The New Creator Playbook: Jumpstarting Communities Through Tokens

When musician Daniel Allan set out to make his album Overstimulated in 2021, he could have done what a lot of internet creators do: spend months or even years creating and releasing his content, in the hopes of eventually building a big enough fanbase to fund his work full-time. Or, he could have gone an even more traditional route: shopped his work around to traditional music labels, hoping one of them would bestow on him that rarest of prizes—a record deal.

Instead, Daniel chose a different path: he crowdfunded his new album through a token sale on Mirror and raised 50 ETH (about $142K USD at the time) from 87 backers to fund the creation of his music. In return for their investment, token holders got a 50% stake in the artist share of the profits—and a direct line to Daniel himself. “For the first time, I owned all of the music that I was putting out and people were assigning an actual value to my art,” he wrote on his Mirror page about the impact crypto has had on his work.

Web3-native creators like Daniel represent the vanguard of a new model for the creator economy. We’ve written extensively about how networks and platforms can distribute user ownership through tokens in order to grow bigger and faster. Similarly, tokens also represent a powerful new tool for creators to bootstrap audiences and capital. Instead of creating content for free with the hopes of gradually growing an audience and one day being able to monetize it, creators are now able to monetize and build an audience upfront through tokens—and then use that money and that following to produce their content and grow their business. 

In other words: web3 has inverted the traditional online content creation model. It’s a paradigm shift that will have significant implications for how creator work gets done, how followers relate to the work of creators, and how the broader creator ecosystem functions as a whole. 

The evolution of the creator playbook 

This isn’t the first time the creator playbook has seen an update. Pre-internet, creators conceived of their content, then pitched that content to institutions such as record labels, book publishers, TV studios, etc. who had the power to decide what got made. Creators then gave up significant creative control and a substantive chunk of future earnings in exchange for upfront funding and distribution of their work. 

With the rise of web2 user-generated content platforms, a new pathway to creative work emerged. Creators were able to publish their work online to platforms like Instagram and TikTok and reach audiences directly. As their audience grew, various monetization paths became available including advertising, brand sponsorships, subscriptions, and merchandise.