My comments here are not from an impartial observer.. I am the Managing Director of Bittunes, an ‘Independent Digital Music Market’, where we stream independent music for free, but members still buy tracks, even though users can stream them for free forever.. Why? Because a) we have changed the equation of how royalties are divided, splitting them between Artists and their fans who buy and distribute tracks, and b) because this makes buying a social/communication activity and.. people like to buy music.
The premise of this article, “A Fair Music Streaming Model is Possible” like most other views expressed on this subject is still skewed to the higher end of the long tail (power-law curve) of music. Even the notion of appealing to the “important Indie labels” is looking toward the upper side of the power-law curve of music. This is not really reflective of the actual world we are living in. The largest sector of musicians are the unsigned, the prosumers, the bedroom Pro tools and Logic wizards using Mac laptops (for instance).. or the band of school kids in the garage.. and this is after all the sector from where all new talent spawns from.
The problem with the ‘The New Model: Realistic, Sustainable Pricing’ is that it is overly complex, and that alone is enough to doom it to obscurity, but also it is purporting to sell something roughly equivalent to what consumers are buying now, (at least it will be from their point of view) but at a significantly higher price.. and that is a huge barrier to entry right there.
It is also pointless asking those larger actors in the music equation that are part of the existing status quo, even if they are an order of magnitude down from what you refer to as “Big Music”, to wean themselves from the nipple they are sucking on. Just as the ice factories never saw the need for refrigerators, ‘Big Music’ and medium sized “important Indie labels” will not see the need to put themselves out in the cold on a matter of principle. No.. change must and will come from further down the long tail.. because that’s where the massive volume of independent actors exist. Empower these musicians, song writers and their fans.. and you will start a grass roots movement that will eventually disrupt the Ice Factories of the Music Business.
Bittunes keeps things very simple.. It is a market for Independent Music only, where Artists must own the rights to the music they submit (although we will open up to include ‘small’ indie labels soon). We use the creative commons licensing framework for trading rights (‘Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND’ with ‘commercial use’ restrictions waived within the legal deed by participating Artists) and we use Bitcoin as our native currency, but denominated in US$.
These two aspects allow us to a) avoid any potential rights conflicts with ‘Big Music’ and their affiliates and b) avoid costs associated with running legacy merchant payment systems.. These rights and payments innovations allow us to operate freely across all territories and only recently out of Beta and now freely available on Google Play, we have 139 Artists participating from 34 different Countries.
We are small, but the formula is starting to work. It all stemmed from a plan formulated almost exactly 10 years ago and put into action in 2013 when it became obvious that Bitcoin was starting to ‘cross the chasm’. The diagram below is completely unchanged from our first concept value flow diagram for the Independent Music Market drawn in 2006.
We are following a disciplined disruptive strategy, which if you study this theory usually emanates from a product or service that is ‘not good enough’ for main stream users, but gradually gets a foot-hold and eventually can become a disruptive force.
In summary.. our feeling is that you cant beat this ‘Big Music’ problem by fighting such a deeply ingrained system on its own terms. You have to change the basis of competition, and use your opponents weight against them. Bitcoin isn’t perfect yet as a micro payments system, but with new technologies in development like @Blockstream ‘s Sidechains and Lightening Network , we are confident that we are on the right path, and working with the right partners for a durable long term solution.
You can see a video here of a quick explanation by me of the Bittunes system, in English, and here by our CTO, Mr. Adrien Violet in French, (with subtitles).
