It is difficult for artists to use the Twitter platform to eliminate fans' doubts about NFT, or to reverse the trend of fan sentiment. At the same time, it is unreliable to infer the long-term fan-attracting potential of an NFT project based on Twitter data alone.
Original title: "WM Report 105: Music NFT Release Analysis Report "Fan Sentiment""
Written by: Water Music
Abstract
Between October 2020 and November 2021, hundreds of music NFT projects were officially released on Twitter. In order to comprehensively and objectively observe the emotional status of fans in the music NFT industry, we drew a time graph based on Twitter data to track fans' reactions to the issuance of NFT. We conducted a stress test on several common social media communication strategies to analyze the effectiveness of each strategy in promoting music NFTs. The results showed that it is difficult for artists to eliminate fans’ doubts about NFTs through the Twitter platform, or to 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-attracting potential of an NFT project based on Twitter data alone.
In the past two months, the Water Music community has collaborated to write a "five-part" research report on the current status of music and Web3. This article is the final article in the series. This article is a fan sentiment analysis report on the release of music NFT projects. The list of report contributors can be found at the bottom of the article (sorted by first letter). You can also visit stream.waterandmusic.com to read the full report now available, along with a full list of members and contributors.
Water Music community has completed a series of research reports on "The Current State of Music and Web3 Fields" in the past two months. The report contains a total 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 last year alone, artists have raised an astonishing amount of money through music NFTs. Some industry insiders are also very optimistic about the potential of music NFTs and believe that they are the future trend of creative monetization. But despite this, NFT is still controversial. In addition to industry insiders, music fans also have mixed opinions about music NFTs. The main issues they care about include: NFTs are not conducive to the sustainable development of the environment; NFTs are a game that only rich people are qualified to play; and in their impression, NFTs are a form of fragmentation. Leek’s financial scam. The success of
artists is inseparable from the support of fans. It is the strong consumption power of fans that drives the growth of artists. Given this, it is important to understand fans’ attitudes and reactions to the emerging medium of music NFTs. The reason is simple: fan sentiment heavily influences artist choices. Whether psychologically (such as self-perception) or financially (such as livelihood income), many celebrities have many intrinsic connections with fans' feedback in their careers. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that the negative evaluation of NFT projects affects not only a certain artist, but also the views of other consumers and artists on the new trend of NFT.
In 2021, we have witnessed multiple artists changing their NFT strategies directly due to negative feedback from fans. For example, fan-favorites Jacob Collier and A.C.E. have both withdrawn all NFT issuances, in large part because their fans are concerned about the negative environmental impact of blockchain technology . DistroKid Sellouts went through a similar situation, while the likes of Charli XCX, Interpol, Crazy Frog, METHod Man and A$AP Rocky all struggled. As a result, many artists began to avoid the word "NFT" in their marketing copy and instead used words such as "collection" or "digital art" instead.
In view of the current phenomenon, we hope to gain a comprehensive and objective insight into the emotional status of fans in the music NFT industry. To do this, we created a temporal graph tracking fan reactions to NFT releases based on hundreds of music NFT items officially released on Twitter between October 2020 and November 2021.This report aims to conduct a multi-faceted and comprehensive investigation of fan sentiment in the NFT industry, analyze the changing trends of fan sentiment over time, and explore the potential reasons and patterns that inspire positive/negative reactions from fans. This article and the fourth report in this series, "Guidance Strategies," complement each other. The former uses large-scale quantitative data analysis, while the latter mostly uses in-depth surveys and case studies, focusing more on qualitative data analysis.
Research method
We chose to use Twitter as the main data source to draw a fan sentiment map. In addition to being a large 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, when it comes to choosing a single data source to build a large data set, Twitter seems to be the best choice, which can help us accurately capture the direction of fan sentiment in the music NFT industry.
Water Music community initially built a seed data set containing more than 200 official tweets announcing the release of music NFTs. The dataset samples are mainly concentrated in the field of electronic music (about 75% of the list), but also cover some other music genres, such as hip-hop, K-pop and rock . At the same time, we also collected all replies and quotes under each NFT issuance tweet, ultimately forming a large dataset containing approximately 6,000 tweets.
We aggregated these tweets and generated two description parameters for each NFT project release.
- Percentage value of positive sentiment: ranging from 0 to 100, representing positive sentiment from zero to full score. We use a specialized Twitter text sentiment analysis library to add positive/negative sentiment labels to each tweet in the data set, and calculate a sentiment value for each NFT issuance 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 chart with time as the horizontal axis (as shown in the figure below):
Each point in the figure corresponds to a publicly released Music NFT project. The horizontal axis is the date of the project’s official announcement, and the vertical axis is the proportion of Twitter interactions that convey positive emotions among all interactions. The size of the dot represents the overall engagement on Twitter, and different colors correspond to different artistic genres. The genre classification is taken from the music analysis tool Chartmetric.
