Video excerpts of artists on streaming royalties and ownership/rights to masters. Superfan aims to solve both of these systemic problems.

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FAQ
Do the images in the lettering above have any meaning?
YES, here's a list.
1- The turntablist homey DP one (from the Heavyhitters crew) scratching on his modified mixer.
2- Bathroom of the famous CBGB.
3- Graffiti of MF DOOM's mask, originally designed with help from the homey KEO.
4- The colorful sweater is a Coogi, made famous by Biggie.
5- Album cover showing J Dilla's face, the genius producer who died of Lupus in 2006, leaving some of his belongings to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at The Smithsonian in Washington DC.
6- Yellow safety tiles from the NYC subway.
7- The colorful donut is also a nod to Dilla. Fun fact, his family owned a Donut shop called Dilla's Delights in Downtown Detroit. We'll be introducing an in-world token called Donuts as a way for socialFi participants to earn, 'tip' others, and trade for merch. We'll continue to add gamification to the Donuts as in-world currency.
8- Alicia Keys, because her fingerprints on music and culture are significant. She presses those emotional buttons along with the greats (Whitney or Prince or Mary) while wielding swagger as if she was a member of Wu Tang. Can you tell I'm a fan?
9- Montana brand used cans of spraypaint. I'm a graf artist, had to happen.
10- Queensbridge, where Nas (and many others) is from, and where I learned computers while doing community service as a teen. I spent countless hours in the Exile building on 11th street, 40 side. I was the only white kid in those bodegas on 40th, and trooping to Bel Aire diner near Ravenswood at all hours. Good times.
11- A Basquiat painting, one of my favorite.
12- An album cover from A tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory was an important album for hiphop. The production and lyrics somehow felt like Hiphop was growing up and getting wiser.
13- Old NYC subway map.

What's the thesis, what's the northstar?
The simple version? To pay artists better! That is, provide a new kind of revenue stream, and provide a legal safe space for them to thrive. Many have experienced predatory records deals from labels, and in thoday's world, Spotify only pays out a fraction of a cent. Humbly, we see ourselves as the artists' hero on the music landscape, innovting with blockchain under the hood.

An investor hit me with 'homework' recently, sort of an essay writing task. He asked me for a personal breakdown of 3 movies/shows. The Playlist, Blackberry, and Tetris.

We have the common tropes about kicking down doors against all odds, thinking differently about opportunity, and figuring out a pivot when at rock bottom. These are all inspirational to see - but I saw a different thread between these shows/movies very clearly.

My answer is a story about friction. 1- Tetris was a worldwide phenomenon because it was simple to understand, you did not need a manual or good graphics to become quickly addicted. 2- Blackberry went from owning enterprise completely to losing it all overnight because chicklet keyboards became oldschool in an instant. The desired UX became the touchscreen with a better UI and it took over with a single slide presentation. 3- Spotify made music ingestion easier than piracy or purchasing, it won by being the lowest friction for the customer. An easy and fun user experience beat any conversation about ideology (in context of record label control) or legality (Pirate Bay, Limewire, Kazaa, Napster, iTunes). This is the commonality between the three shows/movies.

The founders each understood (clearly & early) their opportunities because they themselves experienced friction particular to their focus. They each understood the problem so well, they doubled down in their conviction. Perhaps with the exception of Blackberry, they understood the problem well in the beginning, but did not use their learnings at the end of their story.

