In this series, I want to pitch some projects, and kick around some ideas to mimic popular services and turn them into Steem dapps, look at some of the challenges for each, how they might be met, and some suggested improvements while were at it. My hope is to start thought provoking conversations, get input from the rest of the community, work the problem together, and hopefully inspire someone to take on the project.

Spotify:

We all love listening to music. Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming apps out there. I think this would be a good one to examine possibly mimicking on Steem.

What I like about Spotify:

• You can Search and play specific songs and albums.
• Create and download your own playlists.
• Easy to navigate U.I. with album art, and other little tidbits of info on the song / artist.
• Mobil App.
• Able to cast to other devices.

What I don't like:

• The ads. I think we can all live without those. Ads are annoying, but not a deal breaker.
• You only get a certain amount of skips per hour.
• Not very easy to get your own music on the platform (as far as I'm aware).

Some considerations and obstacles:

• According to Spotify, between 2006 and 2018, they paid $9.76 billion in royalties to artists, music labels and publishers. That averages to over $816 million a year. The IP cost is HIGH.

• There are quite a few licenses needed in their particular business model. You can read more on that here.

• Another route that could be taken is to, somehow, entice big names to post their own songs on the platform, but that is almost as daunting a task for a startup as all the red tape and IP compliance. I'm honestly not even sure how you would get an opportunity to pitch it to them.

Next question is payment system. Some options are:

• Put the whole thing behind a pay wall, and charge a subscription fee.

• Use the regular voting system like Dsound does now. (Bigger artists might not like that.)

• Charge once for access per song / album. (I don't think listeners would like that unless the price was really low and profit was made in volume of sales.)

• Something like the SteemMonster marketplace, where artists can set their own one time price for access per song / album.

• Then, there's always Ads. (Ugh....)

• A combination of the regular voting system, ads, and pay per song using a modified version of the SteemMonster marketplace. Incentivize traffic and customer retention by offering access to the song in exchange for an upvote. (This will build the artists reputation and Steem power Incentivizing them to be more active on Steemit.) An early bird special, of sorts. After the "post" has paid out, charge per song / album using the same ratio as author to curator, except now, the project gets the curator cut + ad revenue for the entire site / app. Plus, this puts big artists and smaller artists on a more level playing field. Use fewer, non-intrusive ads such as banners on the site / app, rather than audio, video, and popup ads that interrupt your music. Again, though, it may be difficult to get the opportunity to pitch this to big artists.

Conclusion:

This seems like it would be a difficult one to do, but possible!
I personally don't have any experience in this industry. I have no real sense of how the market would react to something like this.

So, what do you think?! If this is something you would like to see, have ideas, some constructive criticism, solutions to some of the challenges, something I missed, want to take on the project, have a similar project and found this input helpful, let everyone know in the comments! Lets work on it together! I know @ericdjuly has experience with the music industry, and him being an artist, himself, would have a valuable perspective. So would @prc. He has had his hand in a couple Dapps similar to this, if I'm not mistaken. Would love your input guys!

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy thinking about this with me! Keep an eye out for more of these!