How Could Blockchain Gain Real-Time Royalties For Musicians To Make Money Again?
A big problem for creatives in the music industry — such as songwriters, producers, and musicians — is that they are the first to work and the last to benefit. They have little to no data about how their royalty expenditures are calculated and have no access to valuable aggregated information about how and where people listen to their music.
Blockchain technology has the potential to bring order to the messy music industry. If properly managed and nurtured, blockchain has the potential to bring us a golden age of music, not only for the listeners but also for those who make it.
Now is the time for the music industry to look at the long term and explore blockchain for its future.
A quick statistic, “ROCKI, the new music streaming platform on the blockchain, just launched their first Royalty income right music NFT (Non-Fungible Token) for a song, which sold for a record 40 ETH ($24,800 at the time of writing)!”
The Benevolent Web & Decentralized Market Cap
Today, musicians use social media to develop their line of business. The world wide web transcends the boundaries of radio and television, connecting enthusiasts to their favorite musician and their homes, finances, arts, relationships, and everything in between.
Streaming has been successful in many ways. According to the MIDiA Research report, the music industry produced 18.8 Billion Dollars in 2018 with a streaming contribution of nearly 9.6 Billion Dollars.
The pool of social network users is gigantic with 2.85 billion active users on Facebook and about 300 million users on Twitter all taking the opportunity to raise awareness of their artists.
Can NFTs Give More Value To Musicians?
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) are electronic identifiers that verify the existence of blockchain assets in the musical world and display these musical assets digitally through tokens.
NFTs create a decentralized scarcity that increases value. Music professionals can generate NFTs for their music, songs, cover art, and sell these products digitally.
In addition, the artist can receive royalties when someone buys and sells a digital copy. This new drive gives musicians more control and enables them to make every cent from their artwork and digital assets.
How Do Traditional Performing Rights Come Up Against Blockchain?
While all records secured on a database are centralized, each participant on a blockchain has a secured copy of all records and all changes, so that each user can view where the data came from. However, it seems a bit slow as PROs modernize their rights management databases and as more record labels begin to discover the power of NFTs to create value for artists.
Several blockchain music companies (such as musicoin, Ujo Music, Emusic, Onchain music, Inmusic, Mediachain, etc) will modernize music royalties’ data and payments over the next several years. There are already about 48 million songs and 9,400 music publishers, and they just inherited $424 million in unpaid royalties (“the so-called Black Box”).
Artists like Lupe Fiasco, Gramatik and Pitbull have advocated for decentralized technologies in music, and proponents champion blockchain’s distributed ledger technology as a way to efficiently release music, streamline royalty payments, eliminate expensive intermediaries and establish a point of origin for music creators.
