Finally the MAJOR PROBLEM in the MUSIC Industry Being SOLVED ||| The Next Generation Music Service
With the continuous increasing focus by many innovators, also many new music based services are defined and launched in cryptospace. From track and album streaming services powered by the likes of Musicoin and AudioCoin to the next generation solution for artists, promoters, venue owners and music fans; The company and service "Viberate".
Viberate is the service I like to introduce to you in this post. But before I do that, I will explain why Viberate is an unique service solving in an innovative way a long lasting problem in the music industry.
Electronic Dance becomes an Industry
Since the beginning of the millennium, the electronic dance music industry is getting the attention of the mass. It went from the so called underground where it was for decades, to mainstream. The Netherlands was one of the frontrunners in the world, maybe THE frontrunner together with Germany and the UK. By now many other European countries followed. However, one of the biggest markets in the world did not pickup this segment of the music industry for a long time, but since a couple of years it started booming. You know what market I'm talking about?... Well, don't guess anymore, it is the United States of America.
By now, on a global scale 10.000s - maybe even 100.000s - events happen every single weekend with 10s of millions and more music fans attending these events.
Fragmented Industry
By nature, the electronic dance industry is very fragmented. It is an industry segment with predominantly tiny to small size businesses. Every artist, every club, every festival is its own little business. The enormous increase of the amount of parties, clubs and professional artists, makes it harder and harder for the buyers (promoters) and sellers (the artist bookers) to find each other. To support this marketplace for stakeholders to become more connected and be able to make the deals, the need for a kind of LinkedIn service dedicated to the music industry is therefor growing tremendously. Due to lack of such service, the lack of automation in the businesses itself, the lack of (human) resources to get all the tasks done, this industry still works more with Excel sheet and simple contact book, then anything else.
In many markets, Facebook became the channel of choice for promotion and interaction with followers and fans, for promoters, for artists and for venues. I think this grew naturally, since it is the only social network that has members of all age groups. Although the youngsters may like Instagram more, or even Snapchat, these services are not well suited for the professional music industry. But Facebook is also not the best channel, it is not dedicated to music, promotions get snowed under quickly by the so many notifications and messages Facebook members are getting daily.
Lack of Centralised Quality Information
Since ever there is a lack of services with quality data to discover parties around, the lineup, artists schedules and so on. Facebook is kinda covering it at the moment, but it is not the perfect medium. Many small services and also larger services exist, but they all lack completeness and correctness of the data. Mostly only a part of the artist schedule is shown in their databases. Mostly only a part of the parties happening on a particular date in a particular area is available.
The reasons for the low quality and incompleteness of data are manyfold, but for sure the fact that this industry is very fragmented, databases are copied from other incomplete sources and the lack of moderation and review of the data are some of the key elements causing this. Promoters, artist, bookers and managers do not have the time to update 100s to 1000s of services with their latest information. You may have heard about Bandsintown, Songkick, and maybe the biggest knowledge database for promoters, artists and venues, Resident Advisor. All have the same issues, their databases are incomplete, and in most cases they are not in sync with the reality.
Viberate
Two years ago, the Slovenia based company "Viberate" launched a next generation proposition. Viberate intents to offer relevant services to promoters, artists, bookers, venue owners and other stakeholder, to offer a digital marketplace and aims to connect the entire industry.
They understand what it takes to materialise such ambition, data is the starting point, and quality and completeness of data are key!
The challenge is how to get millions of businesses entered into the system, with high quality, without going bankrupt on the cost to pay the amount of people required to collect the data.
The answer to this challenge is quite simple, Crowdsourcing!
This is what Viberate implemented. Anybody who likes to contribute to the database, can submit information. Submissions are rewarded, in order to fuel the crowdsourcing.
But, we have gazillion other (small) services out in the field for many years that allows anybody to upload information, so why would Viberate be different to them? How will Viberate be able to keep the information quality at high levels?
Well, simple: all submissions are reviewed in order to make sure the quality of the data is kept at high levels. This is THE KEY element to the puzzle many players in the world was forgetting.
Viberate is therefore (one of) the first companies in the world that understands what it takes to make a - next generation - tool to support not only the professionals in the music industry (promoters, artists/bookers and venue owners) but also the music fans. Whilst the later is not really the short term focus, I see the huge potential for Viberate to become the primary service for anybody who wants to go out and party, to discover the next party to go to, to buy tickets, to interact with artists and more.
Viberate Token
Not long ago (a couple of weeks), Viberate launched their own token.
Before, those who contributed to the database could earn loyalty points. Merchandise could be purchased with these points. A bit closed system in my honest opinion, and Viberate must have thought the same.
Now, the rewards are given in form of crypto currency tokens which are tradable on the crypto exchanges. This reward mechanism is maybe the prime reason why Viberate gets so many people involved contributing to their database; It is growing tremendously fast with by now more then 130.000 artists alone.