At the same time, we captured user portraits and online behavior data through Meltwater (social media monitoring platform) as supplementary materials for this study. Based on two indicators: interactive value and product/market fit, we carefully screened out 8 well-known NFT issuance projects and conducted research on the operational tools they used. We hope to find some clues that may be related to fan emotions to explain the intrinsic connection between the way NFT projects are announced and the positive (or negative) emotions of fans.
research found
In the NFT issuance time map, the first obvious feature we observed is that the NFT issuance volume shows an uneven distribution state of "dense at the two ends and sparse in the middle": the project issuance time is concentrated in February and March 2021 , after about six months, the issuance dropped sharply, and it did not start to pick up until October. This is consistent with the overall trend of NFTs in 2021: the beginning of 2021 is considered the "NFT peak season", and the following summer is called the "crypto winter." In addition, this is also consistent with our previously released NFT market report, which showed that monthly sales of music NFTs in Q2 of 2021 dropped by 90% compared to Q1. The
fan sentiment index is widely distributed vertically, with most of it concentrated in the middle (around 50%) and slightly positive. This is broadly consistent with the bull run at the start of 2021 and the uptick in recent months, but is slightly inconsistent with our original assumptions. We initially expected the proportion of negative sentiment to be greater, especially for larger artist projects.
In this data set, from the perspective of specific genres, electronic music is the most representative project type, and its fan sentiment trend is closest to the overall trend, mostly distributed between the middle (about 50%) and slightly positive. . Looking at the entire music NFT market, the data of electronic music NFT projects is also the most representative and indicative in terms of sales.
In contrast, the sentiment trend of fans of hip-hop music is slightly better than that of electronic music, and is more positive. However, in the past few months, only a few NFT projects have fallen into this genre.
Analysis of the correlation between overall project participation and fan sentiment
We initially believed that some artists have clear and small fan groups, and the overall number of interactions is low. NFT projects issued by them may be more likely to receive feedback from fans. positive feedback. Our hypothesis is that if an artist has a broad audience that does not interact closely with each other, and most of them have little knowledge of NFTs, then the NFT projects he releases may receive more negative emotions. On the contrary, we believe that artists with a "small but sophisticated" audience have potential advantages, and it is easier to lead fans into Web3 and build a more cohesive narrative around NFT projects - every NFT held is for the artist. A contribution and recognition for creative work.
However, the results show that this assumption does not hold. Based on the participation level of NFT projects, we divided them into three categories (active, medium and inactive participation), with a consistent number of projects in each category. Based on three different participation levels, we plotted fan emotion distribution curves (as shown below). The horizontal axis represents the percentage of positive emotion values, and the vertical axis represents the distribution probability of the corresponding percentage value.
We found that the fan sentiment distribution trends corresponding to the three participation levels are very similar. In other words, there is little correlation between the degree of fan interaction with NFT projects and the positive degree of fan sentiment. In other words, the existing data cannot effectively prove the hypothesis that "NFTs issued by niche artists will be more popular."
However, it should be noted that this derivation process assumes that the overall interaction level of the project is proportional to the audience size, that is, it is assumed that when the artist’s audience is wider, the points received by the original NFT release tweet (and its comments and quotes) The higher the total number of likes and retweets. However, this may not actually be the case. Artists with a "small but focused" audience may have higher fan engagement than artists with a "broad and scattered" audience. Although the analysis results show that the overall engagement of Twitter fans of NFT projects cannot be used as a valid indicator to measure sentiment, due to the bias in the way of dividing the overall interaction level into the audience size, we cannot accurately assess the audience size and NFT project success. relationship between rates.
Solving fan concerns cannot effectively guide positive emotions
In the "Fan Guidance Strategy" 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 The likelihood that an artist can dispel or alleviate a fan's concerns simply by using guidance strategies, arranged from left to right.
research results show that the impact on the environment and high financial expenses are the biggest concerns among fans, especially those with little knowledge of Web3. Interestingly, this result matches the Twitter data we collected. Using 50% as the dividing line, we divided the data set into two categories: positive sentiment (positive feedback accounts for 50% and above) and negative sentiment, and extracted the 30 most commonly used keywords by fans in Twitter interactions. Among them, "environment" and "money" are both high-frequency keywords.
