Polkadot Music Events Initiative - onboarding fans, artists and builders to Polkadot through music

Proposal: Polkadot Music Events Initiative Tranche 1

[2024-2025]

PMEI is a team of developers, music industry entrepreneurs and live events coordinators focused on creating intuitive web3 experiences within the context of side events during major crypto conferences.

polkadotmusic.events

Proponent: Polkadot Music Events Initiative

Beneficiary: Polkadot Music Events Initiative

Date of Proposal: December, 2023

Requested: $1.241M @ 7 day Avg. Tool | 176,852 DOT

Full budget here.

This proposal is for Tranche 1 of 2. Tranche 1 is proposed for six large events taking place in 2024. Tranche 2 will also be for six events in 2025. Throughout the next two years we will be sourcing viable technical integrations and collaborating with teams to build and then launch for our events. To keep everyone tied in, we will be producing content to document the story around the build.

PMEI held a proof-of-concept event during Mainnet in September which was a huge success (1500+ users engaging with Polkadot tech). We are now asking for community support to continue our initiative to add value for DOT holders.

Short recap from Pilot Event here.

2024 Proposed Events:

Description:

The Polkadot Music Events Initiative, or PMEI, is the organizer of a curated event series taking place alongside major web3 and music conferences, giving Polkadot dApps and parachain teams an opportunity to showcase their tech in a live, in-person setting. These events are centered around live music performances that leverage Polkadot technology and create a thoughtful experience for the attendees, developers and talent involved.

PMEI is a collaboration of proven teams, not only in the ecosystem, but live events and music technology.

PMEI Events 2024(tranche 1)

ETH Denver (Denver, CO) February 2024
Token 2049 Dubai (Dubai, UAE) April 2024
Consensus (Austin, TX) May 2024
BTC Prague (Prague, CZ) May 2024
Mainnet September (New York City, NY) 2024
Amsterdam Dance Event (Amsterdam, Netherlands) October 2024

PMEI Events 2025 (tranche 2)

ETH Denver (Denver, CO) February 2025
ETH London (London, UK) March 2025
Consensus (Austin, TX) June 2025
Mainnet (New York City, NY) September 2025
Token 2049 Singapore (Singapore) September 2025
Amsterdam Dance Event (Amsterdam, Netherlands) October 2025

Sustainable Economics

PMEI and Walker Music have created a runway for introducing new brand partners, paid partnerships and ticketed event models that can be used as a lever to generate revenues and make PMEI a sustainable series, eventually requiring little to no treasury funding.

The strategy behind this model is to bridge opportunities for the ecosystem where outside brands can work together with Polkadot teams. A sensible outcome would be brand collaboration beyond the events creating ongoing usability.

Context

On many levels, music is an incredible vertical where blockchain can solve real world issues and create a higher quality and more equitable outcome for the fans and the artists. Polkadot should, and can be a phenomenal arena for music in web3 to grow and incubate necessary advances in technology and culture, alike. Many Polkadot projects already have products that can actively help advance this, directly and immediately, through the experience around live music events.

We think of these events as a clever way to accomplish a few things that are ultimately required for the growth of the ecosystem- more specifically onboarding new users, new entrepreneurs and new developers.

How are we accomplishing this?

Glad you asked! Each event will focus on three key elements to funnel into our larger goal for adoption and usage.

Accessibility - Prioritizing an intuitive experience for ALL attendees

Hard and Fast Implementation - UX/ UI build outs and backend implementation specific to the event series. This will give developers a chance to work together on specific business needs surrounding the events and engage more use cases for XCM.

Ownership and Perpetuity - A focus on creating brand loyalty through community, collectibles, cross-ecosystem collaboration and compounded benefits for ongoing/ repeat attendance.

These three principles help us define the conditions for success and measure qualitative and quantitative outcomes.

For our events, the goal is to take measurable and attainable steps in implementing new attendee experiences and advancing the music tech stack.

Accountability

As a passionate team of people striving to better the ecosystem, we firmly believe it is important to have complete transparency and uphold accountability for the efforts associated with the Polkadot Music Events Initiative. Our objective with this is to provide the community with reporting for engagement, attendance, successes and failures. We will encourage anyone with the same passion and principles, building in the ecosystem, to connect with us for open collaboration, ideation and to provide critique.

Who is on the team?

PMEI has core members dedicated to the curation, planning and execution of all twelve events. In addition to these core members, partner teams will provide direct support and resources to create successful outcomes.

The Core Team

Spencer Zabiela: Co-founder of MuFi, a music and royalty payments tech stack built on Polkadot. 11 + years of experience in the music industry. Spencer also has a background in media and financial services and has been a long time participant of the nightlife community and event organizing (most recently the September 19th Mainnet side event with Exiled Racers and Zeitgeist).

Walker Music (Jojo Walker): WM consists of four full-time coordinators, led by Jojo Walker. Jojo is a music industry entrepreneur with 15+ years of experience as a talent buyer and coordinator for the largest global nightlife brands, venues and labels, including Defected Records, Keinemusik, Boiler Room and Avant Gardner/ Brooklyn Mirage.

Er-Ti Chen: formerly the Ecosystem Marketing Manager and Global Event Program Manager at Parity Technologies. She has been instrumental in pioneering Polkadot's ecosystem marketing efforts and shaping the global event strategies for Polkadot Ecosystem. She has both spearheaded and provided invaluable support to the Polkadot community in orchestrating successful events throughout Asia, Europe, and North America.

Full-Time Dev/ Technical Success Manager: This will be a hybrid role and is yet to be hired. The responsibilities for this job will include full-stack development and technical success; working with parachain teams and dapps on strong collaborative outcomes. This candidate will also be managing the communications across entities, and technical expectations between team integrations and Walker Music Services.

