Music streaming platforms attract hundreds of millions of subscribers each month, yet artists who create the songs remain without fair compensation from streaming companies. Blockchain promises a way out for this industry:
Blockchain In Music
Blockchain is offering solutions to some of the music industry's major issues. Through it, independent musicians receive equitable royalty payments, venues can prevent counterfeit tickets, and record companies can quickly track music streams while paying all artists who contributed songs or albums instantly.
Artists such as Lupe Fiasco, Gramatik, and Pitbull have championed decentralized technologies in music. Proponents praise blockchain's distributed ledger technology as an equitable and transparent means to efficiently release music releases while streamlining royalty payments without intermediary costs and providing creators a point of origin for music creation. Considering this, we've assembled 17 examples of how blockchain in music technology could revitalize its industry.
Top Blockchain Music Companies
Sound
Location: Fully Remote
Sound fosters an engaging connection between artists and fans through its Web3-based NFT platform. When an artist releases an NFT song as an early version with specific numbers that allow owners to brag about discovering it first or sell for higher values, those who keep their NFTs can leave public comments and engage with artists via Discord hangouts.
Digimarc
Location: Beaverton, Oregon
Digimarc creates solutions for licensing intellectual property rights across audio, visual, and image content, exclusive content creators by incorporating blockchain technology. Digimarc Barcode, its music fingerprinting technology linked to metadata for tracking music sources and usage estimates and paying artists, provides more holistic insight for rights holders than most watermarking methods can.
Mediachain
Location: Brooklyn, New York
MediaChain (now part of Spotify) is a blockchain platform database that facilitates information sharing among applications and organizations. Not only can users organize open-source information using unique identifiers assigned for each piece, but the company works closely with artists to ensure fair compensation; issuing smart contracts directly specifying royalty stipulations without needing third-party parties for these arrangements.
Royal
Location: Austin, Texas
Royal is an innovative new platform designed to transform music fans into invested partners by directly giving listeners access to artists so they may purchase royalties now. Once an artist determines their royalty sales quota for sale on Royal's platform, a user may buy these tokens either to keep or trade on an NFT exchange - transactions can even be processed using credit/debit card payments, and crypto wallets can even be set up if no accounts exist yet.
Open Music Initiative
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
The Open Music Initiative (OMI) is a non-profit advocating for open-source protocols in the blockchain in music industry. They believe it provides transparency and deeper data insights, which allow artists to receive fair royalty payments; among their members are Soundcloud, Red Bull Media, and Netflix, among many more.
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Musicoin Foundation
Location: Hong Kong, China
Musicoin is a streaming music platform that facilitates production, consumption, and distribution within an unaffiliated economy. Utilizing blockchain in entertainment for peer-to-peer music transfer, its global currency, MUSIC, supports trade related to musical purchases & streaming revenue directly back into artists' pockets. All 100 percent of streaming revenue generated goes back into their music.
OneOf
Location: Los Angeles, California
OneOf is an exchange decentralized platform where active users can acquire and trade non-football trading cards (NFTs). Collection releases occur frequently on OneOf, allowing users to increase the value of their NFTs by being among the first to claim them. OneOf's marketplace also features different categories for NFT collections, including Green, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond versions, with VIP experiences being accessible only via auctions (OneOf One Tier).
Async Art
Location: San Francisco, California
Async Art makes Web3 technology accessible for creatives by offering them a creator platform that makes piece of music development and selling songs through an NFT marketplace easier than ever before. Their technology takes care of coding, so artists just upload assets and then leave the rest up to Async's platform, offering more personalized experiences for artists and their fans.
Mycelia
Location: Fully Remote
Mycelia is an ecosystem for musicians and fans seeking to empower creatives within the music industry. Mycelia utilizes blockchain for various purposes; most significantly, running an entire database with artists paid fairly and acknowledged quickly via blockchain is its main priority. Furthermore, their Creative Passport contains comprehensive details regarding each song, such as ID numbers, acknowledgments from collaborators, and payment mechanisms to ensure all contributors are treated fairly.
Vibrate
Location: Ljubljana, Slovenia
Are you curious which artist, event, or venue is gaining momentum? Vibrate offers profiles that showcase an artist's upcoming shows, social media engagement, and music videos. Utilizing blockchain, Vibrate manages millions of crowdsourced data points with real-time rankings and profiles. It rewards community participants with VIB tokens, which the company sees as its digital currency in the music industry.
ZORA
Location: Los Angeles, California
Zora is an NFT marketplace platform that allows artists to publish their work as tokens, sell them to customers, and profit. Instead of recreating copies of NFTs repeatedly for sale by artists or owners alike, Zora allows creatives to sell an original content NFT often without incurring extra expenses by receiving their due compensation every time an NFT is sold - such that artists earn a fair share of its sale price every time someone purchases that same original token from Zora.
Blokur
Location: Oxford, United Kingdom
Blokur provides global publishing data for music management and monetization. Utilizing AI and blockchain, this platform combines various sources of rights data into one database for easy viewing by music publishers who catalog their work for community approval; additionally, its AI resolves source disputes by scanning pertinent origination details that ensure only eligible artists receive payment.
eMusic
Location: New York, New York
eMusic is a decentralized blockchain music distribution and royalty management platform to benefit artists and fans. Their decentralized music platform includes:
- Instant royalty pay-outs.
- Rights management tracking databases.
- Fan-to-artist crowdfunding.
- Back catalog monetization for copyright holders.
- Exclusive artist content with promotional incentives at lower streaming prices than competing sites.
