Hey there! Coinvise is a web3 platform that helps creators & communities build and manage their Social Tokens. You can join the community here. If you find this essay interesting, make sure to subscribe to this newsletter and follow Coinvise on Twitter. Enjoy! 🔥

Music DAOs are on the rise, with thriving communities such as Songcamp or Water & Music gathering thousands of members. We're seeing more and more projects trying to help musicians and institutions such as Colors (a stage for non-ordinary expression) embrace the Web3 mindset and create DAOs to better their global community of artists and creators in their activities.

It's already obvious that Music DAOs will disrupt how the music industry is working and how artists will collaborate and distribute their work. This new organizational model allows artists to be closer with their fans, building projects together and sharing the upsides. This is now a matter of time, and it might happen sooner than most people (even artists) thought.

Because Music DAOs can help millions of musicians to make a living, it's essential to create the ultimate guide to show easily how anyone can jump into this revolution and leverage the new tools at their disposal to build empires.

So what are the steps for artists to build a DAO? Let's find out 🔥

Step 1 - Think about a flow and a digital space to host your community.

Before even thinking about building a DAO, creating a space to host your community is essential. The goal at this stage is to create a space for your most engaged fans to start chatting together and collaborate on potential projects.

Telegram, Geneva, Discord, and Slack are all reasonable solutions. Personally, I would encourage any artist to choose Discord over the other solutions as it has proven its efficiency and provides many features that other platforms don't.

Once the space is created, it's essential to design it the right way, creating different channels that suit your audience (the most famous being #introduce-yourself - #Announcement - #General etc..). You can also implement different Discord Bots to track engagement (e.g., SourceCred) better or to token-gate some channels (e.g., Collab.land).

Finally, it's essential to think thoroughly about your onboarding process, ensuring your audience understands the steps to join Discord and start interacting in the community. To make sure to create a safe space and a healthy community, for example, certain DAOs have implemented a form during their onboarding process for anyone wanting to join the community or simply have put a paywall.

Step 2 - Build forth values for early community members and have a clear mission.

When considering launching a Music DAO with Coinvise, you should ensure you've already gathered a strong community for your project. You can, of course, create a DAO without an existing audience, but the main goal of Tokenized communities is to make your fans work together and collaborate to achieve great things.

With a digital space for your community and a part of your audience onboarded, it's now time to share with them the core missions and values of the DAO. What do you want this DAO (that we could compare to a decentralized startup) to do? What are the core missions? Creating music together? Working on a future album?

If you're unsure what you want to achieve, you can create working groups and brainstorm sessions with community members to define better what they think is possible considering your work and career.

Remember that people will work with you only in exchange for points (tokens) in your economy. They'll help you because they want to do it, not because they need it. To make sure they continue to help you over the long term, you'll have to create a strong culture. You can create a strong culture in your community by giving contributors ownership and responsibilities over specific projects, making sure to create a group they can identify with, giving them a social status within a group etc…

You shouldn't underestimate the power of a strong culture in the success of a tokenized community.

Step 3 - Start incentivizing your community to work toward an ambitious project.

Culture might not be enough to motivate your community to work over the long term. That's why well-designed incentives are more than crucial, as they can make your project tremendously grow. Incentives are ideal when it's mutually beneficial to you and your community. This will create positive-sum games, where everyone has an aligned economic interest.

There are three main types of incentives:

• Social incentives - It's more of a social, collectible value that people are proud to own. Social Tokens create status within a community. Think of Airline miles that generate status within a specific sphere (Airline lounge, first to enter the plane, etc..) or special perks in Discord servers
• Vision Incentives - Members aren't participating "for-profit" (aka economic incentives) but are driven by a specific ideology. Community members will exchange your Token without a monetary value because they sincerely believe in the vision.
• Economic Incentives - It doesn't require a particular strategy, and you can simply ask community members to achieve a mission in exchange for economic value. Creating a "pay-for-performance incentive scheme" (a program where you pay contributors depending on how hard they work) allows anyone to participate and help grow the project.

If you're interested in digging more into creating great incentives, we've created a complete Framework on how to do it.

Once you know the three types of incentives, you can start creating Quests. Creating quests is a great way to manifest positive behaviors and create a positive feedback loop for achieving communal goals and showing gratitude.

You can reward members in tokens for their initiatives, soft contributions, loyalty, and other added value forms. This creates strong value alignment and reinforces a culture of giving.

Step 4 - Create a community token on Coinvise and start sharing the upsides.

A great way to reward members who accomplished Quests is through tokens. The Token will primarily serve as social recognition as it won't have financial value at this point.

To help you create your Token from start to finish, we have created The Ultimate Guide to Designing Effective Token Launches and a series of videos showing a creator going through all the process steps.

More than simply rewarding contributors who accomplished quests, A Token will also allow you to make Airdrops and reward your early contributors (those who bought your NFTs or Merch early, for example) or attract new potential community members.

With a Token, more of your fans will be incentivized to make the overall project and DAO succeed as the value of their tokens will be directly correlated to the project's success.

Conclusion

Launching a Music DAO is one small step toward building a whole new economy around your art. It's an excellent way to create a special experience with your listeners, gather a strong community around your music, better monetize your audience and share the upsides.

We're still at the beginning of Music DAOs, and there is still so much to discover and build. Some communities such as Water & Music are dedicated to researching the current landscape and future possibilities for music DAOs and identifying critical needs in the landscape that are still going unaddressed.

Launching a Music DAO is a great way to explore new horizons and build at the forefront of the Web3 space. Many artists have already leveraged tokens to create communities (e.g., RAC ($RAC) - Daniel Allan ($OVERSTIM) etc..), and it's only a matter of time before others follow this path.

Want more?

Follow us on Twitter,  Instagram and join us on Discord 🔥

Thanks for being here!