Direct Support Team

WebZero: WebZero is a community-run event agency which emerged during Berlin Blockchain Week in 2022 and has been a fixture in the Polkadot ecosystem ever since. The team around XyloDrone (Ordum, prev. RMRK, Kodadot), Roman Kemper (prev. CMO Subsquid) and Elisabeth Vajner (Amsterdot, Parisdot, prev. HydraDX) produced side events in the US (ETH Denver, Consensus) and Europe (Sub0, Decoded, BlockSplit, Berlin Blockchain Week) with the aim to raise awareness around Polkadot, as well as bringing the community together.

Exiled Studios: Gaming and prediction layer. Exiled Studios will provide technical support, marketing resources and BD support.

What does the team do?

Each member will be focused on specific ongoing needs such as talent buying (booking) and advancing (logistics), venue coordination and permitting, show production (equipment rental, staff, logistics), marketing and promotions, partnership visibility (with conference organizers), tech implementations (with Polkadot teams), and events management (operations).

There are seven unique event locations of which PMEI has decade-long relationships with local promoters in each region who can help supplement local attendance. We are really excited by this resource as it proved extremely helpful for our pilot event during Mainnet in September of 2023.

Additional Support

In addition to the core team and support team, we have additional support from a list of incredible builders in the space. We’ve spent time speaking with these teams and individuals to get their feedback on our proposal and understand what we can do to achieve better quantitative and qualitative outcomes within the context of our event series.

These teams/ individuals included are:

RMRK

Zeitgeist

Subsocial

Moonbeam Network

Moonbeans

Amplified Strategy

Distractive

MuFi

Drop

Peter Mauric

Prime Protocol

API3

Bearfoot Media

Ex Machina Soundworks

We are always continuing to build new ecosystem partnerships and solidify brand and conference engagements. We will post updates here.

If you have an idea for a technical integration, please write us here:

[email protected]

Messaging

Every conference has side events, so what makes ours worth attending?

For one, we are booking top-tier talent curated to each event’s demographic. The reality is, money alone can’t buy you major talent for an event- and certainly not at a fair market rate. Our team has fostered long-held, trusted relationships with artist managers and management companies which allows us to produce these events with great talent at a fair cost. These events will also almost always include specific asks to artist teams that may require more complex logistics potentially affecting an artists' existing brand image or strategy. Communicating the event needs and interactions beyond playing music requires careful handling and experienced talent buying; a task that Walker Music does best.

Secondly, we are also giving outside music brands an opportunity to give away gear and leverage Polkadot tech! That means attendees will have a chance to win cool swag, synths, headphones etc. all for participating in these events.

Lastly, we’re working with Polkadot teams to distribute event collectibles (like Moonbeans), push limited NFT artist drops (with Drop), access prediction games (like Exiled Racers w/ Zeitgeist) and RSVP and gain access (using RMRK x MuFi). All of these initial integrations encourage and/ or require attendees to engage with new onboarding flows!

During selected events, we’re also going to provide space at or near the venue for developers, teams and participants to take meetings and have a workspace. We’re creating a Polkadot resource hub that exists not only for the night of the event, but for the days during the conference.

Marketing Strategy

We have been working within our network and with Amplified Strategy to create direct relationships with each conference to designate the PMEI events as official conference events. The marketing success for our Mainnet side event was seen through cross-network promotion and brand partnerships. With the support of our partner teams, many telegram channels and conference partnerships, we have a high probability of getting the desired attendance.

PMEI will also deliver ongoing content around each event to provide updates and recaps, with more transparency for the community, sparking interest for those who could not attend. These videos will not only include recaps, but developer stories to showcase the teams building out integrations. Why was it a success? What failed?

Our storytelling and video team is Basis Creative. Please view their work here.

As mentioned previously, we have long-standing relationships with local promoters in almost all of these proposed regions. PMEI distinctly seeks to attract attendees with no prior experience with web3. These events can simply act as a gateway for those attendees and spark curiosity.

How is it different from other events?

These events are focused on creating intuitive web3 onboarding experiences within the context of side events during major crypto conferences. The $30,000 technical implementation budget is granted to teams adding developer resources to a new PMEI event experience.

Past Events- Mainnet Pilot

Pilot Event video here.

Our pilot event was on September 19th 2023, billed as an unofficial Mainnet side event. We worked with Polkadot, Exiled Racers, Zeitgeist, MuFi and a list of other Polkadot ecosystem dApps to host, what turned out to be, a 750 person event on the Williamsburg Hotel Roof.

Our headliners and supporting acts were:

Barry Can’t Swim

Jadalareign

Eli Escobar

Some Highlights:

>750 attendees

~1500 race predictions

36% rate of non-crypto attendees

Social reach of ~170K

Other Supporting Teams:

Moonbeam Network
Biconomy
Astar Network
Manta Network
Biconomy
Web3Auth
Dega
Dam Finance
Oak Network
Prime Protocol

This first event was a great measure of the scale of production and resources required. It also gave us an opportunity to evaluate key areas where we can be more capital efficient, where a core team is working across multiple events rather than one-off events. In total, our first event was ~$110K which you can see a breakdown for below in item 1a.

One additional thing to note is that many vendor fees, location allowance, etc. were reduced, or negotiated for free, given that the event was held in NYC where most of the PMEI team is located. It goes without saying, but we will still say it: We will always negotiate for the best value and the lowest fee.

Based on these numbers, we’ve estimated pricing in each additional market.

1a. Cost Breakdown for September 19th Mainnet Side Event

Contact

Manager of the Funds

PMEI team: [email protected]

Recipient DOT Address 13EDmaUe89xXocPppFmuoAZaCsckaJy3deAyVyiykk1zKQbF

More Information

www.polkadotmusic.events

Full budget here.