Avenged Sevenfold’s season pass is turning heavy metal fans into blockchain ‘evangelists’.

Heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold are fans of Web3, launching their own line of Deathbats NFTs and building tokenized ticket sales with Ticketmaster.

Now, in what the band calls the “culmination” of its Web3 efforts, Avenged Sevenfold has launched a decentralized fan rewards platform that allows followers to collect rewards by participating in band-related activities. It's like the Battle Pass in the popular video game Fortnite, but focused on the team.

Frontman Matt Sanders (M.Shadows) told DeCrypt that by slowly introducing fans to the benefits of Web3, they “become evangelists for it, because they go to other concerts or the community of other artists they like.”

“Which fandom do I enjoy participating in? If you show them all the positive aspects,” he said. “If you take all the good and all the bad and weigh them together, you just play the long game and let other people figure it out,” he added.

Built on the Ethereum large-scale network Polygon, the Season Pass rewards fans for redeeming digital stubs for concert tickets, streaming the band's music and purchasing NFC-chipped merchandise. Those points unlock standard rewards, which can range from digital collectibles to trade deals and previously unreleased demo tracks. For the band's most dedicated fans, the highest tier of rewards includes free concert tickets and meet-and-greets.

Since they are distributed on a decentralized platform, fans have real ownership of those rewards and can trade them on third-party marketplaces. Avenged Sevenfold had the advantage of working with an already established group of fans, Sanders said.

“We've had 20 years of goodwill with them, and they knew we wouldn't do anything ridiculous to tarnish our reputation with them,” the group said. Think it's even cooler.

Many bands are “sitting on the sidelines” to see how Revenge Sevenford's Web3 gamble will play out, Sanders said. Two years after Dezbats Club's NFT set, and the band playing the second leg of their Libad tour, the benefits began to show in what he calls a “real get-to-Jesus moment.”

Now, he says, “The fans are going to talk, and the artists are going to listen.”

Sanders expects Web3 adoption in the music industry to be led by established bands like Avenged Sevenfold. “The fact that we're in our 40s and trying to do this kind of breaks the matrix,” he said, “and the way that normally happens is when these young kids come along, we create a completely different music industry—the one we've been trying to create 25 years into our careers.”

While Avenged Sevenfold has invested a lot of time and effort into educating fans about Web3, he says the next generation of musicians and fans will thrive on the technology. “It's going to be harder for us to convert our audience here than it is from the kid who's going to build our audience natively on this site 3,” he said.

For now, Sanders said, negative press around NFTs and Web3 has made some artists wary of embracing the technology. “You just have to get up and pass,” he said. If not, you're a slave to your fans, and I don't think that's a healthy relationship.

He added that Avenged Sevenfold is an “unusual problem” because at this stage in their career, the team is “set to shake the tree and ruffle the feathers of our fan redemption.”

“We could literally go out into the sunset, write the same kind of records and play arenas the rest of the day, and call it a day,” Sanders said. Instead, the team wants to make sure Web3 has real utility for musicians and fans.

“We want to lead by example so you can create a better internet, a better future for artists,” he said.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.