In this journey with Offtrack, I’ve decided to share transparently the path of building Fankee, what we’ll call the Fankee Lab

The process of creating a startup from scratch, and the challenges we face every day in turning an idea, an intuition, into a scalable, successful business model that can truly bring value to our users.

Today we’re talking about something extremely relevant for us:

The Attention - Monetization dilemma.

When I was a teenager, in the ’90s, I used to listen to music on cassette. I remember recording tapes to listen to on my tram ride to school. The feeling of creating something of my own, my own sound, a hyper-curated selection of the music I loved.

It was the soundtrack of my days (they call them playlists now, guys... those ones!).

And the feeling when a friend listened to it and said:

"This is fire, can you make one for me too?" was incredible.

And in fact, what I loved the most was sharing those tapes with my friends or even better, I admit, with the girl you liked. You’d prep the tracklist, write the titles by hand on side A and side B, put it in its plastic case. Done.

No likes. No emojis. No comments.

Just work, sometimes days of it.

I thought about it, and I put my heart into it. Everything had meaning, had value. And whoever received it knew they were holding something precious. Personal.

Today, everything’s changed.

That same energy, that same passion, it still exists, but it’s scattered across the feeds. A link on WhatsApp, a tweet, an Instagram story. Just drop a reel with a song in the background and in seconds it’s shared with all your contacts.

On social, every piece of content, music especially, becomes accessible to the entire web instantly.

Sounds great, right? Everything’s easy, instant…But here’s the twist. In a system where everything is accessible, replicable, infinite…nothing is rare, and if nothing is rare, nothing really has value.

Scarcity is what gives an object its value.

But what happens to that value when it’s accessible to everyone in a few clicks?

Simple: the less rare it is, the less it’s worth.

That’s the Attention - Monetization dilemma.

To get your music heard, you have to be on social. You have to be everywhere, fast. But if you’re everywhere… guys, then you’re worth less and less.

This topic was masterfully explored by Chris Dixon, a legendary Silicon Valley investor, now partner at iconic fund A16Z. Let’s understand what Dixon says about the creator economy, and why it matters for the music industry.

Dixon says media creators today face a tradeoff between maximizing attention and maximizing money. Traditional media, old school stuff I grew up with too, has always relied on scarcity to generate profit. But with the rise of social (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram), content has exploded. And so, even with platforms trying to route and filter all this stuff with their algorithms, far more content is flowing in than anyone could ever consume.

The good news? You can reach five billion people in an instant.

The bad news? So can everyone else.

So the more content I make and flood into social, the less scarce, and the less valuable, it becomes. And the harder it gets to monetize.

Dixon explains how in gaming, they got this very quickly. They realized they had to embrace free games and saw they’d make more money that way: give away the game, monetize the add-ons. The gaming industry’s cleverness shows clearly in how it handled streaming. On platforms like Twitch, users watch live streams of players who chat with the audience at the same time, somewhere between TV and talk radio.

Legally, it would’ve been easy for the industry to shut this down. And in fact, when game streaming started in the late 2000s, some companies, Nintendo especially, resisted. But how is it that now every gaming company encourages streaming? Because they realized something very simple: the attention they gained made up for the money they lost.

Game developers were smart. They looked at their products broadly, not just as games, but as bundles that included streaming and virtual goods. They experimented. They got bruised. And they found the right balance between free and paid elements to optimize the tradeoff between attention and monetization.

That’s how they created a new layer of value based on scarcity.

Games, once paid-only content, became free, but with new layers added:

– streaming (free)

– virtual goods (paid): boom, there it is.

As Dixon puts it: they squeezed one part of the "revenue balloon," and found others to inflate.

Now let’s go back to our old friend: music.

Dixon says the music industry, unlike gaming, spent years suing innovators instead of adapting to the internet. Up until just a few years ago, and believe me still today, when music startups tried to tackle the attention–monetization dilemma, the labels usually threatened lawsuits. That does nothing but chill entrepreneurs from creating new ideas, and investors (VCs) from backing them.