How do I apply this to my own efforts - I make it easy and risk-free for artists to win in a system where they currently (and historically) lose, a system with no good alternatives at all. I also make it easy for superfans to 'feel' better about the value of their click over the current system. Finally, I have a model which continues to get Spotify (and other DSPs) their clicks without competing with them. Everyone wins, but water will always flows downhill, taking the easiest path to us... and to force another water metaphor, all boats can actually rise using the Superfan model. Knowledge of the current landscape informs us as well - 1. Streaming economics are seen publically as broken/exploitative. 2. The rise of the 'independant' artist's modern capabilities for promotion are not well paired with social networks in providing a direct relationship between artist and fan. 3. Safe spaces don't exist for our user personas (the artist, the superfan, and the investor) in the way we're planning. 4. Steve Jobs' keynote which killed physical keyboards in a single slide was powerful in a way in which Superfan can show up - I've chosen Alicia Keys as a cofounder to be the cultural face and signaling to the industry because she can lend a similar gravitas and gravity to our message. Timing is very good for her voice to be heard over the CEO's of DSPs and equity groups gobbling up rights to masters.

Tell me more about the rights reversion process.
If you, as an artist, signed away your rights to your music/masters in a predatory deal with a record label during the 80's/90's, you could be eligible to have those rights revert back to you now, or very soon. This is a bit complicated at first glance but we're automating the process as much as possible for your convenience.

Notice may be served no earlier than 25 years after rights were granted, or if the grant of rights covered the right of publication no earlier than 30 years after execution or 25 years after publication, whichever comes first.

The termination is not effective until 35 years after the date of execution, or if the grant covers the right of publication, no earlier than 40 years after execution of the grant or 35 years after publication, whichever comes first.

The law also says there's a 5 year window where you can revert. So the latest you can terminate is at 40 years after the grant of the rights.

Let's look at the grant of all exclusive rights for a composer author without the rights of publication. The first thing we would need to do is pick your date of termination. The termination window is between 35 and 40 years after the date you assigned the ownership to the publisher or the record label. So the date of termination should be in that window. After we know your termination date, we will send notice to the music publisher. This is a 13 year window, no less than 2 years, and n omore than 10 years before the date of termination. So your notice can be sent between 25 and 38 years after assigning the ownership. As long as your notice of termination is set giving the current owner two years notice.

Basically, if you want to terminate sometime in year 36, we would send your notice of termination some time before two years of that notice (meaning, year 34).

Linking Section 203 of Termination and Licenses at Copyright.gov.

Will you be introducing a token?
Short answer - not right now. Long answer? We've got an interesting plan around a future token as part of our growth strategy. We'd like to hold on to as much equity as possible - I'd rather offer artists and labels equity rather than a VC. As we don't have a large community today, and as we're coming out of a bear market, it makes the most sense to have a plan in place to launch a token as a response to future metrics, user behavior, and market conditions. For now, we think it's super important to focus on a good product that artists and fans love using. Legally speaking, the token will be considered by Superfan a collectable.

Technically a token, but perhaps not what you had in mind - We'll be introducing an in-world token called Donuts as a way for socialFi participants to earn, 'tip' others, and trade for merch. We'll continue to add gamification to the Donuts as in-world currency.

How would the eventual token be used, any utility?
1- We'll offer a limited mint as crowd-sourced growth funding. The folks who get in early get it a low floor price.
2- All purchases by consumers for fanclub membership (aka the majority of our transactions for membership NFTs) will contribute a small portion to the platform token liquidity. This growing liquidity pool can be used like a treasury paying for continued growth (ie: an ecosystem fund), and we can think of ways to use the liquidity ala staking. The tokenomics around this will be designed to be quite low-risk, an indicator of of slow and safe growth.
3- We plan to onboard via a special airdropped membership to holders of other ecosystems (such as Onchain Monkey, Yugalabs, Crypto Punks etc), as a way to bring degen buyers into our marketplace with some perks specific to their community. We're still working out the details but the goal would be to have interoperable features with those communities. Example, use your OCM PFP as a special membership to take part in this ecosystem without fanclub membership. The value of NFT ecosystems are their communities (moreso than the NFT art), which is 100% inline with our core values.
4- Finally, a 'new artist launchpad'. I was presenting on a recent Twitter Spaces hosted by STACKS $STX when @NatalieCrue asked me about breaking new web3 focused artists. As our strength is in fanclubs for established artists with existing fanbases, I didn't have a good answer. I thought I'd leave that market segment to the Sound.XYZ's and GalaMusic's. This would be my answer to her today - We'll host an 'artist launchpad' in which artists without a large fanbase, needing exposure, could take part in our version of crowdsourced american idol. We'd gamify a moment in the spotlight for artists with a buy-in and rewards mechanism for voters. We'd be careful to steer clear of anything which looks like sports betting, but rather, look more like the 'Unsigned Hype' page from the Source Magazine, with a rewards incentive added. We'd use our project token for participation and rewards.

