Notes from First Live Video AMA by Musioconomi team
Recently Musiconomi did a live Video AMA with team with a special acoustic performance from The Motorleague! I wrote a summary of the discussion in Q&A format. Do note that I have rephrased the Q&A in my own words. If you feel there is a mistake or unclear just let me know. Also If you would like to check out the original video (Highly Recommended!) check out the link below:
If you would prefer a youtube link of the AMA instead — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpCwePQFL7A
AMA Participants
- David Werba — Co-founder & CMO at Musiconomi
- Brian Byrne — Co-founder, Chief Musician Ambassador
- Elio Di Iorio — Co-founder, Chief Organizer and Spokesperson
- Don Levandier — Vocalist & Guitarist of The Motorleague band
Q01 — How does this project benefit consumers? How does it benefit the artist? Why would anyone invest in MCI?
Elio — There is a lot of constraints in music economy in general. We’ve seen a lot of various models with the Internet. It introduced file sharing which was not there before the legacy model of listening via Tapes/CDs. The internet caused a lot of change and turmoil. Things aren’t working very well in the current state. This new change has badly affected the artists, consumers etc — the industry in general.
Music listeners/enthusiasts want to listen and support great music but they struggle to do so. Same goes for artists.
There is an opportunity for investors to bring a change and make money off of this opportunity, Where investors can bring their business ideas and experience to revive the industry.
Q02 — How will you deal with licensing and royalty that has been part of the industry for many years?
Brian — Instead of trying to get permission from them or get them to buy in, we’ll build whatever we are building because the focus is on the artist and investors who’ll drive this space. When we do a good job of that, these companies will come to us and we’ll try to figure out a way that works for all of us. Doing it the other way around will take ages. Ultimately we want the music economy to get together again and work for each other.
Q03 — (Follow up to Q02) What are these company going to do once they see that all the fans/artists are migrating towards this new blockchain enabled music industry?
Brian — If you would just look at how far behind they are in terms of payments in terms of schedule and money it’s alarming! I got a check from some institution for 44$ yesterday for 2yrs of work. That alone just speaks volume in terms of why there will be a shift in the industry! (He didn’t really answer the question here though 😛)
Q04 — Is MCI based off an existing blockchain technology like bitcoin or specific blockchain features being used?
Elio — Some of the team members came from the Music Coin Blockchain. So we have a lot of experience with working with the blockchain &the community (of music coin). Our experience of working with music coin helped us polish what worked/didn’t work. There are so many various solutions that are coming up as blockchain is still in its infancy. The rational thing would have been to just use the music coin blockchain as a solution for the musiconomi project (Note: music coin and musiconomi are two different projects). We are looking at all of the state of the art technologies that are available to us today and we are still tweaking things and talking to the community to build what is best for everyone.
Q05 — Why not just use ethereum instead of creating a whole new cryptocurrency?
Elio — Initially we were looking at Pay-Per-Play (PPP) model (Check this link for more details on various suggested models) where each song play would have a pay out transaction to the artist. This was not feasible with the current state of ethereum as there will be millions of micro payment transactions. And if we factor in the gas cost it makes it unusable for such a model. Hence it required for a new token and a blockchain that supports that model. However we do need our token irrespective of what underlying blockchain we use, as that will represent the value of the system.
Q06 — What is Musiconomi and what problem does musiconomi aim to solve?
Brian — Primary focus is to eliminate the intermediaries that bring questionable value to the music economy. We want to make sure that all the participants in this system are responsible for what they bring in. Using the blockchain technology we’ll add the missing ingredients of transparency, secure, global and borderless to the industry.
Q07 — Is there a model where you pay a flat amount per month and it will be split between those you have listen to or will this always be straight pay for play?
Elio — One of the concepts of Pay-Per-Play model is the transparency of seeing what is being listened to and that shows up in how they paid. We like that as a concept. We also recognise that we have range of listeners who are used to the subscription model where they pay a certain amount every month and get to to listen on a unlimited fashion. We don’t see that our model has to be a binary of either PPP or Subscription. We are trying to look at hybrid solution that brings in the benefits of PPP but also look after our listeners by also using some sort of subscription where they pay per month and forget just like they used to in other traditional services. This is still an ongoing discussion with the community. And we will come up with a model that works for artists, listeners and investors.
Q08 — What is the ICO Structure (Total tokens issues, capped/uncapped, locked contract, length etc etc)?
Elio — Current info is in total there will be 100 million MCI tokens.
Breakdown:
- 25% release to public
- 25% team, partners
- 25% strategic partnership reserve
- 25% future release (2018/2019)
The strategic partnership reserve will be key part of what we are doing. In the current legacy system there are a lot of people itching to contribute to the system. We just signed a partnership with a label in sweeden called substream. This reserve token will be part of it. We’ll have more details on crowdsale info and its dates being announced soon! For More Info check this link.