Why Viberate Stands Out in the Crowd
In cryptospace many initiatives are started with a whitepaper and an ICO with the promise to deliver a service later on. Generally no fiat money is invested, or very limited amounts.
Viberate took a much more traditional approach. They created the basic service first. They started to fill their database first. They funded their company with fiat currency, and quite a bit of it. Now - two years later - they launched a crypto currency token.
That is THE reason why this token stands out in the market. Not only the token is real; Also the service is real.
Some Useful Links
Don't believe immediately what I'm telling you, Just check them out. The links you can find here below.
Bit disappointing at the time of the ICO ....I hope they will do better than that musiccoin I am still sitting on , worth nothing
I hear you on that one. What a disappointment Musicoin turned out to be. I was hopeful they would make some effective changes when the whole Musiconomi thing was coming together, but it ended up being some social welfare economy for musicians. Very sad.
Viberate has a total different proposition than musicoin. What this will do to the value of VIB itself in the short run, is the question, but I expect in the long run to do well. They got around 30M$ in at ICO, still the coin marketsize is about 20M$, ie only a 33% decrease, more or less. Only at end of 2018 they come with the tools for bookers and promoters. I also think for music fans, the UI needs to become better. But keep in mind these guys got about 1M$ fiat money funded in last two years, that is much more than many of the crypto coins out there. I'm pretty sure these guys want to create some solid and good service.
BTW, never go ICO, since mostly you will see the value of the coin drop after ICO :)
Sounds kind of Myspace-y in terms of scope, which is interesting. I'll bookmark this as I'm trying to understand the full array of options out there for artists/authors for a thing I'm doing.
Have you seen Musicoin on the streaming service side of things?
Yep, I kinda know musicoin, tried their service some time ago, also got some of their coins from them. But, initially they had a wrong offering, track based streaming. No consumer is waiting for that. By now they changed the service I think, the artists are getting paid by Musicoin and the listener listens for free. The founders want to do something different though, provide people with some basic income or something. Not sure if these guys will make it to be honest. AudioCoin I also tried, looks a bit better from service point of view. But, they seem to have issues with their technology as well. My wallet never got enabled and their support is super slow and does not help me activate my wallet.
Viberate is much different to this. Nothing to do with streaming music are creating a marketplace for tracks and albums itself. They solve THE problem in the industry, namely networking and discovering between the professionals. Selling artists requires contacts, and most of the promoters and programmers are not giving out their contact details on the internet, and they generally dont look into their generic contact@... or info@... email boxes. On the other hand, promoters are getting more and more disconnected with the artists community in the sense they simply dont have the time to discover new artists due to lack of time and resources. Sources are spread across many different platforms: Facebook, Soundcloud, Beatport, YouTube and so on. Viberate brings all this together and will make it much more faster to discover. I believe in such service, although Viberate still has to proof itself by rolling out the roadmapped services for artists bookers and promoters. The whole idea is that all artists, events and venues are listed, so all stakeholders can go to a single place to find their gigs, to arrange their gigs, as well as for the music fans to discover the events they want to go to, to buy their tickets, to follow their favouriete artists and so on.
A lot to take it in. I'll have a proper read when I'm not working!
Cool! :)
Hay its real a great step towards providing the best blockchain based music industry and it's also do support the new one for there work. It's awesome to know this from you. Thank for such Great post.
You're Welcome
We have produced a lot of HD live music videos of various artists and venues from in and around Vienna over the last 5 years. Would Viberate also be a place to share this kind of content?
I hope so they will allow to do so at some point in time. For now what I see from their service is the integrate the various existing social media channels, and show the media that are posted in those social media channels. That is as far as I can see the media posted by the artists, promoters and venue account themselves. But for the music fans it would be great if also their own material can be uploaded, but I also can imagine this is not something they want to do soon since they want to build a marketplace for the professionals and allow music fans to discover events and parties and purchase tickets. IN 2018 they plan to integrate with 3rd party e-tickets sellers.
Like an aggregation platform that combines all the various elements. Cool!
So I spent some time checking out the website, here are a couple of thoughts:
I really like the venue exploration map, the detail on each venues' activity is great. The social media analytics and growth visualisation is very easy to read and informative and can give you clues as to what they are doing right or wrong on their social media presences and which ones need work.
So I could imagine that the venues that have had quality live recordings done there also include that on their profile to get back to my initial question.
You've given me a lot to think about, I'm gonna go consider for a while, thank you!
You're Welcome :) BTW, in 2018 they'll create promoters profiles. On analytics, I would also like to see the absolute amounts, not only the relative increase/decrease values.
I am interested in music business. Was 'kind of' in the music business for about a year, but don't know much. Thank you for sharing. I will follow.