BitSong
Location: Malta
BitSong is the world's first blockchain music streaming platform created with artists, listeners, and advertisers in mind. Utilizing blockchain-based technology, artists upload songs with advertisements attached, and listeners receive up to 91% of profits invested by advertisers; additionally, the $BTSG token also allows listeners to donate funds to indie artists and purchase music directly through it.
Blockpool Limited
Location: London, England
Blackpool, located in London, England, provides custom code development consulting services and helps integrate ledger technology into business systems. As well as working across industries such as construction and the financial services sectors, Blockpool creates digital tokens, formulate smart music contracts, and track licensing/IP rights specifically in music industries - also helping musicians implement blockchain throughout the production/distribution/management process.
Audius
Location: San Francisco, California
Audius is a decentralized streaming platform with an expansive community of artists, listeners, and developers working collaboratively and sharing music. When uploading their works onto Audius' platform, timestamped records ensure their correct capture by connecting directly with consumers rather than third-party platforms like Spotify. Audius uses blockchain technology for fair artist payments via intelligent contracts, providing modest payoffs.
OnChain Music
Location: Santa Monica, California
OnChain Music assists musicians of all kinds in earning more from their royalties via blockchain technology and non-fungible token sales (NFTs). Their platform has created the $MUSIC token as an innovative cryptocurrency with utility, governance, and revenue share token qualities. If its value rises further, artists who signed with OnChain could see increased royalty payments - turning their music into an asset investment.
Read More: Revolutionizing the Music Industry: The Impact of Blockchain Technology
Existing Challenges Within The Music Industry
Before exploring how blockchain could transform music industry, we must examine some of its most significant hurdles today. While its current model works reasonably well overall, its shortcomings stem from outdated structures, ineffective processes, and excessive dependence on intermediaries.
Intermediaries
It would be difficult to imagine the music industry without record labels, radio companies, and streaming services, as intermediaries have become essential components in its operations. Although beneficial in controlling processes to an extent, intermediaries typically charge high administrative fees and commissions that result in reduced earnings for artists and music creators.
Centralization
One key consideration in today's music industry is centralization. Take streaming services as an example - these search-style platforms function similarly to search engines where control over which songs and albums to include can be centralized - acting similar to search engines in terms of security, accuracy, and vulnerability risks associated with such systems; biased exposure could occur for particular artists than others as a result of these systems.
Copyright Challenges
The music industry faces unique difficulties because it lacks an effective system to track copyrights globally and record them all in an orderly database, instead relying on separate agreements and licenses, which often create chaos within an ever-evolving ecosystem.
Low Earnings For Artists
Despite these issues, artists and music creators receive lower royalties or pay-outs for their efforts blockchain is shaping the music industry. Furthermore, most artists experience difficulty when trying to claim royalties efficiently and quickly.
Blockchain Music Industry: Potential Benefits
Blockchain technology remains relatively novel as an application across industries. Yet, its properties and capacities make it stand out, providing it the potential to resolve some of the music industry's key restrictions.
Eliminating The Need For A Middleman
As a distributed ledger technology, blockchain can eliminate intermediaries from music sales and streaming processes. Today's digital landscape has forever altered how music is consumed and consumed. Once streaming platforms weren't as widely accessible, it became much more manageable for listeners to access and consume music.
Unfortunately, streaming has introduced yet another layer of intermediaries between artists and fans, which compound with issues regarding royalty payments, further increasing costs for both sides involved. Decentralizing can offer multiple advantages resulting from its implementation, including secure and efficient processes without intermediaries interfering.
Cost Reductions
With blockchain technology, innovative digital streaming services can be developed that instantly pay out each sale or stream without incurring fees and commissions for intermediary services. Instead of being managed by intermediaries, however, smart contracts on blockchain networks allow specific actions such as paying royalties to bands, performers, or producers when specific predetermined criteria have been fulfilled via preprogrammed smart contracts; such payments could include those already due under existing bright contract conditions such as intelligent contract terms being met immediately upon sale/stream.
More Direct Relationships
Blockchain Technology Encouraging Direct Relationships. Eliminating intermediaries allows blockchain technology to facilitate more open relationships between end users and music producers - this strengthens trust between parties while forging loyal bonds between music artists and fans and giving music artists direct payment from fans.
Gains For Music Artists
Concurrent with my last point, direct payments and communication will enable music artists to increase earnings from fans more directly. Intermediaries typically siphon off much of an artist or producer's profits in the music industry, leaving small returns for them. Blockchain can address this problem by offering music producers or artists higher rewards.
Intellectual Property Protection
Intellectual property protection is among the biggest hurdles in music today; however, blockchain technology offers an answer. By storing songs on a blockchain, their numbering system ensures protection from fraud. With the immutability of blockchain's data storage technology and immutability laws that prevent modifications from being made without explicit author consent, blockchain provides absolute transparency while giving creators total control of their work and eliminating illegal downloads. NFTs, in particular, are innovative solutions created on this technology that facilitate authentic ownership within music industry ecosystems.
Creative Sources Of Revenue For Artists
Blockchain technology enables newly emerging artists who already enjoy fan support to experience an ongoing stream of financial support through earnings. There are already projects dedicated to this purpose, like ANote Music's blockchain-based platform, which provides artists access to capital through user investments in royalties. Furthermore, music royalty shares can even be traded on the secondary market.
Conclusion
Blockchain technology offers music creators and consumers attractive incentives and numerous benefits that could drive its widespread implementation in the music industry over time. However, current challenges must also be carefully considered since these are vital in effecting a move toward decentralized, immutable records technology with zero room for error or manipulation.
