Original Author: Water & Music

W&M Report (4): Strategic Analysis of Web3 Guiding Music Fans to Join

This article is from The SeeDAO.

Related Reading:

W&M Report (1): Will music NFT usher in their PFP moment?

W&M Report (2): Defining the Ownership of Music NFT

W&M Report (3): Current Status of Web3 Tools for Musicians

W&M Report (4): Strategic Analysis of Web3 Guiding Music Fans to Join

Too long to see the version:

Too long to see the version:

From October 2020 to November 2021, hundreds of music NFT projects will be officially released on Twitter. In order to comprehensively and objectively observe the emotional status of fans in the music NFT industry, we have drawn a time map based on Twitter data. This tracks fan reactions to NFT releases. We conducted a stress test on several common social media communication strategies to analyze the effectiveness of each strategy in the promotion of music NFT. The results show that it is difficult for artists to dispel fans' doubts about NFT through the Twitter platform or reverse the general trend. Fan sentiment. In addition, we also found that Twitter data sometimes does not accurately reflect fans' emotional feelings towards different music NFTs. Therefore, it is unreliable to infer the long-term fan-absorbing potential of an NFT project based on Twitter data alone.

Over the past two months, the Water & Music community has collaborated on a five-part research report on the state of music and Web3, and this is the final part of the series. This article is a fan sentiment analysis report on the release of music NFT projects. For the list of contributors, please see the bottom of the article (in alphabetical order). You can also visit stream.waterandmusic.com to read the full report now published, as well as a full list of members and contributors.

In the past two months, the Water & Music community has completed a series of research reports on "The Status Quo of Music and Web3 Fields". The report consists of five parts, and this is the fifth part. This article is a fan sentiment analysis report on the release of music NFT projects. You can visit stream.waterandmusic.com to view updates to this series of reports, as well as a complete list of contributors.

In the past year alone, artists have raised amazing funds through music NFT, and some people in the industry are also very optimistic about the potential of music NFT, and believe that it is the future trend of creative monetization. But despite this, NFT is still controversial. In addition to people in the industry, music fans also have mixed opinions on music NFT. The issues they care about mainly include: NFT is not conducive to the sustainable development of the environment; NFT is a game that rich people are qualified to play; Leek's financial scam.

The success of an artist is inseparable from the support of fans, and it is the strong consumption power of fans that promotes the growth of an artist. In view of this, it is necessary for us to understand fans' attitudes and reactions to the emerging medium of music NFT. The reason is simple: fan sentiment can greatly influence an artist's choice. Whether it is psychological (such as self-awareness) or economic (such as livelihood income), many celebrities have many internal connections with fans' feedback in their careers. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that the negative evaluation of NFT projects not only affects a certain artist, but also affects other consumers and artists' views on the new trend of NFT.

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Research methods

Research methods

We chose to use Twitter as the main data source to draw a fan sentiment map. In addition to being a large-scale social platform with tens of millions of artists and fans, Twitter is also a communication platform that gathers a large number of Web3 native thought leaders and enthusiasts. Therefore, if we want to choose a single data source to build a large data set, Twitter seems to be the best choice, which can help us accurately capture the trend of fan sentiment in the music NFT industry.

The Water & Music community initially built a seed dataset containing more than 200 official announcement tweets of music NFT releases. The dataset samples mainly focus on the field of electronic music (about 75% of the list), but also covers some other music genres, such as hip-hop, K-pop and rock. At the same time, we also collected all the replies and quotes under each NFT release tweet, and finally formed a large data set containing about 6000 tweets.

• We aggregated these tweets and generated two descriptive parameters for each NFT project release.

• Percentage value for positive sentiment: ranges from 0 to 100, representing positive sentiment from zero to full. We use a dedicated Twitter text sentiment analysis library to add positive/negative sentiment labels to each tweet in the dataset, and calculate a sentiment value for each NFT tweet, representing all quotes or replies to the original tweet. Percentage of positive emotions.

Interaction Count: The total number of likes and retweets received on the original tweet and all subsequent replies and quotes issued by the NFT.

By collecting the corresponding data points of each NFT delivery project, we initially drew a scatter diagram with time as the horizontal axis (as shown in the figure below):

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The study found

In the NFT issuance time map, the first obvious feature we observed is that the NFT circulation showed an uneven distribution state of "dense at both ends and thin in the middle": the project issuance time was concentrated in February and March 2021, and thereafter about 6 Circulation plummeted during the first three months and did not start to pick up until October. This is in line with the overall trend of NFT in 2021: the beginning of 2021 is considered to be the "NFT peak season", and the ensuing summer is known as the "crypto winter". In addition, this is also in line with our previous NFT market report, which shows that the monthly sales of music NFT in Q2 in 2021 has dropped by 90% compared to Q1.

