FanSociety
Patronage for musicians and fans
A novel crowdfunding solution that works the way you'd expect. Unapologetically anti-subscription.
Think different
Step outside the box with us
Subscriptions aren't a good fit for fandom. The moment you stop paying, you're out of the fan club. Your previous patronage is no longer valuable. This isn't really how the music world works in the minds of music junkies. Discovering new music is the real social currency.
FanSociety replaces the recurring charge with a one-time donation that leaves a permanent on-chain receipt — a FanPin. A FanPin solves two issues at once. One, it timestamps when a fan discovered, started following, and supported an artist. Two, it consolidates months of subscription patronage into one large gift right now, turning a slow drip of funding into a substantial amount to bootstrap an artist's carrer.
research and development
Finding the perfect fit
Most patronage models sort fans by how much they paid or how fast they clicked. We wanted one that sorts by when someone showed up, at a resolution an artist can actually manage.
The mechanism
How a generation works
Everything about the model is taken from existing social contracts. FanSociety uses a cohorts model that is manageable for artists and fair for fans.
While a generation is open, any number of fans can mint into it at or above your token fee. When you create the next one, the previous closes — permanently. Nobody joins Generation 1 in year four.
That single rule is what turns a fan club into a record. Over a career you accumulate cohorts, each one stamped with the period it belonged to, and the ordering can never be rewritten because it was never stored anywhere you or we could edit.
Access
What a FanPin actually opens
FanPins can be used by fans to flex on their friends, but more interestingly, artists can give privileged access to content based on FanPin holders. This works natively with Station on day one and we see growing number of features that can take advantage of the FanPin model.
FanPins with Station are flexible. Artists can do early releases based on FanPin generations. Tracks and albums can even be gated for fan club members only. Station makes this all possible, but doesn't tell artists exactly how they can and can't use it.
Setting it up
Four steps, from the dashboard
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Deploy the contract
Connect a wallet, choose where revenue is paid — your wallet or your Treasury — and deploy. One on-chain transaction plus gas. If you want revenue pooling in a treasury, deploy that first: the payee choice is permanent.
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Open a generation
Set a token fee, which is the minimum donation. Add the FanPin artwork, up to 10 MB, and a description saying whatever you want it to say — or nothing. It goes live as your active generation.
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Point your catalog at it
In the Catalog, grant that generation access to an album or a single track: a date it opens, and whether streaming is free or paid for them. Stack groups to stagger a release across cohorts.
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Close it when you are ready
Creating the next generation closes the last one. That cohort is now sealed, permanently and publicly, and can never be joined again.
FanSociety is its own protocol, and there's more about it at fansociety.xyz.