Introduction

In this edition of Idea Explorer I will be looking at the different sides of creating a Steem based music service that would incentive musical artists to create great content. If you haven't already please check out the first Idea Explorer I wrote regarding a hypothetical Steem Based Instagram. Currently novice musical artists often get paid very little for their music, because usually a central authority takes a cut of the profits.

The Case for a Steemify Music Service

As a musical artist there are currently various mediums to become known through and earn some profit including: SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, YouTube. All of these organizations are led by central authorities that take a cut of the revenue made from the song or album posting. SoundCloud requires a user to purchase a premier partnership to get paid for their original content, but otherwise the service does not pay musical artists. Spotify lists that the average “per stream” payout to rights holders is between $0.006 and $0.0084 [1]. Both iTunes and YouTube take a chunk of revenue from the artist for having their content on the networks. According to a recent article, "On average, many artists earn $6.00 - $7.00 per album sold on iTunes and 60 - 70 cents per song" [2]. But unless you are a very popular musical artist, you probably won't be making much money from any of these platforms.

Source

A Steemify Music service would provide a way to promote quality music in amateur, current and newly budding musical artists by giving them the payouts that they deserve. Steemify would also promote musical artists using the currently existing platforms to join as a means of gaining another revenue channel. Just as blogs on Steemit.com, and pictures on a Steem Based Instagram artists would be able to post their music in different categories or genres.

Steemify Radio and Playlists

Currently existing services such as Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify usually come bundled with a radio that recommends a song based on the type of music you have listened to in the past. This could definitely be a feature for the Steemify service and could be optimized to promote higher rated content. Users could also have the ability to create playlists and get upvoted for them. For example, if you really like a friend's playlist you would be able to upvote it, and some of the payouts would go to your friend and some of them would go to the artists in the playlist.

Embedded Musical Content

Blogging about a trip that you went on and listened to music by a specific artist? By having embedded Steemify content on Steemit it would provide another way for artists' content to get seen. The #music category usually has posts trending on Steemit.com and is one of the popular categories listed on the front page. The community is already starting to support musical content that users post from their YouTube accounts. A Steemify would promote the creation of musical content in the manner that Steemit.com has promoted the writing of great content.

Development and Project Management

Just recently I was made aware of IPFS which is a "peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web, safer and more-open" [3]. Some of the benefits of IPFS are unique media cryptographic fingerprints, duplication removal, speed of access by utilizing network nodes, fast search across the network due to hashing. Storing IPFS hashes and musical metadata in a blockchain was one possible method suggested by user @picokernel and @trogdor in the previous edition of Idea Explorer.

Steemify users should be able to login with their Steem account across multiple platforms and be able to view their playlists, the music that they recently upvoted, as well as trending music in their musical feed, and what the users they are following are currently listening to. There are definitely multiple realtime elements and components to a project of this scope, and a development team with a diverse set of skills would be required to make this project a success. Open sourcing the codebase like I wrote in regards to in the last Idea Explorer would be a great option in that the community would be able to aid in the development progress of this type of project.

A desktop client and a developer mode would serve as a way for developers to modify the Steemify system and perhaps add gamification elements to it. This would lead to the development of different open sourced versions of Steemify such as on that could have a leaderboard that shows the top curators of musical content, or the top listeners on the application.

Positive Impact to the Community

A Steemify, in short, would promote the creation of high quality musical content. A Steemify would push musical artists to producing content based on the feedback from the community through incentivizing them, similar to how Steemit.com pushes quality content through incentivizing writers.

Conclusion

Music is something that we are surrounded by everyday. Many full time musical artists are barely able to make a living off of their music due to lack of exposure, loss of revenue through centralized authorities taking a cut, and various other factors. A Steemify would not only be another door to the world of cryptocurrency for the community, it would have a number of positive externalities that could revolutionize the music industry in the long run.

References

1. Spotify Explained - Spotify Artists URL: https://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/ Retrieved On : August 17, 2016
2. Learn How to Get Your Music on iTunes and Collect Royalties - SongCastMusic URL: Learn How to Get Your Music on iTunes and Collect Royalties Retrieved On: August 17, 2016
3. IPFS URL: https://ipfs.io/ Retrieved On: August 17, 2016

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