My Songs Are Now on Musicoin! Some First Impressions.

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If you're a musician who wants to earn money from your music, then Musicoin.org may be something you'll want to check out. I just signed up a week ago, and so far the experience has been somewhat promising.

The premise for the site is similar to Steemit, in that your contributions earn you some of their crypto currency, called $MUSIC. The difference is that instead of upvotes, the currency is generated simply by people listening to your tracks. In addition there is an option to tip artists directly - something that seems to tie in to their push for people to invest in the coin. At the date of this writing the currency is listed on Bittrex and Cryptopia. I'll mention a few more things on that note later in this article.

The first thing I want to focus on is the means of generating currency. As I mentioned earlier, the artist receives a share of coins from the number of listens that their tracks get. So this would mean that there are no voting bid bots or self upvotes, abuses commonly found here on Steemit, in case you hadn't noticed by now.

That's the upside, but then a potential downside would be people using autoplay bots on their profiles, something that could affect the credibility of the currency. Now this makes me think about the transparency of the blockchain - it seems that bot abuse on blockchain sites is something done out in the open, due to the nature of the technology. It's more of a power play than a sneak manoeuvre.

So I assume that autoplay bots would be quickly detected on Musicoin, and since the site does claim the ability to shut down accounts, this sort of thing could be dealt with. The question is: would unscrupulous players be able to quickly cash out before they were shut down, at a sufficient scale to have a negative impact on the site?

One way they've decided to address this potential issue is their sign up and validation process. Namely, in order to be a validated musician, and therefore be able to upload more than one track, you need to link your Musicoin account to either a Facebook, Twitter, or Google account (preferably all three) that demonstrates a history of promoting one's self as a musician/band; (you are also encouraged to list various other social media in your profile). And while this may be somewhat tedious for those of us who want to decouple from these legacy behemoths, the requirements do seem to be the best way to make sure that real musicians are signing up. In conjunction with blockchain technology, I think this makes the potential for bot abuse rather low for this site.

As far as promoting on other sites goes, they have a music player that works beautifully on Twitter (just copy the link), and on Facebook the link is the image with your song, same with Minds.com. So far I haven't found the iframes imbed to work on any social media, but I still haven't tried Google+. As well, I've yet to try it on my Wordpress powered blog at my own site. When I do I'll post an update in the comments below.

And one thing that I need to mention - the Musicoin link here on Steemit is just that: a link only, without even an image loading. The imbed does not work at all. A Musicoin player is something I'd like to see Steemit support - if Twitter can do it, so can you @ned!

Since I've only recently signed up, I've yet to try exchanging out any $MUSIC from my account. Preliminary research indicates that you can exchange from your web wallet to Bittrex, and for all other exchanges you need to download their desktop wallet.

So that's all for now. Is there anyone else here who's signed up for Musicoin? If so, have you successfully managed to exchange any of your earnings so far? Let me know with a link to your Musicoin profile in the comments below. And in the meantime, please check out one of my songs at the link that follows. It's called QuasiSuperVerse; an instrumental psychedelic rock piece composed and recorded by yours truly.

https://musicoin.org/nav/track/0xae660d0c98ed97e78dd39adf6c8da05e97172e11

UPDATE: So I'm afraid I did have a not great experience a few days ago. One of my songs was less than a minute long, which apparently the site is unable to host. In spite of this inability the site allowed the upload to happen, and for my track to stay in place for six days, then sent me a notification message about the length issue. In addition to that, there was a big glaring banner across the page about my track being flagged for "abuse"! Over a technical glitch that never should have happened in the first place, and after I'd shared the track all over social media!

There's more details that you can read - including the response - in my complaint to their message board (because the email in the notification returned no address). I reuploaded a longer version and replaced all of my links - there doesn't seem to have been too much damage done, except after I eventually deleted the first upload, I lost all payments associated with it, include a tip received! I still think this site shows some promise but, yeah, something of a stumble there.

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Writing, music and image by Greg McCann, the author of this post and owner of this Steemit Channel. To view more of my work, please visit www.fireawaymarmot.com.