A: How can you solve the problem of scalability on blockchain? How can you make sure that the system doesn’t become too slow to be used?
P: Well, that’s a key part. The secret of Spotify is precisely there. They weren’t fighting against other streaming platforms at the time, they were fighting against downloads. When you download you can have all your paid music ready to be listened instantly. Spotify became obsessed with the idea that people should just press play and instantly listen to a song. They succeeded and therefore made streaming a successful technology.
The way you can make plays instant on the blockchain is by not using blocks for everything. The blocks should only contain the smart contracts and not the music itself, nor the coins. You should have a trusted and decentralised system that takes care of the accounting of the transitions, not the transitions themselves.
A: So what would make consumers pass through a normal streaming platform to a blockchain one? What is the biggest value proposition?
P: Well, you have to consider that normal streaming platforms like Spotify, still haven’t made a dime of their businesses. They’re losing money - although doing really well on the stock market - and they pay their artists the leftover scraps after labels and middlemen take their cut. That’s a problem.
There’s also a big fault on the way legacy systems calculate royalties. It’s not based on actual value. A stream on Spotify is counted after 30 seconds. That means that, since there’s a fixed amount per stream, stores that play Spotify playlists all day long can stream royalties for more than they’re actually paying in subscriptions. This only benefit mainstream artists and labels. You can also easily exploit the system by setting up some code that changes a song after 30 seconds in perpetuity. You can end up paying 10 euro a month and listen to something worth 200 euro. That’s a big gap. That’s why Spotify doesn’t make profits and has to pay artists very little. And it’s so easy to do that you can expect a lot of people are doing this.
A: I see. How can blockchain solve that then?
P: Well, thanks to blockchain you can actually base payments on value. Spotify will make pop artists always win. If you have a 3:00 min song you’ll get as many royalties as a deep house musician that made a6-minutee song. But you are engaging them for twice as long if you make deep house.
Blockchain can track how much people have been listening to your track. Your real engagement. Then you’ll be rewarded based on that. Based on the actual time that people have been listening to your music, rather than how many people have passed through your song. That’s fair. That’s sustainable.
A: How do you see Volareo as a smart voice controlled hardware to be implemented on blockchain platforms and music discovery?
P: Well, I’m obsessed with user experience. And if it works out as well as I think it might, it will be very helpful for both music discovery and adoption.
The voice controls will help listeners be present in whatever they are doing. If you’re cooking and Soundcloud puts on some garbage after it has finished your song (happens to me a lot), you can just tell it to put on something else. Even with your hands all fatty and nasty. I like the thought of that.
Or if you’re having people over and you play music, you don’t need to look at your phone and get distracted by the other notifications. Just tell it what to play, and enjoy. That I can see becoming popular, especially now that we are seeing the drawbacks of our “notification-based” society and more people want to log off.
And for the blockchain-based music projects, having compatible hardware to play it from will certainly help with adoption going forward. And with the built-in interactive features, it is likely to increase people’s overall interest in music as well. Voice comments on tracks in context, tipping, and similar interactive features will help bridge the gap between listeners and artists, and is something both sides will benefit from. I think a lot of people assume listening to music is a one way street. But smaller artists like myself actually care a great deal about comments and interacting with listeners. I will for instance use the “two-way” tipping a lot on Choon once it’s implemented to thank people for being nice.
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