A Beginner’s Guide to Music and Blockchain: Why it Matters for Musicians
With concert venues, record labels, and music streaming companies taking a significant cut, it should come as no surprise that there has been a decline in people who self-describe as musicians — as much as 41% since 1999.
The demand of the business side has made it burdensome to become a musician. When ultimately the industry should be about two groups: musicians and their fans. Alas, the technology is here to disintermediate the middle men of the industry.
Blockchain technology promises to break barriers and change business models by giving individuals far more control over their intellectual property and ending the need for central authorities who only serve to take money from artists and creators.While this technology was originally meant to be used as the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies like Ether or Bitcoin, this advanced technology can be applied to an endless amount of current and up-and-coming industries.
The media makes us believe that the musician life is a flashy and wealthy one. Reality check: it’s not. You may think that paying third party intermediaries, like labels and publishers, is just “anotha day, anotha dolla,” but these businesses take a pretty penny out of musician’s financial and creative successes. Now, let’s focus on how blockchain can help the musician itself.
Digital Masters
When artists hold digitized copies of their music with the help of blockchain, they can sell their music to customers directly without labels or publishers. The elimination of intermediaries cultivates better and more direct relationship between musicians and their fans.
Independence
Because blockchain can track usage and payments easily, musicians gain more independence to market their music away from major labels. Specifically, for independent or new artists, this technology will cut costs effectively. Music companies will have to readjust their business models because blockchain will be at the center of this power dynamic shift from big corporations to artists.
Royalty Payments
Royalty payments involve various contracts amongst producers, publishing houses and artists. This is particularly applicable to music streaming platforms like Spotify. Any time a song is played on the radio, at events, or online, the rights holders should get a fairly split royalty payment. National copyright collectors are to ensure the payments are being received by the parties, but to track every play on every platform is challenging. At the moment, these collectors base their payments on airplay statistics which is problematic for lesser-known artists with few statistics who therefore are not receiving fair payments.
Transparency
The transparency of the blockchain would make the sharing of royalty payments more efficient. The blockchain would be a music directory including the original music file connected to different right holders of the content. Smart contracts can be used to instruct how the payment will be divided to right holders.
Another possibility is to have the blockchain system holding the information track the consumption and usage of content on the various platforms. Then with that information, it can automatically give the fair payments to the rights holders.
Smart Contracts
As mentioned previously, a rather recent and exciting development in the blockchain community is “smart contracts”. It’s essentially a digital contract where the terms are public and obliterate the third-party intermediaries making the overall system faster and cost-effective.
Content Control
Musicians will be able to have complete control and access to the number of times their content is being consumed if their content is embedded in blockchain. Therefore, copyright infringements and piracy is almost impossible because this model is created based on consumer-to-consumer content distribution.
A user subscribed to a service can go to their content in blockchain and share it with whomever. The person with the subscription will then be directly charged with the fee for whatever content is shared. This improved system not only allows for a hassle-free and legal way for people to share content with others, but also increased traction for musicians. While piracy and infringement are almost impossible to avoid, the goal is to provide more ways to access and pay for content.
Ujo
Many people in the blockchain community recognize the power this technology could have on the music industry — like Ujo. It is an exciting thought to be able disrupt this industry with blockchain, but also being able to propose functioning business models in order for the musicians to receive the credit they deserve. Platforms like Ujo are working hard to bridge the gap between musicians and listeners by creating a transparent and effective system through the use of the blockchain technology for music lovers and creators globally. While there are still many challenges to overcome, Ujo represents change. The team is working hard to make this revolutionary music platform a reality to mainstream media.
To learn more about how these aspects are put into action and how you can be apart of the change, check out our website: https://ujomusic.com/