MeedScore’s world-first Verified Fan Stories technology creates a new way for artists, fans, sponsors, advertisers, vendors, organizers and volunteers to explore and share attributable firsthand stories, photos and video, preserving the music, people, moments and memories that define Black Bear’s beloved community.
HARWINTON, Conn., Aug. 21, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — MeedScore and the Black Bear Americana Music Festival introduced the first live Verified Fan Stories experience during the 2026 festival, giving the people and organizations who helped create the weekend a new way to publish attributable firsthand stories, photos and video from across the festival grounds.
The Black Bear experience served as MeedScore’s inaugural live pilot for Verified Fan Stories, giving MeedScore and festival organizers an opportunity to evaluate how the experience worked in a real-world festival environment and learn directly from the people participating in it.
Rather than documenting a festival from a single perspective, Verified Fan Stories brings together the voices of the people who collectively shape the experience, from artists and fans to sponsors, advertisers, vendors, organizers and volunteers, creating a shared, attributable record of the moments and memories that define the event.
“Black Bear has always been about more than the music. It’s about the artists, fans, vendors, sponsors, volunteers and people who come and for many camp together to create the weekend. Verified Fan Stories gave our community another way to capture and share those moments from their own perspectives.”
– Ian Campbell, Black Bear Americana Music Festival
Behind the experience, MeedScore uses blockchain-based publication infrastructure to create a permanent, traceable record connecting verified identity, authorization and publication metadata. That makes it possible to trace who was authorized to publish a story and when it was published, helping preserve the record of those cherished festival moments long after the weekend is over.
Black Bear demonstrated how those records can emerge from very different perspectives within the same shared experience.
Singer-songwriter Jane O’Neill was one of the special ingredients that helped give Black Bear its character, bringing her own distinctive voice, performance style and personality to the festival weekend.
Dr. Josh Levitt, co-founder and medical director of UpWellness, brought his own blend of music, health and community to the festival, talking with attendees about wellness, the environment and music while sharing UpWellness products from his booth. A music lover and musician himself, Levitt experienced Black Bear as both a vendor and a participant in the community surrounding the festival.
Jules Poirier, owner of Jules Poirier Company and a Black Bear sponsor, represented the role local businesses can play in supporting live music and community in the regions they serve. The company’s sponsorship helped support the environment where artists could perform, vendors could participate and audiences could gather around the shared Black Bear experience. Jules Poirier Company.
ARC Document Solutions, a MeedScore advertiser, helped connect the physical and digital Black Bear experience by producing signage that invited attendees to scan a QR code and enter Black Bear Verified Fan Stories. The signs created a visible bridge between the moments unfolding around the festival and the digital publishing experience where those moments could be documented and shared.
Together, these perspectives demonstrate a central idea behind Verified Fan Stories: a live event is not experienced through one voice alone. Its story develops through the musicians performing, the fans listening, the sponsors supporting the festival, the vendors interacting with attendees, the advertisers participating in the surrounding media environment, and the organizers and volunteers who bring the event together.
For MeedScore, Black Bear also marked an important public milestone, the first time Verified Fan Stories was brought into a live festival community.
Verified Fan Stories is part of MeedScore’s broader effort to build communications infrastructure that makes the identity behind published information, the authorization to publish it and the record of publication provable.
The Black Bear stories and related coverage are also being published across MeedScore’s music-focused news network, including RealMusicNews.com, MusicFestivalNews.org and News.VerifiedFanStories.com, extending the festival record beyond the weekend and creating persistent, linkable destinations for stories from the Black Bear community.
“What became clear to me at Black Bear is that there isn’t one Black Bear story,” said Max Nuki, co-founder and CEO of MeedScore. “There are thousands of moments experienced from different perspectives by the artists, fans, sponsors, vendors, organizers, volunteers and businesses that make the festival what it is. Verified Fan Stories gives those people and organizations a way to contribute their perspective to a shared, attributable and authentic record of the experience. When those stories are preserved together, we aren’t just documenting what happened onstage. We’re preserving the people, moments and memories that make a community like Black Bear special.”
The pilot gave MeedScore and Black Bear an opportunity to learn from how people encountered and used Verified Fan Stories in a live setting. Those lessons will help shape the experience as MeedScore prepares to bring Verified Fan Stories to additional bands, artists, festivals and live-event communities.
Black Bear provided the first opportunity to put that broader vision into practice: using shared, attributable and authentic storytelling to help preserve the experiences and strengthen the communities that form around live events.
About Black Bear Americana Music Festival
For more information, visit BlackBearMusicFest.com.
About MeedScore
MeedScore is developing communications infrastructure designed to make identity, authorization and publication records provable. Its technology supports attributable digital publishing experiences, including Verified Fan Stories, which enables participants in live events to publish firsthand stories, photos and video connected to verified identity and a traceable publication record.
MeedScore’s broader mission is rooted in the belief that truth in communications should be provable, not assumed.
For more information, visit MeedScore.com.
Media Contacts
Alycia Isabelle
MI Integrated Media
860-318-5700
MeedScore, Inc.
Media Relations
860-372-2896
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/262a17d2-be8a-46b4-ae6e-50a5e94c8541