Unfortunately, the axis map shows that the likelihood of artists solving these two problems on their own is extremely low. Essentially, what they involve is the limitations of the overall blockchain network, and it is obviously unreasonable for artists to "take the blame".
Furthermore, sentiment analysis results show that even when artists take action and try to offer solutions to both environmental impact and monetary costs in tweets or press releases, they fail to have a positive impact on fan sentiment. It may even intensify fan backlash, blaming the artist for not being able to address these issues.
In addition to the qualitative data in the "Frequently Concerned Fans" framework, we also scanned all NFT issuance projects in the data set (official announcement tweets and initial project pages), and captured references to charity and environmental causes (or intentions). )Content.
Based on the data set we selected, whether an NFT project mentions its charity (or intention) has little impact on the overall trend of fan sentiment (as shown in the figure below). In fact, there are even a few charitable NFT issuance projects that have been labeled as having "a greater proportion of negative sentiment." For example, Charli XCX’s NFT project released on Foundation in March 2021 donated a portion of the proceeds to Girls Make Beats. This trend in fan sentiment is largely consistent with the music industry as a whole (and within the WM community). Obviously, simply adding a charitable element to the initial release of an NFT project is not enough to dispel fans' doubts about the form of the industry, nor can it solve the financial costs and technical obstacles that crypto novices have always faced.
We also captured NFT issuance projects in the data set that mentioned environmental awareness or carbon neutrality initiatives. The results show that their average proportion of positive sentiment is slightly higher than the overall industry situation (as shown in the figure below), but due to The data set contains too little information on carbon neutral projects to determine whether this conclusion is statistically significant. In addition, similar to the above-mentioned charity projects, if you overemphasize the sustainability of NFT issuance projects when promoting them, it may go too far, causing "sustainable development" to become the only focus of the project, ignoring the actual experience of fans. As mentioned in the "Fan Guidance Strategy" article, the emphasis on environmental information presented in tweets and press releases of NFT issuance projects actually masks the additional external factors and barriers to entry that fans may face when entering Web3. For example, users need to purchase ETH on the main network and transfer it to low-cost secondary networks such as Polygon and Tezos in order to purchase "carbon-neutral" NFTs.
The importance of fan portraits to the overall emotional trend
If you want to fully understand the emotional status of fans in NFT projects, you need to analyze the "push and pull factors" from the perspective of fans. In other words, most of the charts above take a top-down view of how fans respond to artists’ messages, especially those related to carbon neutrality and charity-related initiatives. However, in order to make the data more convincing, we also need to analyze the motivations and backgrounds of fans from a bottom-up perspective, which may help us understand: For fans, which areas of Web3 they want? Be the first to participate.
To this end, we selected some of this year’s most popular and profitable music NFT issuance projects, and used Meltwater to retrieve participants’ data, including basic personal information, psychological statistics and interests. After analysis, we observed an obvious phenomenon: the core audiences of several high-profile music NFT release projects on Twitter are "Web3 natives". They often use words such as "collector", "cryptocurrency" and "NFT" when introducing themselves, and they all follow many well-known crypto bloggers. In other words, they are avid cryptocurrency enthusiasts, not “hardcore” fans of musical artists.
Taking the Faces project released by 3LAU 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, multiple projects released 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 a “crypto-native” artist, this can be confirmed in many ways.For example, he has been involved in blockchain activities since the early days (2018 at the latest) and studied finance at university. Therefore, he can comfortably discuss the fields of music, finance and cryptocurrency with his followers. How the intersection occurs.
We used Meltwater to conduct a visual analysis of the Faces project’s audience (as shown in the figure above). Its audience distribution map shows multiple clear clusters, which means that they have more positive experiences in the encryption field, at least participating in it. degree is higher. Keywords for these clusters include "transaction/account", "NFT collector/degen", "opensea/creative" and "investor/ape"**. In addition, the keywords they use to describe themselves on Twitter are mostly related to crypto art. Among them, "NFT" accounts for 29.5%, "NFTs" account for 15.0%, "Collectors" account for 10.7%, "Art" accounts for 10%, and "Encryption" accounts for 9.3%.
Secondly, the data from the "Likeability" section of the visual map shows that among the bloggers that the audience of this project pays attention to, the most popular bloggers are related to the encryption field or the NFT art market (Elon Musk, Nifty Gateway, Beeple and Pak). Finally, the data shows that 78.38% of the program’s audience is male. The above factors are almost completely consistent with our stereotype of "crypto fans" (usually refers to men who like to use crypto terms as personal labels on social media). This type of people may be more likely to show a positive attitude toward NFT projects. emotions and actively participate in them. Of course, this conclusion cannot be ruled out as being overgeneralized.
