Author | He hou edited | Fan Zhihui
Recently, Warner Music announced a partnership with blockchain game maker Splinterlands to create and develop a unique "play-to-earn" (P2E) arcade-style blockchain game for Warner Music's musicians, helping fans and players build mutually beneficial partnerships.
Oana Ruxandra, chief digital officer and executive vice president of business development at Warner Music, said, "We can't underestimate the huge opportunities surrounding P2E games, and working with Splinterlands to customize tokenized games will open up new revenue streams for artists interested in the space while enhancing the value of fans and communities."
So, behind the cooperation between the record giant and the upstart of blockchain games, what form will music and P2E games be integrated? What impact will this have on the future of the music industry?
What is a P2E game?
The so-called P2E game is to make the virtual game asset have real value through the NFT. At the same time, NFTs can promote the marketization of game assets by trading on the chain, so that players can make money while playing through transaction circulation. P2E games make the virtual value created by players in the game also realistic, realizing the combination of virtual world and real world.
The first game to catch the flames of P2E was Axie Infinity, a pet farming game developed by Vietnamese game developer SkyMavis. Players need to buy three Axes to start the game, then breed, breed and trade Axes, and earn tokens SLP (Smooth Love Potion) and tokens AXS (Axie Infinity Shard) by fighting and doing quests.
According to the data, in August 2021, "Axie Infinity" generated a monthly revenue of 334 million US dollars, exceeding the revenue of the domestic popular mobile game "Glory of the King" of 256.2 million US dollars in the same period, showing the huge potential of P2E games. This was followed by more lower-barrier-to-entry P2E games, including the card game Gods Unchained, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Chainsmonsters, and the aforementioned Splinterlands.
Founded in 2018, Springlands operates a fantasy-themed card-themed chain game of the same name, where players can compete against others by collecting and combining cards. Similar to Axie Infinity, players first need to spend $10 to purchase the summoner's spell book as a ticket to officially enter the game, and then the player can get rewards by trading cards, completing daily missions, etc., to achieve "play and earn".
On July 28, 2021, Splinterlands announced the completion of a $3.6 million private placement round of tokens and recently partnered with the cross-chain bridge agreement TeraBlock Bridge. According to DappRadar statistics, for nearly 30 days, Splinterlands has always maintained its first position in blockchain games. In January 2022, Splinterlands launched the Legion of Chaos card pack, which sold more than 45% of the card packs in just a few days.
Currently, Splinterlands has 1.8 million registered users and 450,000 daily active users, with a historic number of recent battles among users reaching a historic 1 billion. Warner Music chose to partner with Splinterlands precisely because it saw the success of the P2E model and the market advantages of Splinterlands, as well as the new opportunities that may be brought to the music industry.
How will the P2E model empower the music industry?
The combination of music and games is nothing new.
As early as before, music has been directly involved in games in the form of game songs and soundtracks, and with the development of emerging concepts and technologies such as metaversities, whether it is virtual performances, music promotion, and peripheral sales, the forms of integration of the two are becoming more and more abundant. For example, Travis Scott, Justin Biber, Ariana Grande and other well-known artists have held virtual concerts in the game "Fortnite", attracting tens of millions of fans to watch online; on March 3, Epic Games, the developer of the phenomenal game "Fortnite", announced the acquisition of online music store Bandcamp, expanding its role in the content, technology, games, music, and other content creator market ecosystems.
The development prospects of the P2E model and its integration with the music industry are predictable.
On the one hand, the game assets in the P2E model, because of their real value, can be traded on-chain nature allows musicians to expand their own revenue channels.
Recently, the P2E game "PixerEternity" and football superstar Robin Van Persie reached a cooperation agreement to launch a series of cooperation NFTs. This points the way for P2E games to work with musicians, who can undoubtedly increase their revenue in similar ways in P2E games through co-licensing, the release of NFT songs and albums, and so on.
Taking "Splinterlands" as an example, Warner Music can let its musicians enter the game, co-license to become the game card image, and release songs in the game. The circulation of cards and songs can make fans and players gain revenue, and musicians can also achieve diversification and monetization.
