Ticketmaster’s Token-Gated Ticketing

Talking to Avenged Sevenfold's Matt Sanders (M Shadows)

Hello everyone, GM, GM 

Today we’re bringing you a conversation with Matt Sanders, also known as M Shadows, frontman of the popular band Avenged Sevenfold, and founder of their tokenized fan club, the Death Bats Club.

Most recently, y'all may have heard about Matt because he and Avenged Sevenfold were a driving force behind Ticketmaster’s rollout of their NFT-gated ticketing platform: allowing fans to use NFTs for early access ticket reservations.

When the history books are written, we believe Matt and his team will go down as having played a seminal role in the advancement of consumer-focused blockchain technology and we think you’ll see why.

In this conversation Matt explains: 

• How he’s using the Death Bats Club to drive the NFT industry forward

• His future plans for tiered token-gated ticketing

• How he plans to persuade Spotify to go deeper on NFTs

This conversation has been heavily edited for clarity and brevity. For more of our conversation with M Shadows, check out our full interview with him here.

And if you like this content and haven’t already joined us on the PRO side, consider an OPJ PRO subscription!

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Carly P Reilly (CPR): Welcome back to Overpriced JPEGs, Matt.

Matt Sanders (MS): Thanks for having me, you were one of the first people that would talk to me about this crazy web3 space [when OPJ had him on the podcast back in February 2022]. And that was really exciting at the time. It was a time when a lot of fans of the band were annoyed with us because we weren't giving them the new music that they wanted. 

But there were others that were going along with this Death Bats Club journey and open to the idea that we wanted them to learn about NFTs before the record came out so that we could start implementing interesting features. But we knew we’d need time to explain this world to all these new people that had no clue what a wallet was, or what NFTs were. 

And you were one of the first people to actually talk to me about that to get the information out to the fans. And I appreciate that.

CPR: Gosh, well I appreciate you. You've been innovating and pushing the space forward really authentically. You love this tech. You weren’t in it for a cash grab. 

You wanted to have a tokenized fan club and a place where all of your die-hard fans could be, where you could be rewarding them regularly and giving them different perks and benefits. 

But you also always had this bigger vision of how it could tie into concerts, a tour, other things fans would want. Is there anything else you want to add in terms of context for the Death Bats Club? Before I start asking you about Ticketmaster?

MS: I always saw Death Bats Club as this connective tissue bringing together different use cases. 

At that time, we didn't know what they were exactly. We knew that we were going to need to get partners in the space, whether streaming services, a record label, or something like Ticketmaster or Shopify.

Early on, our priority was let's get the token out there. And then let's start building with partners behind the scenes on an easier way for the fan to interact with us and for us to oversee what's happening. 

On our backend, it's very, very beneficial for us to be able to see these people as token holders and to know exactly what they're doing and what benefits they get, instead of having all this data sent to us from different places.

Instead of, oh let's go collect everything from Shopify, and everything from Spotify, etc. etc., if it’s done with web3, it’s a lot simpler.

So we saw that early on, but we didn't really have the partners yet. We just had confidence that we'd go out there and, and convince people that this was a cool path forward.

CPR: How have you felt about this past year and how have people felt about Death Bats Club? Do you feel like you onboarded people into web3 who, because of the Ticketmaster partnership and other activations, are now really starting to “get it” in a way that they didn't previously? 

MS: So the first thing that we did that was super important was we were not trying to get these tokens in the hands of the NFT flipper, mini Casino people. 

We were very upfront from the beginning that we were not going to do anything to try to pump the floor, or to try to make your tokens more valuable based on short term things. 

There have been so many different eras in NFTs where people were trying to “create value” - through comic books or airdrops, etc. etc. and I think of all of that as selling tickets to a concert, and everybody's scalping the tickets, but there's no band. There’s nothing to actually go see. That’s what web3 was for a long time.

And there were cool projects, of course, and there's going to be cool things that come out of it. But for us, we already have a roadmap in the sense that we know what fans want from us, right? It's access. It's community. But it's also front row tickets and early access to music. And they want all these things because we do have a band. We are a brand. 

So the question is really just how do we take this technology and use it so that it makes their life better?

