Blockchain & Music Industry
For a long time, the music industry is a huge sphere of human society where emotions and money circulate on a high scale. The mp3 emergence was the true emergency for conventional music companies, and the high-speed Internet mass adoption shaped the modern era music market. We are not talking about the comeback of vinyl and cassettes (although these trends are getting stronger) but rather about music streaming. The middlemen of music industry survived despite the peer-to-peer services surfacing all over the place, and both artists and listeners still have to share their time and money with the intermediary branch.
Current Issues
Modern musicians have to fit in the existing limits offered by labels and music platforms. When a musician signs a deal with a record company he/she never knows if the company actually can fulfill all the points of this contract. The record company has no guarantees, too. No protection from human error, from the inability to work, from greed or malicious activity. Something that might look like the start of a great collaboration can end up disappointing for everyone: artist, label, and fans.
Labels and streaming services take a percent from selling of music made by artists, and musicians cannot share their music immediately if they do it via the streaming services or labels. The contract with a label sometimes can be a quite demanding process, and even some significant artists sometimes fail to pass this test and lose some benefits or rights to their own songs. More than that, modern platforms can't provide an adequate picture of the "life" of the music product after release (stats from different platforms sometimes hardly correlate with one another on one hand, and with reality on the other hand).
Independent artists have to do a lot of work to maintain their recordings, merch selling, and all other stuff that has little to do with music writing or performing. They spend much time doing such things, usually together with having a day job. This experience can be exhausting and bringing not much in return. Uploading music for free might solve some of these problems, but why don't we try other options? The ones that remind us that the work on music and releases is labor.
How Can Blockchain Be Useful?
Blockchain can (and will) be used as a storage of all the information related to music, starting with the recording itself. Besides the music, the blocks of data can keep immutable information about the authors of the music, lyrics, cover art, or anything. All this information may originate from the very artist or the trusted person/company (although it can be regarded as a step back to the nowadays music industry consensus) — so the author won't need a lawyer to protect his/her rights because these rights are protected by the blockchain — a beautiful technology that cannot be wrapped around the finger or bribed.
If we speak about the musical market in blockchain era we should understand that when the new music platforms will get mass adoption people won't have to use banks and distributors to pay for music. The royalties will reach the author (or a trusted person/company) immediately after the record gets purchased by a music platform user. No one else gets the money for the job made by the artist and the team. Also, blockchain may detect and block the attempts of unwanted reproduction of the original content on the web
The List Of Decentralized Music Platforms
Below you can see some of the music blockchain platforms:
Ilink2music
Mycelia
Ujo
Blockur
viberate
Most of these platforms are yet to be fully operative but we all live in the times of transition, so the blockchain era is about to start so it's better to learn about the possible paths of the future today.