Why build on Bitcoin?
There are lots of great reasons to build on Bitcoin, and lots of great reason to avoid Bitcoin in favor of EVM compatible chains (for instance). Superfan is married to two very specific narratives. 1. As we're onboarding a huge population of web2 consumers on to web3 rails, friction & perception is a really important topic when thinking of overall product. Ask your parents generation, or your non-technical friends if they've ever heard of Bitcoin... now ask them if they've heard of Polygon/Avalanche/Solana/etc. We believe their answers are critical to our onboarding strategy as well as while educating at the offramps - bitcoin is a recognizable term and is seen by some (especially music artists) as the savior of the music. Explaining crypto/blockchain in terms which are unknown are likely to cause an instant feeling of friction, a feeling of being dumb (maybe), and perhaps cause web2 consumers to lean into a pre-existing 'scammy crypto' narrative. Bitcoin's brand is something we can more readily attach ourselves to in this respect. 2. As the most secure blockchain with the most TVL (total value locked), there is a future opportunity in it's programmability which may prove super important. The growing pains of chains such as Ethereum and Solana has taught us (the royal us) a lot about how to do Layer2s well. As ordinal's are less than a year old as of this writing, it's being built from the ground up with learnings about security (ie bridges as a common attack vector), indexing/oracles, capacity and throughput, and surely much more... and all at scale. Solana had blackouts so we don't have to. Dex's/swaps have experienced hacks so we don't have to. As far as Superfan sees the evolving landscape, Ethereum and others were all a great beta test for the future of bitcoin. A future we plan to contribute to.

How is early fundraising going?
We've been fortunate to recieve some offers at $100k as a pre-seed. We weren't very happy about the equity ask in the deal, so we've decided to focus on giving an angel (with a smaller check) a better deal. Why say no to money? Because we're leveraging our network in the music industry in order to onboard a curated list of 25 artists at launch. We want to hold on to as much equity as possible so that we may offer equity to labels and artists who might be instrumental to our growth strategy. Dilution of equity would be a wrench in our long term plan. Besides, I'd (in the voice of Alpay, co-founder) love to see equity go to veterans of the music industry who are true believers in what we're doing.

What are Donuts?
We'll be introducing an in-world token called Donuts as a way for socialFi participants to earn, 'tip' others, and trade for merch. We'll continue to add gamification to the Donuts as an in-world currency. Why a Donut? It's a loving nod to J Dilla, his family owned a Donut shop called Dilla's Delights in Downtown Detroit, named for his last album completed from his hospital bed as his health failed due to lupus. He died at 32, leaving us with a mountain of amazing music and production on so many projects from MF DOOM to Janet Jackson to De La Soul to Erykah Badu. J Dilla is recognized by the Smithsonian with his MPC sampling drum machine and a custom built Moog synthesizer on permanent display. Read more at this link.

What is LAMBDA Protocol and what does the relationship with LAMBDA look like?
There's more to come on this front as we continue to build... LAMBDA is a new innovation on Bitcoin, bringing smart contract capability to layer 1. Please visit LAMBDA's website and their Twitter/X for details..




Contact :
Alpay@Superfan.fan (superfan of MF DOOM, Blackstar, Sa-Roc, Hiromi Uehara, Jazzy Jeff, Tommy Guerrero, Fiona Apple)
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