Exploring The Monetization of Music on Blockchains
Is there a future where every song finds its own market value based on supply and demand?
(This is not the same model as Peertracks / MUSE)
Peace,
dan-atstarlite
(This is not the same model as Peertracks / MUSE)
Fantastic !!
It's a cool idea but how does the market value pay the artist that created the music? If these tokens are assets then everyone but the musician would be holding a piece of the music.
Definitely a cool idea you're thinking of, but as someone who runs a music production label startup on the blockchain, our priority is to make sure musicians get paid so they can eat. With sites like Ujo, listeners pay for plays and other musicians can purchase track stems/samples for future use at a price set by the artist.
If I were to create a blockchain app, I'd make it a mix between Ujo's platform and Steemit, where listeners also get paid for curating musicians work, and a musician gets paid by curation & by the amount of plays it has.
Yeah thanks, I forgot to explain how that could work:
It would be the artists / producers / label (or anyone else involved in the initial contract) that issue the token. So all the tokens belong to them to sell to the market at any rate they choose. So for instance they could issue a song release (similar to an ICO) and sell a portion of the tokens to market at a reasonable entry price. The artist makes money because they hold a large portion of the tokens (which may or may not go up in value) and they can sell them to the market whenever they see fit. It would really be like ownership... in the way an artist might sell their painting, only the musicians in this case could sell shares of ownership as they see fit over time and always hold some back incase the song is a huge success.
In other words, artist / producers / labels would be "the whales" of their own tokens. If the song is a success and they are smart about their position, then they stand to make a lot of money.
So the musician doesn't actually have full ownership of their work, what they have is a large stake?
They would start with 100% stake and sell to the market at whatever rate they choose. This would be no different than an artist giving up ownership of their painting when they sell it. Except we're dividing the ownership into many shares.
But!!! The crazy thing is... that the artist (or label) can still retain all rights to the song and do whatever they want with it because the token holders are financial investors only. It's similar to an investor owning shares of Apple's stock, it doesn't mean they get to use Apple's logo or make decisions about the company, and it doesn't give them rights to anything that Apple produces.
It's an interesting concept. I think that so long as the musician retains full ownership (the label can hold stakes like the listeners), the only other issue would be ensuring there's a continuous revenue stream through plays. If tokens were sold for each play, like a jukebox, I think it would work better.
Yeah, this is just the underlying monetization system... any type of conventional revenue stream can still be pursued. The only difference is that whoever wants access to the song (either for person or commercial use) has to buy tokens and either hold them or burn them depending on the contract.