On the other hand, the P2E model can narrow the distance between fans and musicians, and the mechanism of "playing while earning" can also incorporate users into the value distribution system of musicians, allowing fans and musicians to share revenue and deepen the connection between the two.
For fans, the game props, peripherals and songs jointly signed with the musician in the game are not only game assets, but also an identity tag that can enhance the identity of fans. The nature of P2E's profitability makes the game assets have practical value at the same time, and fans can bring benefits to themselves by trading props, peripherals and other products in the game, and also motivate fans to continue to follow musicians on the material level.
On January 27 this year, fan financing platform Corite CO raised $6.2 million in the form of a $CO token sale, adopting a P2E model that allows artists to have full control over their content and establish a new model of interaction with fans through NFTs, digital peripherals and tokens. On the one hand, $CO token holders can participate in blockchain-based fan financing and promotion, getting the opportunity to invest in music projects early on; at the same time, they can also receive rewards for participating in the governance of the Corite ecosystem.
In the current social media era, the power of fans and communities has long become the core of the music industry, and with the help of the P2E model, it will be able to effectively help musicians increase their income, expand the fan consumption experience, and drive the further growth of the music industry.
From P2E to P2C, the music industry is an accelerator for entering Web3?
Although the P2E model provides new possibilities for the integration of the game and music industries, and even the exploration of entering the Web3 music world, it has also exposed many drawbacks.
First of all, the potential risk of the Ponzi scheme of the Ponzi game is also present in the music industry.
Take Axie Infinity, for example, as the game has become more popular, the price of its AXS tokens and SLP tokens has also risen, and from June to July 2021 alone, the price has increased by more than 600%. In the face of rising prices, once gamblers speculate in the price of the coin to no room for further increase, those who cannot get rid of the high entry will face the crisis of no one taking over and the price of the coin falling sharply.
Secondly, behind the external incentive and the internal incentive, there is a contradiction between the transformation of speculators and fans.
Take the game industry as an example, the most popular card game "Splinterlands" at present, although innovative in the game graphics, special effects soundtrack and gameplay, but in terms of fun and card game "Hearthstone" is still far from the same card game. This also leads to the lack of playability of P2E games attracting more "hit workers" who are aimed at making money than pure gamers.
In the P2E game or decentralized Autonomous Organization (decentralized autonomous organization) community dominated by financial users, it is conceivable that music alone can find its own audience and fan base. When the P2E model of the music platform can not provide enough revenue, players will move to other higher revenue projects, making the income and growth of musicians have great instability.
Combining the P2E model with the P2C (Play to Create, create while playing) model may become a breakthrough point and accelerator to stimulate the creator economy and even the music industry to enter Web3. In the P2C model, everyone can participate in the creation in a gamified way, and fans can also get actual remuneration through the creator's work, peripherals, IP images and other secondary creations, rather than just "generating electricity for love".
In fact, K-Pop giant SM Entertainment has recently established a comprehensive cooperative relationship with the NFT crypto trading platform Binance, and will work together on the blockchain mainnet, NFT and a new "ecological fund" to build a global "P2C" ecosystem. The collaboration will start from the NFT field, allowing users to make secondary creations and make profits in the form of games, music, dance, etc. by using tools and IP in the P2C system.
It is not difficult to see that from the gameplay, the P2E mode and the P2C mode actually have the same magic. Musicians can launch related products by releasing songs, IP output, etc., and users can improve their rankings and obtain revenue by trading musician NFTs and participating in activities on the platform, providing practical value for attracting most ordinary users to join the construction of the Web3 world.
But what is different is that the "artist-fan" relationship in the P2C model is not just an external, financialized incentive relationship, but based on the trust relationship, social tokens and decentralized infrastructure, allowing fans to participate more deeply and directly in the growth and advancement of artists and build a sustainable economy.
Optimistically, with the rise and maturity of P2E and P2C models, under the framework of true decentralization, musicians will be given greater autonomy in operation and revenue, enabling them to bypass platforms and record companies, and gradually explore and collide with the new paradigm of the music industry in the Web3 world in the two-way rush with fans.