The fan sentiment index is widely distributed vertically, most of which are concentrated in the middle (about 50%) and slightly positive. This is roughly in line with the bull market in early 2021 and the uptrend in recent months, but it is slightly different from our original assumptions. We initially thought that the share of negative sentiment would be larger, especially with larger artist projects.

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Correlation Analysis of Project Overall Participation and Fan Sentiment

We initially thought that certain artists have a clear and small fan base, and the overall number of interactions is low. The NFT projects issued by them may be more likely to receive positive feedback from fans. Our hypothesis is that if an artist has a wide audience, does not interact closely with each other, and most of them have little knowledge of NFT, then the NFT project issued by him may receive more negative sentiment. On the contrary, we believe that artists with a "small and sophisticated" audience have potential advantages, making it easier to lead fans into Web3 and build a more cohesive narrative around NFT projects - every NFT held is a gift to the artist A contribution and recognition of creative work.

However, the results showed that this assumption did not hold. According to the level of participation of NFT projects, we divided them into three categories (active participation, medium and inactive), and the number of projects in each category is the same. Based on three different participation levels, we drew the fan sentiment distribution curves (as shown in the figure below), the horizontal axis represents the percentage of positive sentiment values, and the vertical axis represents the distribution probability of the corresponding percentage values.

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Solving fans' doubts cannot effectively guide positive emotions

In the "Fan Guidance Strategies" chapter of this series of reports, in order to reflect fans' biggest doubts about the Web3 field, we counted and drew an axis map composed of four common doubts, according to which artists can eliminate or alleviate them only by guiding strategies Possibilities of fan concerns, arranged from left to right.

Environmental impact and high financial costs are top concerns for fans, especially those who are new to Web3, according to the findings. Interestingly, this result matches the Twitter data we collected. Taking 50% as the dividing line, we divided the dataset into two categories of positive sentiment (positive feedback accounted for 50% and above) and negative sentiment, and extracted the 30 keywords most frequently used by fans in Twitter interactions. Among them, "environment" and "money" are high-frequency keywords.

Unfortunately, the Axis Map shows that the likelihood of artists solving both problems on their own is extremely low. Essentially, behind them is the overall limitation of the blockchain network, and it is obviously unreasonable for artists to "take the blame".

In addition, sentiment analysis showed that even when artists took action, trying to provide solutions to both environmental impact and monetary cost in tweets or press releases failed to have a positive impact on fan sentiment. It may even exacerbate fan resistance, blaming the artist for their inability to address these issues.

In addition to the qualitative data in the “Fans Common Concerns” framework, we also scanned all NFT issuance projects (official announcement tweets and initial project pages) in the dataset for mentions of charity and environmental causes (or intentions) Content.

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The importance of fan portraits to overall emotional trends

If you want to understand the emotional state of fans of NFT projects in an all-round way, you need to analyze the "push and pull factors" from the perspective of fans. In other words, most of the charts above are from a top-down perspective, assessing fan reactions to artist messages, especially those related to carbon neutrality and philanthropic initiatives. However, in order to make the data more convincing, we also need to analyze the motivation and background of fans from a bottom-up perspective, which may help us understand: For fans, which areas of Web3 are TAs wanting? the first to participate.

To this end, we selected some of the most popular and profitable music NFT distribution projects this year, and used Meltwater to retrieve the data of the participants, including basic personal information, psychographic data, and hobbies. After analysis, we observed an obvious phenomenon: the core audiences of several high-profile music NFT distribution projects on Twitter are "Web3 natives". TAs often use words such as "collectors", "cryptocurrency" and "NFT" when introducing themselves, and they all follow a number of well-known crypto circle bloggers. In other words, TAs are avid cryptocurrency enthusiasts, not "hardcore" fans of music artists.

Taking 3LAU's Faces project on Nifty Gateway as an example, let's first analyze its overall audience data (click to view the Twitter announcement). The data set shows that in terms of fan sentiment, many projects issued by 3LAU have a very high proportion of positive sentiment, with an average ratio of about 80%. However, this is not surprising. Because 3LAU is an "encrypted native" artist, this can be confirmed in many ways. For example, he has been involved in blockchain activities from a very early stage (2018 at the latest) and studied finance at university, so he can discuss music, finance and cryptocurrency with his followers at ease How do intersections occur.

