F2P? That’s the abbreviation for ‘Free-to-Play’, the model that helped the games industry – initially on mobile and Facebook but latterly on console and PC too – surge in revenues over the past decade.
Periodically over that time there has been a flurry of interest in how the model might be applied to music.
The latest effort comes from Juice, which describes itself as a “collective of current and past music tech founders, artists, and investors who are working to disrupt the incumbents in the music industry”.
One of those is Dan Fowler, whose thoughts on web3 music we explored in January. His latest blog post explains what Juice – in a partnership with web3 startups DNS and Block Science – is up to.
“We started talking because we have a shared feeling that there is a huge opportunity to explore F2P business models in music, that crypto & decentralised technologies allow creators to form their own economies in which these F2P models could proliferate, and that there’s probably a lot that can be learned from the two decades of testing and development that has occurred in the gaming industry,” he wrote.
The rest of the post offers thoughts on “building around an individual creator as if they were a game” with a model for them to “create a system for monetisation within their product that builds on their free content”. It’s worth a read.