IMU: A Coin for the Starving Artist
It is currently harder than ever for artists to generate a sustainable revenue stream from their digital work and the distribution of wealth has never been more unbalanced. Imusify hopes to change that.
The way we experience content is changing fast. This shift is happening most abruptly in the music space and the existing infrastructure is struggling to keep up.
The music streaming industry has grown exponentially in the last few years and now generates roughly $50 billion annually. The two biggest players in the space, Apple Music and Spotify, receive over 75% of the total revenue. The current methods with which these companies pay their artists are both inefficient and unfair to smaller artists. Legislators are starting to take action against artist exploitation but the present conditions make it almost impossible for a new artist to attain a sustainable revenue stream.
In the current streaming ecosystem, it takes roughly 58 hours of streaming content for an artist to get paid one dollar. The music video ecosystem is tough for artists as well, with 1,000 streams of YouTube videos yielding only one dollar.
To make matters worse, music revenue wealth distribution inequality is at an all time high. Currently, the top 1% of artists receive 77% of the total revenue.
Fundamental Issues in the Digital Music Industry
Digital Rights Management
In order for an artist/rights owner to receive royalties for their digital work, they must register with a collecting society. These societies collect royalties on the owners’ behalf and split them amongst the parties involved. However, this distribution is sometimes predetermined by the society. So even when artists produce, distribute and market their own work digitally, they still have little to no control over ownership and security of rights.
Payment Transparency
Ask any artist: getting paid for your work is a nightmare. The payments can take weeks or even months to get delivered and there is little to no transparency in the payment process. This lack of transparency comes from intermediaries within the current centralized system.
Payment intermediaries include rights organizations, collecting services, publishing companies and record labels. As these centralized organizations claim to offer some form of value to an artist hoping to publish and receive a return on their work, artists will often offer a larger portion of their revenue to these services in the hopes that they will deliver the remainder of the revenue in a reliable and professional fashion. These artists typically sell or license their work to publishing companies for 25–50%.
Licensing and Monetization
The current laws regarding licensing and royalty rate-setting are outdated and don’t leverage the available technology to track licenses and deliver royalties. Music streaming services don’t have a robust enough infrastructure to handle the appropriate payments based on the usage of music. Smaller artists don’t have the resources or knowledge to enforce control over their content and rights and therefore usually get exploited by the bigger companies.
The Solution: A Decentralized Global Music Economy
Imusify is a decentralized music ecosystem that aims to provide an open-sourced innovation space for development into music investment, distribution, and user experience.
Built on NEO’s blockchain, imusify will leverage smart contract technology and Initial Token Offering (ITO) infrastructure to help artists succeed in the music industry in multiple aspects. By using NEO’s cutting edge smart economy technology, imusify is revolutionizing the global music economy in a way that will create transparency and deliver increased value to all music shareholders. While the goals and ambitions of imusify’s open-source team of artists, entrepreneurs, and developers are far-reaching, the following features will exist in their smart music platform’s launch this summer:
ITO Crowdfunding for Artists
ITOs (similar to ICOs) have been one of the most successful use cases of blockchain technology to date. They allow for a very low barrier to entry for supporters and fans that want to help fund a project they believe in and receive equity. Imusify leverages this technology to help artists crowdfund for projects like albums, music videos, and tours.
In addition, these tokens can also be programmed as what are called “private access tokens”. These token allow holders to access exclusive content provided by the artist, which can be anything ranging from discounted ticket prices to private chat access with the artist. These tokens can also be traded on an exchange within the imusify platform for other artists’ tokens, or the platform’s utility token, IMU.
This feature will greatly benefit up-and-coming artists that have a lot of talent but lack the funds and resources they need to develop and get started on what they need to become successful.
Transparent and Fair Artist Royalty Payments
Imusify compensates artists with IMU tokens based on the usage of their music through smart contracts. Smart contracts allow for artists to see exactly how they are being paid, allows the transaction to be executed immediately and autonomously and cuts out the middlemen in the transaction process that take profits from the artist.
In addition, the way that imusify is constructed, users can use the platform for free, as the artists are rewarded IMU tokens from a pool of IMU reserved to reward platform users.
Marketplace of Music Industry Participants
Imusify aims to create an ecosystem where a multitude of different types of industry contributors can interact with each other. An international music marketplace of business development services and products such as videography, production, advertising, promotion and graphic design will provide artists, creators and entrepreneurs with immediate access to quality development resources.
For example, an advertiser in Germany could buy a commercial license to an artist’s song from Canada through a smart contract. The artist would receive the IMU payment immediately and could then use the tokens to buy new recording equipment from an American supplier or schedule a recording session with a producer, all without converting their IMU to fiat currency.
Incentivized Content Curation
When a user creates an imusify account, a NEO wallet is automatically created with a starting balance of IMU tokens. Any user can earn IMU tokens by interacting with the platform and curating content by sharing it throughout their unique network. This not only allows users to get paid for listening to and discovering music, but also creates an immense value to artists with their fans and network becoming unofficial promoters of their work.
Co-evolutionary Copyright Management
Adaptable tools on the platform now give artists total control over their content ownership and rights and the revenue stream they will generate. They can now assign their IP rights as they see fit, whether they make business deals, want to credit the songwriter or want to assign a portion to each token in a crowdfunding ITO. This allows for a much more transparent system in situations where artists sample other songs or remix songs. They will no longer have to worry about copyright issues as they can just encode the appropriate royalties into their smart contract. When the song starts to generate revenue on the platform, the smart contract will immediately distribute the earnings accordingly.
From the whitepaper:
If we are in the future of currencies, we must look to the past to remind ourselves why this new exchange began. In the era of the Silk Road, nomads travelled to trade art pieces for other foreign goods. In this context, the idea of digital currency and a new trade ecosystem seems acceptable and necessary to match the needs of an expanding digital global economy. With the introduction of the imusify platform, artists from around the world have the unique ability to connect with other artists to create and distribute their own content, as well as exchange their own goods and services.