We used Meltwater to conduct a visual analysis of the audience of the Faces project (as shown in the figure above), and there are multiple clear clusters in the audience distribution map, which means that TAs have more positive experience in the encryption field, at least participation higher. Keywords for these clusters include **"transaction/account", "NFT collector/degen", "opensea/creative" and "investor/ape"**. In addition, the keywords that TAs use to describe themselves on Twitter are mostly related to encryption art. Among them, "NFT" accounted for 29.5%, "NFTs" accounted for 15.0%, "collectors" accounted for 10.7%, "art" accounted for 10%, and "encryption" accounted for 9.3%.

Secondly, the data of the "favorite" section of the visualization map shows that among the bloggers who are concerned by the audience of the project, the most popular bloggers are all related to the encryption field or the NFT art market (Elon Musk, Nifty Gateway, Beeple and Pak). In the end, the data showed that 78.38% of the project's audience was male. These factors are almost in line with our stereotype of "encrypted fans" (usually referring to men who like to use encrypted terms as personal labels on social media), and this type of people may be more likely to show positive emotions towards NFT projects. And actively participate in it. Of course, it is not ruled out that this conclusion is suspected of overgeneralization.

Several other projects we analyzed also showed the same result, that is, the audience of projects with a high proportion of positive sentiment tends to be heavy crypto users:

Dirtybird Flight Club: Men accounted for 77.79% of the audience; personal keyword composition: "NFT" accounted for 21.6%, "encryption" accounted for 13%, "NFTs" accounted for 9.8%, and "collectors" accounted for 6.0%; Twitter interaction is positive Emotional accounted for 85%.

Ice Cube / Trevor Jones on Nifty Gateway: Males accounted for 73.45% of the audience; personal keyword composition: "NFT" accounted for 20.6%, "encryption" accounted for 11.5%, "NFTs" accounted for 9.1%, and "collectors" accounted for 6.0% ; Positive emotions accounted for 80% of tweet interactions.

Method Man / Tical: Men accounted for 76.66% of the audience; personal keyword composition: "NFT" accounted for 17.8%, "encryption" accounted for 9.3%, "nbatopshot" accounted for 6.8%; positive emotions accounted for 60% of tweet interactions.

In contrast to the WarNymph project released by Grimes on Nifty Gateway in March 2021 (Twitter announcement: link 1, link 2), the audience's replies, comments and other interactive content did not revolve around the encryption field (as shown in the figure below). The keywords most frequently mentioned by TAs are "love", "music" and "art", while "encryption" only ranks fourth, and only about 2% of the audience use these keywords in common, which is similar to 3LAU's The Faces project and the Dirtybird Flight Club stand in stark contrast. More than 20% of Dirtybird Flight Club's audience mentioned the word "encryption" in their self-introduction, showing obvious "Web3 natives" attributes. Additionally, WarNymph has a slightly lower male audience (63%) than the other NFT projects mentioned above. As shown on the right side of the visual map, its audience gathering areas are not limited to encryption and investment, and its user portraits are very diverse. The main tags include "student/technology", "culture/politics", and "grimes/stan".

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Analysis conclusion

Based on the information in these charts, we cannot judge whether the proportion of encrypted natives in the project audience can be used as an indicator to measure the proportion of positive sentiment. Whether there is a positive correlation between the two remains to be further studied. That said, the only conclusion we can draw from this initial analysis is that each artist's fan base has highly individual attributes. At the same time, we believe that if we want to build a comprehensive and objective fan sentiment model, it is necessary to include some relevant audience data, such as basic information, hobbies and core concerns.

Facts have proved that it is difficult for artists to dispel fans' doubts about NFT through the Twitter platform to reverse the trend of fan sentiment, especially doubts about environmental issues and monetary costs. Overall, it's probably because the Twitter platform isn't well suited for deep dives into these complex topics (who knows...).

Twitter data cannot fully reflect fans' emotional feelings towards music NFTs. As mentioned in the preface of this article, artists are likely to be afraid to try NFT technology for fear of receiving negative comments on Twitter. However, negative sentiment does not necessarily mean sluggish sales for NFT projects. Take the NFT project issued by Charli XCX on Foundation as an example. Although it has been collectively disgusted by fans, its total price is close to 20 ETH. Similarly, even if the interaction on Twitter is dominated by positive emotions, it does not necessarily mean that the NFT project has successfully achieved its goal of attracting long-term fans and completing community building. Furthermore, the definition of "success" varies. The metric of "success" for an emerging artist can be very different from that of an established artist, especially when it comes to social media engagement.