David — On a sidenote Håkan Ludvigson founder/owner has joined us an advisor!
Q09 — When will MCI be available on exchanges?
Elio — After the crowdsales it’ll take couple of a weeks but not a long period. Probably within a month post crowdsale gets finished.
Brian — We are definitely targeting bigger exchanges and make sure everything is good.
Q10 — Why were you (Don Levandier is a vocalist & guitarist of The Motorleague band) attracted to musiconomi project?
Don — In the current streaming platform you pay sometimes as much as 10$ per month as a listener. And I listen to this band called The Thermals on this platform.
As an artist I always wonder how much of this subscription fees that I pay do this bands actually get? I’m sure it’s 0. Half a million plays would be a penny in terms of payout! My money is going to artists who are much higher up in the curve.
David — Spot on Don! We have been having the same chat with the community on slack. Spotify or soundcloud are usual part of that discussion on how this whole financial model is completely broken!
Q11 — What are your (Don) biggest challenges as a recording/touring act in the current industry and how do you think musiconomi will help in that?
Don — Keeping yourself afloat in the current financial model of the ecosystem is the hardest challenge of them all. As a band of 4 you have to pay for 4 people. That’s like having a 4 person startup. With musiconomi you’ll have a pay per play which is fair and transparent to the artist. That alone is enough for us to switch to the new model.
Q12 — You have 3 top 20 songs in Canada, you have a great support from the fans. What’s next for The Motorleague?
Don — We are still in the cycle of record and tour. Our last album is 2yrs old now. We gotta churn out more music!
< Don played acoustic version of their hit song — All the words >
Q13 — Are you hiring? If yes, where do I send my resume?
David — We have been flooded with this question over the past few months! And it’s just amazing considering I have been in this industry since ages now, but I have never seen this before. Once the crowdsale is over we’ll be looking at hiring for sure. For now, connect with us on linkedin, talk to us on slack, fb anything. We wanna know the people before we hire them. Just talk to us through any social platform we are available on.
Q14 — How do you plan to educate the market about this revolutionary platform?
Brian — We have talked about this quite a lot internally. We’ll need to educate the artists about blockchain, how to setup a wallet etc. We’ll need to connect the artists and entrepreneurs. We’ll setup camps and help them educate about how blockchain works etc.
David — We’ll also be doing video tutorials, live streams (like this one). We have a lot plan in the next few months to work on educating everyone about this.
Q15 — How did you find out about cofound.it and what made you reach out to them?
Elio — I participated in ICONOMI crowdsale last year. Earlier this year when we were working on the music coin project. Once we had done enough and needed to fund the project to grow further, I started looking around and I found out cofound.it just like that. I reached out to Jan (Co-founder of cofound.it) and he asked me to reach out to Daniel. We had a chat, did a little workshop. And it’s just been an amazing journey since then with them. (Note: cofound.it is a spinoff of iconomi project)
Q16 — What would be your dream band to partner with for your platform?
Brian — I just want to work with bands that want to work with us actually (without sounding disingenuous). In the legacy system you become a priority and some days later someone else is the priority. So we want to work with those who share our vision and we want to empower such artists. If I look at The Motorleague, they are open to using new technology, writing great songs & they share our vision to take the next step. We want to work with such bands. Most guys I wanna work with are dead already 😛. So I’m just open to all great bands!
Q17 — Who have you already partnered with?
Brian — Some of the ones we can talk about right now are:
- Hakan from substream.
- Emel Michael from UK
- Tim Arnold
- Folami
- Penny Foster
- The Wintyr (who lent music for our crowdsale video)
- The Motorleague
- Mike Turner
There are more but just can’t talk about them yet. Stay tuned we’ll announce those as well 🙂
Q18 — Will we be able to purchase merchandise from the musiconomi platform?
Elio — Great question! Answer is YES! We’ll be bringing in a store front concept to the platform. We’ll be building tools to help any music related business, organisation, any interested 3rd parties to use the underlying platform and technology for their business. Some other aspects we want to cover would be ticketing for shows. We have been talking to music schools to benefit from the platform.
Think of Musiconomi like Amazon for Music and not a better Spotify or iTunes. It’s a marketplace of music industry and not just a music streaming platform.
You can buy/sell sheet music from musiconomi for example. It’ll be a portal for music related business.
Brian — It’ll be beyond just the streaming music. We wanna make sure everyone is included in it. It’ll work for artists, listeners, businesses, organisations etc. You can back artists and get paid for that. (Check this link for some of the features that they have listed)
