Tickets for the first music festival set to be powered by blockchain technology are now on sale.
Scheduled for this fall, the Our Music Festival is launching its own virtual currency — the OMF token — at its inaugural event in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza. It will be the first musical entertainment experience to process booking fees on a live blockchain application.
The festival plans to develop on the ethereum network and hopes the event will appeal to the city’s tech crowd.
Pre-sale tickets start at $25 and can be purchased as standard digital passes directly from crypto.ourmusicfestival.com and ourmusicfestival.com using U.S. dollars and cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ether, litecoin). General tickets are being released tomorrow starting at $29.
The line-up, which has been announced on the festival’s website, will feature electronic dance musicians Zedd, 3LAU, and Matt + Kim, hip-hop icon Big Sean and pop singer Charlotte Lawrence. The one-day event will run from 5 P.M. to 11 P.M. on October 20.
Headlining artist 3LAU, whose real name is Justin Blau, is Our Music Festival’s brainchild. He is supported by a team of music and cryptocurrency veterans from Creative Artists Agency, Paradigm Talent Agency, Spotify, Billboard, Prime Social Group, CID Entertainment and SINGULAR DTV to organize the festival chain.
Blau told CoinDesk that he has been working on the project since August of last year. He wanted to build a substantial use case for cryptocurrencies that will streamline the music market and cut out industry middlemen. Throughout his music career, he has seen street scalpers, Craigslist and ticketing vendors artificially drive up prices for music event attendees, scam innocent buyers, and squeeze out profits from musicians and agents.
Our Music Festival envisions a decentralized, end-to-end, direct-to-consumer music ticket pipeline that makes supply and demand economics fully transparent and ticket users digitally verifiable to optimize pricing on all sides, features which Blau claims are not supportable without blockchain technology.
Though StubHub and TicketMaster calculate pricing analytics, many traditional ticket options are manipulated or fraudulent, obfuscating the actual mathematics. This is why Our Music Festival customers will be able to curate events and tickets will be inexpensive relative to standard-fare price tags that typically reach hundred dollar markups, he says.
Our Music Festival also incentivizes event attendees to stay loyal to the music-going experience. Blau added that ticket holders will be buying into a tokenized ecosystem where upgrades, merchandise, concessions, and rewards can be digitally exchanged through an all-in-one community portal integrated into the blockchain booking platform.
No crypto novice
The 27-year-old American music producer shot to fame in the early and mid-2010s collaborating with EDM notables Dash Berlin, Alesso, Afrojack, R3hab and The Chainsmokers. He then remixed hit songs from pop sensations Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Adele, Rihanna and Nicki Minaj.
As a Washington University of St. Louis finance student, he gave up a career on Wall Street to pursue dance music. The Winklevoss twins introduced him to bitcoin around the same time.
In the last several years, Blau has toured Electric Daisy Carnival and debuted at Hakkasan, Rehab and Drai’s nightclubs on the popular music festival and Las Vegas residency circuits. He has also posted about cryptocurrencies on social media. Just a few days ago, he uploaded the first page of Satoshi Nakomoto’s bitcoin white paper on his Instagram Story.
Like Paris Hilton, Scott Disick, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, and as of Tuesday, Kim Kardashian, Blau joins the ranks of celebrities who share an interest in alternative financial systems. The recent surge of star power has led many to believe that mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency payments is on the horizon, but others remain skeptical.
In an email, Trey Ditto, a representative for the EDM DJ, wrote that Blau is genuinely passionate and well-versed about virtual currencies:
“Justin has put a lot of his music on hold to focus on this project…the truth is he spent the past 18 months diving into all aspects of blockchain to immerse himself in the industry. So, he’s not just some DJ trying to use his fame to get into crypto and make some money.”
