channel.
While we plan to start marketing Supertrue to musicians, followed by artists of different mediums, we plan to build the product so it can be utilized by any content creator.
The Supertrue Mission
There is no shortage of opportunities to create impact through this project. Because of that, we’ve narrowly defined these three core objectives to guide the company and product road map. These three points we see as being the highest leverage and giving directionality to the project.
Where does Supertrue fit in the current landscape
We see Supertrue as creating unlocks that no current company with a reputation can make today without massively shifting their current business model. This is a project that needs to be created by a new company and adds paradigm-shifting value to support creators.
Thanks to the editors from Foster for feedback and helping us make this article what it is!
Vision
In a world where the vision of Supertrue is fully realized:
- Artistic taste is a way to capture cultural and monetary value.
- The best art emerges as quickly as possible by the power of early communities
- New artists have a career path where they build conviction and receive support from those who believe in them
- Community and shared financial incentives are built by those who have similar artistic taste
- The follower count is decentralized and future developers can build tools to unlock the connection between fans and artists, as well as the power of communities around the arts.