Fandom is an evolving digital world where the world of royalties meets the artistry and emotional experience of music and community.Fandom is an evolving digital world where the world of royalties meets the artistry and emotional experience of music and community.
A digital home for fan-owned music
Musicow needed somewhere for fans who invest in music to actually be fans together, and a fintech platform is not that place.
Musicow is a South Korean fintech company, backed by Jay-Z's Roc Nation, built on a model where fans can invest in the music they love. When they launched Fandom, a fan-owned album series under their US label with artists including Jon Bellion and Swae Lee, the missing piece was not a website. It was a world.
Two realities had to share one product. On one side royalties, ownership and returns, which are precise, regulated and unromantic. On the other side the artwork, the behind the scenes, the release-night feeling and the arguing about a track at two in the morning, which is why anyone cares in the first place.
Ownership without community is a spreadsheet. If a fan buys into a record, the thing they are buying into is a group of people who feel the same way, and they need somewhere to find each other between releases.
We treat your challenge like our own, shape ideas into a clear experience strategy and craft every detail to create experiences that create lasting connection.
“Own”
We treat your challenge like our own, bringing expertise and perspective to make every idea stronger.
We think like owners, so we started with what Fandom needed to be to survive its own roadmap. This is not a campaign with an end date. It is a product that has to hold every future release, every new artist and every fan who joins, which changes almost every decision at the start.
Our Perspective: The forum is the product
A community layer is usually the last thing built and the first thing neglected, a comments box under a marketing page.
We made it a place in its own right, because the thing that brings someone back on a Tuesday when there is no release is other people.
Our Vision: One living world, not a stack of pages
Fandom should feel like one connected place. The WebGL globe at the heart of it shows real-time connections between everyone on the site right now, and it carries across page transitions instead of resetting, so moving around feels like moving through somewhere rather than loading something.
Our expertise: A micro-brand we made, and a system that can keep making them
We handled all of it: art direction, micro-branding, motion, interaction design, community architecture and frontend development. So we built Fandom its own identity, separate from the parent fintech, plus a flexible system underneath it. Every release gets its own visual language and its own interactive world, and all of them plug into the same framework.
“Shape”
We shape ideas into a clear experience strategy, built around your audience and your objectives.
The plan: A home, a release, a room
Three things had to work from day one. The world that holds everything together, the release experience that makes a single feel like an event, and the forum where people stay.
For the first release, Two Car Garage, we built an interactive world that goes past pressing play: video, interactive touchpoints and popovers that reveal context, visuals and artist content as you explore, on your own terms.
Every release after it can arrive with its own identity in the same framework, and each one adds artwork, behind the scenes material and a reason for the forum to get loud again.
Strategic choices
A subbrand rather than a section of Musicow. The fintech brand has to be trustworthy and a fan brand has to be exciting, so asking one identity to do both would have cost it both.
A forum we built ourselves. Fans notice instantly when the social part of a product belongs to someone else, and the community had to look and feel like it lives here.
A design system that shifts per release. Motion, typography, colour and layout change with each drop while staying rooted in the same DNA.
A Headless CMS, so the Musicow team can ship a release without waiting for a development cycle. For a platform that lives on release cadence, that is a strategic decision rather than a technical one.
“Craft”
Using experience strategy, design, motion and code; we craft every detail to create an experience that feels effortless and leaves a lasting impression.
Design
Art direction and the whole visual identity are ours, which is rarer for us and was a lot of fun. The interesting constraint was building a language flexible enough that a Jon Bellion release and a Swae Lee release can each own their space while the platform still reads as one place. So the system defines behaviour and proportion, and lets each release bring its own colour, type and texture.
Motion
Motion is what makes the world feel continuous. Page transitions carry the globe rather than interrupting it, and the smaller movements are deliberately restrained so the release worlds have room to be loud.
Code
The globe is real-time WebGL, visualising live visitors and their connections across the world, running through transitions without a reload.
The forum is custom built inside the platform: threads, reactions and profiles, designed for the Fandom audience rather than adapted from a generic community tool.
The platform sits on a modern composable stack with content in a headless CMS, chosen for performance, flexibility and the fact that someone other than us has to maintain it for years.
FANDOM – An exploration-first community platform for fans of Musicow's artists
Give the fans and artists a place to connect, explore and share.
