Blockchain music applications like imusify have tremendous potential.
Current trends within the blockchain space announce profound changes in the music industry. Innovative startups like imusify come to the forefront as far as bringing new propositions for the music business. We all know that the music industry is traditionally centralized, shrinking revenues to copyright holders and song creators. How does imusify plan to shake the global USD 17 billion recording industry? Which solutions have imusify come up with when it comes to compensating musicians better? Does the project sound realistic enough to reach mass adoption? Let's explore.
For those unfamiliar with blockchain technology, the idea of “fair revenues” in the music industry sounds unrealistic. Yet, artists get an average of $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream on Spotify, despite constant growth of global streaming revenues over the last decade — indeed, streaming service growth reached 15% in 2018 according to Music Business Worldwide. We are accustomed to the fact that creators don't get paid for their work. At the backbone of the imusify project comes one strong concept, which is to decentralize the music industry, enabling fans and musicians to interconnect and exchange value that is compensated.
“The ultimate vision of imusify is to create an international borderless ecosystem in which fans can directly interact with and financially support artists with the help of our platform and our native cryptocurrency, the “IMU”.” -- David Walters, Founder of imusify
Decentralization and incentives
One of the greatest impact of blockchain deals with the concept of decentralization. In a decentralized world, we can imagine that every participant is encouraged to actively participate, for example, when it deals with promoting an album or sharing new music. It's like a world where fans and musicians simply liaise together and value the participation of everyone. We call such a system "the Internet of Value" where actors now become active participants nor passive consumers anymore.
For imusify, the idea of decentralization brings a cutting edge platform that does everything an artist needs, from streaming, crowdfunding, social media integration, to copyrights management. On such a platform, not only fans and artists can share, upload, download, and track songs but can also crowdfund their projects, as well as receiving the IMU tokens — Imusify native cryptocurrency — anytime they perform an action on the ecosystem.
In short, we can think about Napster and Spotify combined into one single platform that tracks royalties and copyrights efficiently. But what imusify came up with goes ever far beyond a new platform.
Fair revenues for musicians with “IMU” tokens
Traditionally, streaming platforms keep a large part of the revenues without compensating musicians fairly. But artist’s missing revenues are also made of unclaimed royalties due to an inefficient tracking system, for example when a track is played on the radio or in a film or even in a shop, and poor royalty collection management. On top of it, artists suffer from fraud or illegal downloads, or sometimes simply can't prove they are the author of their works.
Even under the traditional model the music business currently operates, most of these issues remain unsolved. The record labels responsible for promoting artists sometimes fail at doing so due to lack of funds (apart from the biggest three, Universal, Warmer, and Sony), and streaming platforms don't track songs played out their platforms, meaning if they can help artists get discovered at first, they are totally inefficient with regards to song management services. On imusify, fans, labels, song holders exchange IMU tokens and receive IMU tokens whenever they participate.
"The underlying technology allows for tracking of the flow of content, and the smart contracts ensure a fair and immediate distribution of payouts. The content is reviewed automatically to determine copyright ownership, and digital identity tracking is used to prevent fraud." -- David Walters, Founder of imusify
How about market penetration and product adoption?
Hence, imusify brought the idea of fair payout to musicians, while allowing artists to directly engage with their fans while managing their own royalties payout. Fair payouts occur when artists and fans directly connect and share information, without compensating anyone else in the interaction apart themselves. Finally, there is a strong likelihood for the 90,7% of undiscovered artists to get known with an award-winning platform like imusify: the more people participate, the more revenues to share, the more artists get a fair promotion.
We can easily scale how much money musicians and fans could generate from actively exchanging value on imusify. Let's think of Steemit. Anytime one user posts a blog post, the community can upvote or share content, and get paid in Steem accordingly. It didn't take long for Steemit to reach 1 million users. Then, how about the 15 million new subscribers Spotify registers each quarter? As soon as all fans of music — including listeners, talented song creators, forward-thinking label managers — will figure out the massive benefits to switch to a platform like imusify, the maths are likely to shock, in turn.
As David Walters suggested, "What if there was an online p2p platform that enabled multiple features which enabled musicians to have multiple streams of income thus decentralizing the centralized structures of the music industry?", we easily foresee that the driving forces behind this change are now in place.
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