And so the idea with Death Bats Club was to start by educating people. And then did it again more recently with Ticket Pass, which we'll get into, which was then to educate the people that missed out on the Death Bats Club. To say hey, Web3 and NFT's can be anything you want them to be. 

They’re not just the Bored Ape that Bill Maher is going to show you and make fun of. They are not necessarily what you're seeing all the time. 

They can be a financial statement. 

They can be a bus ticket or a concert ticket.

They can be a rewards benefit for Starbucks. 

And that was the hardest part, was getting people to understand that it's really an open playing field. And we have seen a lot of people get into NFTs because of our project. And we've seen a lot of people go and get burned, and we've seen a lot of people that understand it. And we've seen a lot of people just say, Hey, this is the only NFT I'm getting because I trust you guys. I want nothing to do with this space and yada yada yada.

CPR: I really admire how much y’all have stayed true to the original vision, which gets us into Ticket Pass. 

You have this partnership with Ticketmaster where holders of Death Bats Club NFTs or folks who use the Ticket Pass program are able to get early access to reserve the tickets they want for your upcoming shows. This means they don’t have to fight with the masses, scalpers, bots, etc. 

MS:  I would say, it’s not a partnership with Ticketmaster. We would work with any ticketing company that wants to implement this. 

Ticketmaster happens to be the team that understood this first. They understood that this was important.

But you know, when we go to South America, or we go to Europe or Southeast Asia, Ticketmaster is not necessarily the ticketing platform folks use there so we don’t have a solution there yet. We would love to implement this for our holders around the world. But right now, it's very fractured. And it's unproven technology in their eyes, so we don't know what's gonna happen.

CPR: Got it. That's helpful clarification. So is it fair to say that this is now a Ticketmaster product that came about because you all pushed for it and offered to be the guinea pig? Because that's even more exciting to me. The idea that this is a Ticketmaster “product” now. Would you describe it like that? 

MS: It is now, yes. 

I met with the Ticketmaster team during NFT LA last year.

David Marcus [EVP Global Music, Ticketmaster] said that they were putting together a web3 team and they were looking at ways to do this kind of thing.

Not exactly what we were talking about, but something like it. 

So we suggested some things we could do on our side to work with them on it and they came back with other suggestions. 

And then it was many months of having conversations about user flow, what's easiest for the fan, what's best for the fan, etc, etc. 

So what happened and why it happened was really a joint effort.

I did tell David that it was important to me to get more artists involved. I want more artists to be able to use this. And now they have that. Any artist that has a token can plug right into Ticketmaster. 

The Ticketmaster team is really, really good. They've gone above and beyond. And they're also very knowledgeable. So this isn't a joke team. They really know what's up, which is great.

CPR: We’ve seen so many brands in this space do things that amounted to dipping their toe in, but then eventually they scrap their program. Based on everything you’re saying, it doesn't sound like this is experimental for Ticketmaster, but rather a serious, long-term program.

Is that fair?

MS: I can't imagine them taking this away from us. We've got a good relationship with that team and we're talking to the most senior people there. 

But it's still going to come down to the artists. If no other artists implement anything, well, you can’t have a whole web3 team just to service Avenged Sevenfold.

So we’ll see what happens. I will say… there were seven or eight different artists that were talking to me constantly about getting into this space. 

And then I hit them up when the Ticketmaster news came out and said, This is going to be great for you guys. And they all said, Oh we’re not doing this anymore. 

But my feeling is, if you're already gone, then you never saw the vision in the first place. It was always about money for you.

I don't know how you could look at this technology, properly understand it, and then just be like, Oh, well, Bored Apes aren't worth what they used to be so I’m out. 

That stuff has never fazed me. 

These bands got in it because they saw there was money to be made. And I don't hate them for that; I don't hold it against them. 

But I do think it's a little weak because there are so many cool things happening now. 

We’re hopeful our fans are going to run around and go look how easily I got these tickets. I didn't have to sit in a queue. I didn't have to fight a guy for the seat next to me. Which is usually what happens when these things go on sale. 

CPR:  This is a great moment to explain exactly what y’all are doing.

First and foremost you have the Death Bats Club, which we've talked about. 

And they are always going to be the first priority. Moving forward, Death Bats Club members will have the first opportunity to go to Ticketmaster and get any tickets they want for your concerts. 

