Soundcloud is dead - long live Opus? Musicoin? - a review

Background

The times the are a-changing. Soundcloud announced serious downsizing last week and there is plenty of talk of Spotify gaming their own system to avoid paying out (their meagre amounts) to artists and labels. It should come as no surprise to people here that blockchain solutions to the endless exploitation of musicians are being developed and tested. I'll look at 2 such projects here (there are more, but I'll only write about what I've experienced so far). I'm a musician (25 years experience) with a tech background (comms, programming) and have no links with either of these projects. I'm on both slacks and have uploaded some releases to Musicoin.

This is not a cut-and-paste press release like a bunch of other posts you'll find all over the place - my own thoughts and experiences are within.....

The projects are Opus & Musicoin (Opus Slack : Musicoin Slack)

Both projects initially tackle the streaming model like Spotify, Tidal, Deezer etc and can develop in a number of ways for the future. Both operate using Ethereum blockchain smart contracts.

Use, invest, avoid etc? read on ;)

---

Pros:

• functional beta
• pay-per-play model
• can access and trade your tokens now
• friendly and responsive dev team slack
• easy writer-split $ setup for song writers in the metadata
• 100 free plays for fans/uploaders (IP / account tied)
• proposition of a "universal basic income" % from mining direct to all music providers (details unclear)
• wallet
• uncensorable

Cons:

• UX
• centralised data storage (at the moment, distributed planned for later)
• no copyright dispute plan
• The white paper is a bit thin on details/tech and is more conceptual

Neutral:

• a non profit organisation
• original dev team split in two with the other people starting the Musiconomi project
• already listed on bittrex

Musicoin is currently in beta, people can upload their tracks and any user can listen to 100 tracks without having to get any Musicoins - the cryptocurrency used on the platform. This is smooth as it's easy for fans and musicians alike to try out and test the platform. At the time of writing, 1 MUSICOIN = approx $0.02 or 800 satoshis. There is a wallet and you can trade the coins on bittrex at least.

I've loaded up a few tracks and got some plays. The interface is a bit rough but it is beta and it does work. The dev team have been open to suggestions as well, with some being implemented within a day of chatting about it on their slack channel. Embedded players haven't been implemented yet.

Users can tip MUSICOINS in addition to the 1 coin per play.
I presume in future, the project expects users buy MUSICOINS to give to musicians they enjoy much in the same way Bandcamp allows people to pay what they want for a download. I'm a bit ambivalent on this aspect - we'll have to wait and see if it works in practice.

The best way to bring people to the platform is to promote your tracks on your usual channels... facebook, twitter, mailing list etc etc. There's precious little in house traffic at the moment and the homepage favours a "most played" and "most tipped" section which I'm not a big fan of. All this does is keep the top 10 going and is super easy to spoof.

So, in summary - I like it and there's a long way to go, so will keep an eye on it and keep uploading music there to see how it develops. Oh yeah, you can check out one of my projects there - Beam Up ;)

---

Pros:

• very solid whitepaper in tech and business plan
• responsive dev team slack and open to ideas
• UX on the demo webpage
• truly distributed audio delivery planned
• uncensorable
• anti spoofing/spamming strategy in the whitepaper
• deflationary coin
• marketing plan and budget method
• user voting possible re: future development
• dev team avoiding hype and focussing on implementation

Cons:

• no visible copyright dispute plans
• demo page only - no beta as yet
• not listed on an exchange as yet (plans for 1 week after the crowdsale finishes)

Neutral

• crowdsale underway until end of August (capped at $20mil, payment by ETH/BTC/other)

This project is behind Musicoins in implementation but ahead in terms of concept (my opinion after going through the 42 page whitepaper and talking with the devs on slack). While the demo player page looks fine, users are not allowed to upload their own music at the moment so we'll have to wait to see how that works in practice. They're currently holding a pre-crowdsale - go to their page for details) and seem to be making a good effort to avoid the damaging hype surrounding recent ICOs and hacks. Investing could be made a lot easier for noobs, but hop onto the slack and you can get guidance from the users / dev team.

---

---

Whilst there's less meat to chew on with Opus, my feeling is that this could be more viable than Musicoin in the long term. The current streaming model of Spotify et al is failing and never served musicians well in the first place. There are plenty of articles written on that subject alone.

I have invested in the crowdsale for Opus and have uploaded music to Musicoin.
I'd like to hear your own thoughts on the project from the crypto/blockchain/ICO and music business point of view.
This was a first stab at doing my own review of the 2 as I've found them so far.

Cheers,
Brian May.