Concerts in the Metaverse could lead to a new wave of adoption
Colin Fitzpatrick is a Dubliner based in Dubai who turned a bad time during quarantine into a business that promises to bring your favorite artists to a metaverse near you. His company Animal Concerts, which launches in January, is in the process of signing world-class artists to perform in the decentralized worlds of the Metaverse.
Among the first to get the who wanted to make sure his NFTs can be purchased by credit card, Fitzpatrick sees a future where virtual concert-goers have the option to go to a website, putting in the credit card details and purchasing tickets and then purchase an NFT without worrying about a cryptocurrency.
In many cases, these NFTs could be combined with physical memorabilia, such as an NFT and a physical copy of handwritten lyrics by the artist. They might also be combined with virtual meet and greets specifics are largely up to the artists.
Dublin to Dubai
Fitzpatrick, 41, began on his path in 1999 when he began studying business management at Portobello Institute in his native Ireland. He immediately began doing freelance web design work, soon expanding to DJing and working as a nightclub organizer. I used to organize club nights and do festivals, he recounts of his younger days.
He chose the corporate path upon graduation, joining Dell as a relationship manager in 2002, and in 2006 took an enterprise sales job with Oracle where he spent five years until 2011. After about two years with Salesforce and HubSpot, Fitzpatrick returned to Oracle for seven years, which saw him rise through the ranks from a sales strategy manager to a leadership position in the Multi-Cloud Ecosystem unit, with the latter promotion taking him from Dublin to Dubai to build new business here for them in late 2018.
Fitzpatrick discovered Bitcoin at around $100 in 2013, but he was sadly persuaded out of it by a friend, he recalls. He got back in the game in late 2016, however, becoming a full convert when the concept of blockchain clicked for him. Soon enough, he started chatting with another employee at Oracle who was interested in crypto, and then we found someone else, and it started to spread like wildfire, he recounts with a laugh.
Fast forward a couple of months halfway through 2017, there was more cryptocurrency trading being done in the office than there was selling Oracle software!
Spending much of his time researching cryptocurrencies, he wanted to go work for a blockchain company, but there was nothing in Dublin, and virtual jobs were not as common as they are post-COVID, he explains.
COVID wreaked havoc on Oracle. The company, despite having recently moved Fitzpatrick, an employee of 13 years, to a new country, made me redundant smack bang in the middle of COVID, which absolutely sucked it was just when the lockdown started, he recalls with a hint of shade. I was in big trouble as almost no companies were hiring at the time, but Fitzpatrick managed to find work as a director of business development with Eastnets, a local company who do payments and software compliance.
A year in, however, he quit. It was time to strike his own path as an entrepreneur.
Fan tokens for music
Fitzpatrick says that the average Animal Concert will cost between $10 and $30 to attend, with tickets available on sites like Ticketmaster as if for any event taking place in the meatspace, as some Metaverse proponents humorously like to call the physical world. Those purchasing tickets with Animals native token will receive discounts, so if you want to buy with our token, it will be cheaper, so thats an incentive to use our native token, he adds.
There’s always a token, of course, and the Animal token will also function as a governance token, allowing fans and artists to engage in interesting new ways, such as by voting on which songs artists will play or what outfit they will wear. Fitzpatrick believes that a highly engaged fan base is sticky, and will attend numerous concerts while purchasing artists NFTs. Those staking the token will be eligible for first access to the hottest NFT drops, or you get free tickets to future concerts, he adds.
This model can be compared to the fan token phenomenon, of which Socios is the market leader. Socios has a tradeable native token which comes with various utility functions, and the fan tokens created by the firm for different sports teams gather more chatter from fans who seem to view them as akin to investments in their favorite teams. Such tokens can also provide sports clubs with massive liquidity, as they can slowly release them as fans open their wallets.
Could Animal become the Socios of music?
We have a plan to create a token for each artist, Fitzpatrick responds, explaining that each artist has a group of very loyal fans who would be sure to be interested in holding tokens based on their idol. Looking through the lens of NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens that cannot be subdivided, a fungible token can be imagined as a single, fractionalized NFT which represents the name, idea, or concept it pertains to.
As such, Ariana Grande Token could quite possibly be expected to rise in value in relation to her star power, and investing in the coin of an emerging artist could prove fruitful. Just as with Socios-created sports tokens, music fan tokens could, in the future, function as a sort of quasi-share of the artist.
Star power is sure to have a big impact on any future tokens, as Fitzpatrick agrees that fans wont necessarily care about the Animal Token, but they would care about the Ariana Grande Token.
