Remember the time that you had to drop the needle of your record player exactly in the right groove to make it play your favourite song, or that you had to turn around the LP to make it play the other 5 songs that were stored on the LP? No? Me neither. But I do remember the time that I was walking around with my brand-new MP3-player that could store only 60 songs. Good times, but look where we are now. Chances are that you are reading this blog while streaming the new song that your favourite band just released on Spotify, or that you listening the repertoire of Marvin Gaye through Apple Music. A lot of disruptions in the music industry have taken place and changed the way we listen to music. All because of the never-ending developments in technology.
The digitization of the music industry provided several challenges like licensing music services, tracking consumption and paying royalties to the right parties (Brook, 2018). It isn’t always very clear which party you have to approach to purchase a music license, so it often takes a real effort to make use of someone else’s work. Furthermore, because of the growing amount of music streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and Soundcloud, the revenue distribution system becomes more and more complex. The actual producers of music are getting less and less royalties over time because every intermediary wants a piece of the pie (Victoria S., 2018). Right now, we are in the early stages of yet another potentially disruptive evolution that can tackle these everlasting challenges within the music industry: blockchain.
Blockchain technology enables and facilitates the development of a global network for intellectual property rights registration, management and monetization (Sanchez, 2018).
An example is the JAAK start-up. They are developing KORD, an open shared data network based on Ethereum blockchain. It enhances the interconnectivity between producers, labels, promoters and publishers. Users of KORD have the sole authority to insert, update and remove their own information, creating a public record of rights and an immutable audit trail (Sanchez, 2018).
A similar initiative is the Mycelia project from Imogen Heap. This project, also based on blockchain, consists of a platform containing immutable metadata about songs, which ultimately enables peer to peer payments and a more transparent and fair revenue distribution system.
So people, let’s get rid of the status quo! Purchase music with cryptocurrency and hope that these initiatives become very successful in the near future by growing in popularity. Only then, the revenue distribution- and copyright systems will become 100% transparent and fair.
Sources:
https://blog.jaak.io/jaak-music-pilot-announcement-c8274b0a9170
https://rubygarage.org/blog/blockchain-in-music-industry#article_title_1
Can JAAK’s Blockchain Music Rights Database Succeed Where Others Have Failed?