So the few music-tech products that do exist are usually just minor variations of older ones. That’s why hundreds of startups pop up in gaming every year… and very few in music. Because founders want to spend their time inventing, not getting sued. The result of these two approaches shouldn’t surprise anyone.

And it shows, as always, in the numbers.

In 2024, music hit $34B in global revenues, almost back to what it made in the ’90s, when we bought physical formats like CDs and cassettes. Meanwhile, gaming followed a steady trajectory. Its revenue has blown past music, hitting nearly $160B.

The gaming industry grew by embracing every new wave of tech.

The music industry? It litigated itself into stagnation.

Dixon, a strong believer in blockchain’s potential, argues that the solution exists. Why?

Because he believes that embedding an asset into a digital container, call it a smart contract (NFT, sure, but whisper it or the ignorants will swarm), written on a cryptographic, immutable ledger…could transform the creator economy.

Let’s go back to music again.

There are over 150 million tracks on streaming platforms, made by around 12 million artists. And only about 22,000 of them made more than $50,000.

Crazy, right?

Most of the revenue goes to the streaming services and the labels who own the rights. But what if we embedded a track’s content, or its master, or access to exclusive experiences, rare goods, into a digital asset? That could change the game. Cut out the middlemen. Let artists and creators sell directly to their community. They’d get way higher margins than with physical merch and it’d be much easier to keep a continuous connection with fans.

And the value wouldn’t disappear.

As the "balloon" gets squeezed by the content flood, value shifts to adjacent layers. Want to let me hear the music almost for free? Cool. Then shift the value to the relationship with people. With fans.

Now more than ever, in the age of AI, we’ll see even more content flooding in. And people will crave human connection more than ever. They’ll give it value.

That’s why I believe, just like Dixon, that the community, shifting value to people, building layers of scarce value in an ocean of media, is not just possible… it’s inevitable.

Let the internet do what it does best: copy and remix content. And give creators/artists new business models, without declaring war on the industry.

Guys… gaming already did it. It’s right there, in front of us. We just need the guts to try.

Which brings me to something close to home: our friend Fankee.

At Fankee, we’ve had this same challenge since day one , May 2024. At first, we wanted to use NFTs. But then… regulatory complexity across countries (US vs Europe), a total lack of clarity in the legal framework, and above all the skepticism of the entire industry, especially artists, after all the scams, slowed us down.

So we decided to do the same thing. Without blockchain. Even knowing it’ll probably be the right solution long-term.

Still, what Dixon describes is exactly what we’re building. What could be less abundant than owning an asset, a master, of a track? Forget the merch, the caps, the T-shirts. Sure, they’re cool. But nothing brings people closer than ownership.

Internet is heading toward massive content proliferation. Sure, we could fight it… but should we? Let’s put human interaction back at the center. Let’s put community at the center.

And let’s give them something that makes them unique, that makes them stand out.

Let’s give them scarcity.

Let’s harness the viral power of the internet, and give the people who spread the content (the fans…) skin in the game. That way, it becomes a collaborative environment, where the fan creates content for the artist, pushes the track, designs the cover, uses their own social presence to bring value, not just to the artist, but to themselves and the entire community.

Call it a decentralized music label? Fine.

Call it a community-driven label? Even better.

But it has to be the future. Is it really that hard to see?

If we want to talk about difficulty, fine. I’m with you. It’s hard. Brutally hard. Because every day, we live with a problem called attention.

Back to our guy Dixon. How do we explain to people, to users, what they can do today with music, especially on social How do we freeze their attention, even just for a second, and show them what they can do with tracks from their favorite artists?

What kind of connection they could create? That’s our challenge. As a startup, we feel the attention problem more than anyone. And we’ve got ideas for how to crack it.

All we need is time.

And time, surprise, surprise, how do you buy it?

With...

(We’ll talk about it in the next episode.)