An interactive 3D globe reflecting online users
An evolving digital world
Meet the artistry and emotional experience of music
Scope
Art direction
Micro-branding
Experience and interaction design
Motion
Community architecture
Frontend development
Result
Fandom launched with Two Car Garage and is expanding with new artist collaborations across Korea and the United States. It is the digital foundation for Musicow's wider idea, that fans should share in the value they help create, and it is built to grow into a multi-artist, cross-border community.
Our partnership with Musicow continues on platform improvements, new release rollouts and product strategy as Fandom grows.
Decide first whether you are building a feature or a place. A comments section under some content needs almost nothing. A place people come back to on their own needs profiles, threads, notifications and somebody moderating it, which is a product rather than a component. Building the small version and hoping it turns into the big one is the usual way this goes wrong.
Building it yourself is worth it when the audience would spot a bolted-on tool immediately. And whatever you build, plan the moderation before launch, because an empty forum and an unwatched one fail in the same way.
As an example, FANDOM by Musicow, a fan-owned music platform launched with artists including Jon Bellion and Swae Lee, has its own forum built into the platform rather than an embedded third-party one. It was designed and built by Merlin Studio, a digital studio from Amsterdam.
When the two are being asked to say different things. A parent brand often has to signal trust or scale, and the new product may need to signal excitement or belonging, and those pull in opposite directions. That is where a subbrand earns its keep.
Keep the joins deliberate. The subbrand can own its type, colour, motion and tone of voice while still following the parent's structure, and the places where they touch, like signing up, the account and anything legal, should feel like the same company.
As an example, FANDOM is a micro-brand created for Musicow, a South Korean fintech backed by Roc Nation, so the fan-facing album series has its own world alongside the investment platform it sits on. Both the brand and the platform were made by Merlin Studio, a digital studio from Amsterdam.
Let the look change and keep the behaviour the same. Colour, type, imagery and how loud the motion is can all vary per release. Navigation, layout logic and the way things work should stay put, so people do not have to learn the site again. Then a new release is content plus a theme rather than a new project.
It helps to describe a release as a thing with slots: a hero, a few interactive moments, media, artist content, credits. Anything that cannot fit a slot becomes a one-off, and enough one-offs turn your platform back into a pile of microsites.
As an example, on FANDOM by Musicow, a fan-owned music platform, each release gets its own interactive world inside one framework. The first, Two Car Garage, uses video, interactive touchpoints and popovers so fans can explore at their own pace. The platform was built by Merlin Studio, a digital studio from Amsterdam.
Tie it to something people care about. A counter of anonymous visitors is noise. Something that shows you are part of a crowd, where those people are and that they are here right now, turns a solitary visit into a shared room. Same data, and the framing decides whether it means anything.
Keep it light and keep it honest. Presence should be a small live connection rather than constant checking, the visual belongs on the graphics card so it can run next to everything else, and it should quietly go still when the connection drops.
As an example, FANDOM by Musicow, a fan-owned music platform, has a globe at its centre that shows live connections between visitors around the world and carries across page transitions, so the platform reads as one continuous place. It was built by Merlin Studio, a digital studio from Amsterdam.
Give them a reason that does not depend on you making more content. New material brings people back on release day. What brings them back on an ordinary Tuesday is other people, or something that changes on its own. Community, presence and a history that builds up all work without a content calendar behind them.
Then make returning easy. Remember where somebody was, put everything new in one place, and only send notifications worth opening. Most return visits are lost to friction rather than to lack of interest.
As an example, FANDOM by Musicow, a fan-owned music platform for artists including Jon Bellion and Swae Lee, was built with a forum and a live globe alongside the release experiences, so there is something there between drops. It was designed and built by Merlin Studio, a digital studio from Amsterdam.
Let each part keep its own voice. Anything about ownership, returns and regulation should be plain, exact and calm, because that is where confidence comes from. The parts about the music can be as expressive as the artists are. The trouble starts when the expressive language creeps into the money screens, or the careful language flattens the fan side.
Design the handover on purpose. There is a moment where somebody goes from feeling something to doing something with their money, and that should feel like the same company keeping its promises rather than two sites stapled together.
As an example, FANDOM by Musicow, a South Korean fintech backed by Roc Nation whose model lets fans invest in the music they love, holds both sides: the artwork, the community and the release experiences alongside the practical side of royalties. It was built by Merlin Studio, a digital studio from Amsterdam.