Several other projects we analyzed also show the same results, that is, the audiences of projects with a high proportion of positive emotions tend to be heavy crypto users:
- Dirtybird Flight Club: 77.79% of the audience are men; personal keyword composition: "NFT ” accounted for 21.6%, “crypto” accounted for 13%, “NFTs” accounted for 9.8%, and “collectors” accounted for 6.0%; positive emotions accounted for 85% of tweet interactions.
- Ice Cube / Trevor Jones on Nifty Gateway: 73.45% of the audience are men; personal keyword composition: "NFT" accounts for 20.6%, "crypto" accounts for 11.5%, "NFTs" accounts for 9.1%, and "collectors" accounts for 6.0% ;Positive sentiment accounts for 80% of tweet interactions.
- Method Man / Tical: Males account for 76.66% of the audience; personal keyword composition: "NFT" accounts for 17.8%, "encryption" accounts for 9.3%, "nbatopshot" accounts for 6.8%; positive emotions account for 60% of tweet interactions.
Looking back at the WarNymph project released by Grimes on Nifty Gateway in March 2021 (Twitter announcement: Link 1, Link 2), its audience’s replies, comments and other interactive content are not centered around the encryption field (as shown in the figure below). The most frequently mentioned keywords by TAs are "love", "music" and "art", while "encryption" ranks only fourth, and only about 2% of the audience are using these keywords together, which is consistent with 3LAU's The Faces project and Dirtybird Flight Club are in stark contrast. More than 20% of Dirtybird Flight Club’s audience mentioned the word “encryption” in their self-introductions, showing obvious attributes of “Web3 natives”. Additionally, WarNymph’s audience is slightly less male (63%) than the other NFT projects mentioned above. As shown on the right side of the visual map, the areas where its audience gathers are not limited to encryption and investment. The user portraits are very diverse. The main tags include "students/technology", "culture/politics", and "grimes/stan".
Based on the above factors, we speculate that the participants of the WarNymph project are mainly long-term loyal fans of Grimes rather than so-called "crypto fans". Interestingly, according to the analysis results, the project’s fan sentiment value on Twitter has not dropped significantly, although the proportion of positive sentiment is slightly lower than that of several other NFT projects mentioned above (Grimes’ positive sentiment accounted for The ratio of positive emotions is 62%, and the positive emotions of several other projects account for around 80%), but the overall interactive atmosphere of the project is still dominated by positive emotions.
Based on the information in these charts, we cannot judge whether the proportion of crypto natives among the project audience can be used as an indicator of the proportion of positive emotions. Whether there is a positive correlation between the two requires further research. That said, the only conclusion we can draw from this preliminary analysis is that each artist’s fanbase is highly individualized. 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, interests and core concerns.
Research conclusion
Based on the information of these charts, we cannot judge whether the proportion of crypto natives among the project audience can be used as an indicator to measure the proportion of positive emotions. Whether there is a positive correlation between the two requires further research. That said, the only conclusion we can draw from this preliminary analysis is that each artist’s fanbase is highly individualized. 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, interests and core concerns.
- It has proven difficult for artists to turn the tide on fan sentiment by using the Twitter platform to reassure fans about NFTs, especially concerns about environmental concerns and monetary costs. Overall, this may be because the Twitter platform is not well-suited to discussing these complex topics in depth (who knows…).
- Twitter data does not fully reflect fans’ emotional feelings about music NFTs. As mentioned in the introduction to this article, artists may well be deterred from experimenting with NFT technology for fear of receiving negative comments on Twitter. However, negative sentiment doesn’t necessarily mean low sales for NFT projects. Take the NFT project issued by Charli XCX on Foundation as an example. Although it was collectively disliked by fans, its total selling price was close to 20 ETH. Similarly, even if the interactions on Twitter are 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. In addition, the definition of "success" varies. The standards of "success" for an emerging artist and the standards of "success" for an established artist can be very different, especially when it comes to social media engagement.
In the end, the main factors affecting fans’ emotions still fall back to the following two points: first, whether the relationship between artists and fan groups is strong enough, which is the core point of the Web3 project in the music industry; second, in the context of mainstream narratives , fans’ acceptance of NFT works. In addition, we may need to pay attention to external factors that are beyond our control (for example, the environmental costs of blockchain technology), but what we need to prioritize is still leverage within the controllable range (for example, true creativity , community building, good intentions and values), and use these as the main focus when issuing NFT projects.
