Continuing the series about blockchain based music platforms, today I'm going to talk about Emanate. This is a very promising platform that I'm excited to tell you about and even though it hasn't been released yet, there's already an alpha version ready to be tested soon, the team is actively developing it, there's already a community being built that will have a significant role in the platform and tons of partnerships are being built to promote the ecosystem to musicians, record labels, fans, producers, etc. So it's definitely a platform to be looking for in the near future.
Blockchain is helping to disrupt multi-billion dollar industries and the music industry is one of them. The current business model is highly centralized and is like that for a very obvious reason: is convenient for the big guys. Because of this, the revenue that is generated is concentrated and not distributed fairly among participants, being the artist the most affected. The current legacy system favors major players in the sense that, at the end, they will get their piece of the pie seamlessly and effortlessly.
But the problem is that, there are many participants involved in creating the art of music. Producers, recording engineers, beat makers, song writers, lyricists, composers, studio musicians, sample makers, sound designers, influencers, etc. Are they being compensated fairly for their contributions? Highly debatable due to a system that doesn't take into account all the complexities behind royalty attributions and collaborative efforts. Are these participants able to thrive and flourish independently from a middle man? Absolutely not. Without the middleman, the musician's journey is full of obstacles that will ultimately prevent a successful career. This is where Emanate comes into place, by putting the artist first.
The Audio Exchange Protocol – More than just a dApp
The Audio Exchange Protocol is basically the ecosystem that powers up the Emanate music economy. Based on the eosDAC blockchain, it allows the platform to be built on top the EOS decentralized technology to provide a streaming platform where musicians can share their art, powered with EOS smart contracts to manage royalty payments among participants that were involved in the creation of the music and also to store the metadata of the licensing securely and transparently. In the current legacy system, there's no global ledger to record and protect metadata (artist, record label, composer, genre, release date info) but with a system like the one proposed by Emanate, we could achieve a global standard that could not only benefit a new economy, but also one that legacy platforms could benefit from.
The team has chosen IPFS as the storage infrastructure that will allow Emanate to store audio files to stream, audio files to use for collaborations and to help the artist in the music making process, all of this integrating it with the built in Emanate apps as well as third party apps. The cool thing about using IPFS technology is that, once you encrypt “premium” content, the only way to access the music stored on this system is through decrypting it with the users keys and the platform keys, so that way piracy is completely prevented and the revenue can be generated directly to the artist while ensuring a healthy token economy. I mean the innovation behind Emanate is great, not even current legacy platforms put so much effort and technology to allow a truly decentralized economy that puts the artists first. As I mentioned above, the big players are comfortable with the way things are because for them, as long as is comfortably profitable, there's nothing that will incentivize them to change anything, if anything is just hassle that is not needed or too complicated. Luckily we are having emerging technologies like EOS and Emanate that are disrupting exactly just that, the big player's comfort zone.
Payments
One of the main benefits I'm interested as a musician myself are payments. Being able to be payed directly means that you get to receive your revenue faster. With conventional platforms and payment systems, you usually get to see your money after a minimum threshold has been met and then, you have to wait sometimes 45 days, 3 months even up to 6 months or more in extreme cases to receive your money. Being able to be payed with EMT tokens means that you are able to have full ownership of your money. Plus, I think is interesting that the music economy of the platform won't gravitate only towards streaming revenue but also collaborative efforts among musicians, production services (mastering, mixing maybe even recording), the ability to buy sample packs, sound banks and plugins with EMT is a huge deal. To protect the value within the platform, there will be two tokens in the network. The MNX token that will act as a stablecoin and the EMT token, the liquid volatile asset.
Exciting Innovation
The way Emanate focuses on building a community of artists collaborating with each other is insanely good. In the Alpha version, artist will be able to upload their audio files to start the collaboration with other interested musicians but the real innovation comes at the Beta stage. Musicians will be able to directly integrate the IPFS content to the DAW of their choice like Ableton, so they can start putting hands at work immediately and all of this while maintaining full ownership of the digital audio assets. This has never seen before. For sure there's platforms to collaborate with musicians like Splice, Blend, Kompoz, Vocalizr, Bandhub, etc. But nothing has ever been so integrated and complete as the solution Emanate is proposing.
There's so much potential for the Emanate platform because every participant in the music industry can benefit from the ecosystem. Radio stations can discover talent through Emanate and easily manage any broadcast licensing seamlessly, producers, beat makers, sound designers, everyone can manage royalties and licensing on the platform. Independent artist will finally have complete ownership of their art by being able to directly publish their work and make it readily available to also be distributed in legacy platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud and monetize their work. Currently this is only possible with a distributor and while it's easy to do it, some even do it for free (having a 15% cut on your revenue), they don't give you a combined and integrated solution as the Emanate's Audio Exchange Protocol and they always dilute the income you can generate. However, these features won't be available at launch, they might be integrated later on as it becomes more feasible due to development progress.
The Governance
A DAC stands for a decentralized Autonomous Community/Company and the purpose of this is to reach a governance consensus (Delegated Proof of Stake) for the platform in a much more efficient way than conventional PoW and PoS consensus based blockchains. In a dPos system, the community members have more weight in the network. Here is a breakdown of the governance system:
Custodian
Custodians are like the block producers that secure the network, transactions and receive a stake for their efforts. Every EMT holder can vote for a custodian.
Emanate Rep
Reps are responsible for user's issues, bringing musician's to the platform and helping them upload their music and get familiar with the ecosystem. They also review the audio material to corroborate the legality and quality of them. They will actively promote and make the platform and community grow. EMT holders can also vote for reps.
EMC Member
Then members are users of the platform that regularly vote, listen to music, follow artists and curating playlists. Artist themselves are also members by uploading audio, moderating tracks, collaborating, etc. Every member has the right to be part of the governance system by voting for custodians and reps.
Conclusion
The Emanate music ecosystem is one of the most complete solutions I've seen being developed currently. My previous post was about PeerTracks, and while they both share lots of features and qualities because of their underlying technologies, Emanate is the platform that really cohesively addresses every corner of the music industry and everyone involve has a role and weight because the ecosystem is community driven to support decentralization.
Feel free to connect with the Emanate project and community!
If you want to follow along with this series, check my previous posts:
Analysis Of Blockchain Music Platforms – PeerTracks (SounDAC)
How Blockchain Will Disrupt The Music Industry (Part 1) – The Problem
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