A platform for artists and music built with Steem could revolutionize the music industry, reducing middle-man fees dramatically and bringing ownership back to the artists.

Music Playback

The distribution of music has evolved rapidly in the past few decades. From vinyl records to CDs, and then to online stores like Apple Music, people have slowly migrated to more convenient and open ways of accessing their favorite tunes. People want freedom, low costs, and convenience. With thousands of songs being released every day, it’s nice to be able to try out as many as desired to find hidden gems. Additionally, because of the vast amount of new songs, a system that encourages thoughtful curation could prove valuable.

The Steemit model could easily be applied to a new streaming platform, where users could upload their music, and others would be incentivized to browse and curate songs. Each upvote would represent revenue and Steem Power for the artist, just like it does for posts here. Furthermore, we could create a form of “micro-upvote” that happens every time someone plays a song. Thus, every time a user listens to a song on this streaming service, the artist would get paid in Steem (but the amount they get paid is only a fraction of the amount they’d receive for an upvote by that same user). This way, users could play many more songs a day than they could if the reward weight was as high as an upvote. This is potentially a viable system where users could stream songs for free and artists could still get paid per play, which would seem impossible a few years ago.

There are several competitors to this hypothetical music streaming service. The main ones are probably Spotify and SoundCloud. Spotify is not ideal for artists that are getting started, given its high barriers of entry. It is relatively difficult to get listed on Spotify, and even more difficult to get a significant following, without being signed to a traditional Record Label. On the other hand, SoundCloud is a good service for artists who are starting out or have side projects outside their contracts. However, there is no obvious business model for the service. Although there are paid pro memberships, SoundCloud has struggled to break even in the past. The new decentralized system would have several revenue streams in the form of cryptocurrency and token valuations. Furthermore, if we really wanted to we could design the service to be subscription-based, such that users must buy certain amount of Steem Power a month in order to listen to songs without depleting their voting power.

Raising Money

Other than by the sale of live performance tickets, merchandise, record sales and streaming revenue, artists may find it difficult to raise money. This is especially true for artists who are just starting out and need to spend a significant amount of capital getting the right management and promotion. On our crypto-powered music platform, artists could create and issue their own tokens (perhaps an ERC-20 token), these would represent indexes tied to the artist’s performance and speculative future success. Investors could support artists without the need for the latter to renounce ownership of their music or revenue. Additionally, this would allow any investor, large or small, to support artists of their choice.

For artists to buy back their tokens, they could request their records, merchandise and concert tickets be purchased exclusively with them. That way, there would be demand for the artist tokens at least proportional to their sales. Furthermore, we could set up the tokens to have a small constant inflation in new tokens minted for the artist. This way, they could extract value from their index in a predictable manner. The decentralized music platform could have a store in which the conversion between Steem and artist tokens happens under the hood when buying different items.

Artist’s Team

Although the goal of this hypothetical music platform is to disrupt the music industry, such still plays crucial roles for artists other than management and funding. Artists need all sorts of people in their team providing them a variety of services. Everything from PR and audio production, to venue management and creative guidance is useful and necessary.

Traditionally, labels have provided these services to artists. In this modern age, a decentralized marketplace could provide them instead. Our platform could include a world-wide marketplace of talent in audio engineering, promotional campaigns, song writing, etc. Artists could make public all the members of their team, as well as all collaborators of each song, and this could allow non-artist members of the music industry to gain visibility and future contracts.

Projects Worth Mentioning

There are a few interesting projects in the crypto-space that are similar to this idea already. There is, for example, a Steem clone of SoundCloud called DSound. It gets the music playback aspect mostly right. However, it’s not a complete music solution, and it could be better suited for podcasts and other non-music audio. If the creator @prc is interested in any of these ideas, we could integrate them probably without too much work.

Additionally, there is a coin called Audio Coin, which has as a goal to address some of the issues of the traditional music industry. However, I cannot figure out exactly what music-specific developments they have made so far. I see they have powered a music store in partnership with Blockpool.io, but there they are performing the exact same function than any other cryptocurrency. If anyone manages to get more info let me know!

[Update] I found a new coin that also has to do with music, called Voise. They are focused on content selling, rather than music streaming though. Interesting nonetheless!

What do you think of this idea? Is it worth exploring further? Is any specific interesting? Is anything unrealistic or broken? Leave your feedback below, I’m excited to read through it!