And since there are only 5,400 people who hold these Death Bat Club tokens, and they’re all over the world, you’re never going to run the risk of too many people with tokens being in the same city all at once trying to get tickets and driving up prices.

MS: That’s right. There are promoters for every city who look at the queue of people waiting to get tickets on Ticketmaster and go, let's raise prices now because there are so many people in the queue. That’s never going to get triggered during the Death Bats Club ticket sales, which means Death Bats Club members are always going to get in before any surge pricing starts and therefore they will always get the best prices.

CPR: Okay, so that's step one. 

The second tier in this system are Ticket Pass holders, which, as you’ve said, is for folks who missed out on Death Bats Club, but who want to get into this ecosystem.

Ticket Pass is a way to reward actual fans and get tickets into those fans’ hands. 

And the way you’re doing that is you're implementing a system where fans earn “points” (though that might not be the right word) for various different fan behaviors. And those points will determine their rank in the system.

If you buy merchandise, that merchandise will have an NFC tag in it that validates that you bought that merch. 

If you attend concerts, your attendance will be verified via the blockchain and marked down.

I’ve also heard you say you will track streams on Spotify and so if a fan streams your music on Spotify that will also earn them “points.”

And in the end you will have a multi-tiered system in which Death Bats Club members are #1 and then after that you have #2, #3, #4 within the Ticket Pass holder system, which are determined by all these other behaviors.

And ultimately that's how you avoid scalpers taking advantage of this system. Because the scalper would also have to be streaming on Spotify, and buying merch, and doing all these additional things that start to reduce the ROI for them in order for them to also get the best priced tickets.

MS: Yep, you just nailed it. 

You get it better than most people that I explain it to. 

And the other part is, we can see a lot of what's happening with each individual pass.

For example, just recently Ticketmaster came to us and said, “Hey, this guy bought the max amount of tickets (4 tickets) at every venue. And we can see they're using eight different Ticketmaster accounts, and running through a Death Bats token. It seems kind of suspicious.” 

So I said, “okay, give me the wallet address for his Death Bats Club token.”

First of all, it was bought two days ago. And then I go through his wallet and I see that this is a total NFT flipper. They're in every project, flipping things. And I started looking through all their Etherscan history and it's obvious this person makes a living off of flipping things. 

So I just went back to Ticketmaster and told them to tell him he didn't get the tickets. 

He’s not a fan. There's nothing about him in any of his profiles or socials that is Avenged Sevenfold anything. And so we just temporarily turned his token off. 

And some people might look at that as a negative, but to me, I look at it as it’s our brand and this is exactly the kind of behavior that we're trying to protect people from. 

CPR: Yep. That makes sense.

Let’s talk about the Spotify piece in all this. I'm sure you’re still in early phases, but I'm curious to hear how you’re going to track Spotify listens and aggregate that into a total “fan score.” 

MS: So currently I speak things into the universe before they've actually happened. {laughter]

But here’s how I see it.

The web2 listening experience right now is very good for the consumer. Nobody that's a listener has a problem going anywhere they want and listening to any song they want at any given moment. It's a very good experience. 

So how do you make it even better? To me, it’s by rewarding fans that listen to any particular artist. 

I have a call with Spotify coming up. And even if that call goes badly, I'm going to explain to them that we want to reward our fans and that all we need from Spotify is to communicate with these fans that if they download a wallet, we will airdrop them an appreciation token which will ultimately play into Ticket Pass.

We know they have the data, we see it every year on Instagram. People love to brag about their Spotify Wrapped top artists and songs. 

The reason I'm going to attack Spotify first is because they are doing token-gated playlists and there is a Head of Innovation there for me to talk to. 

Now, if that doesn't work, and they say we don't want you to have our information, we don't want to be involved in that, then we will individually go to our fans that are sending us screenshots of their Spotify Wrapped and we will say if you send us proof of this with your email and your wallet, we will send you a token. 

So that is our manual backup plan. 

But I think that we can do it in a really smooth way, where we just do an airdrop to all the addresses that are our top listeners. That's what I think should happen. And because of our ability to convince people in the past that it's good for them, I think we can do it with Spotify…

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This conversation has been heavily edited for clarity and brevity. For more of our conversation with M Shadows, check out our full interview with him here.

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