Blockchain in Entertainment Industry
One industry that is particularly poised for Blockchain disruption is the Entertainment Industry. Entertainment Industry, as it is today, has a challenging gatekeepers where new entrants are disallowed or lost in the clutter. Blockchain Technology in the entertainment industry, can actually enable a democratic environment for talented individuals or groups to get their worth of spotlight.
Blockchain, a globally distributed ledger provides an immutable record of truth, that in many ways solves the major woes of Entertainment today.
Content Creation and Distribution
Previously it was next to impossible to create music or piece of entertainment without having the backing of media giants or top music labels and studios. One could not distribute and monetize the created entertainment piece without their backing.
Not much has resolved with the advent of open platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify and Netflix. These new middlemen have not completely resolved the challenges in the industry and in fact, just modified ways to the initial approach of the industry. These middlemen have the broadcasting rights and scope, they decide the compensation levied to the artists and also authenticate its content. They also decide the scope of their outreach in few instances and curb to an extent, the natural organic ways of reach. This has led to serious disputes around artist compensation and treatment — Taylor Swift’s feud with Spotify and Apple music, and many such cases.
In the words of Taylor Swift, “All I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment,” she said in 2014. “I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to
an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music.”
Blockchain, by offering a decentralized digital database of records gives companies and artists to have an encrypted records of ownership and enable smart contract for a fair exchange of those records. Blockchain gives the customizability in terms of smart contracts meeting the artist’s requirements.
With blockchain, you can eliminate the middleman publishers, distributors, and retailers, so the artist might retain as much as 90–95% of the total.
Ujo is an example of a blockchain self-publication service. The same principle holds true for other forms of media — articles, videos, photos — any digital asset can be watermarked and sold with light or no intermediaries taking a slice of the revenue. Grammy winner Imogen Heap is one of the most prominent musicians to embrace the blockchain. She recently teamed up with Ujo, a company looking to be the one-stop shop for independent music distribution and payments, to release the first song on the Ethereum blockchain.
Smart Contract Enabled Content Rights
Content piracy and duplicacy is another troublesome arena in the entertainment industry. The scale at which content is distributed, makes it an uphill task to manage such wide scale outreach.
Smart Contract enabled Blockchain networks has an efficient solution for this problem.
On a similar note — the issue of copyright law has been a long-standing problem in the entertainment industries. There’s been many a scuffle over the origin of such contents and their rightful ownership of origin. Blockchain enabled identification will put an end to such disputes.
Merchandising and Ticketing over Blockchain Network
Blockchain has the ability of keeping the authentic, authentic.
When was the last time you were dubbed with a counterfeit merchandise of your favourite artist just to later remorse the excess money or equivalent exchanged for the same. Many cases of ticketing frauds at large events has caused millions to the industry.
All these woes can effectively be handled by a blockchain network. In the UK, BitTicket has launched a blockchain-based platform that manages the sale of public event tickets and aims to tamp down on ticket scalping.Aventus and TicketChain are competitors.
Undoubtedly, Blockchain offers several remedies to heal the tech stagnant entertainment industry. At a more mundane level, any business does recordkeeping. Trust and transparency are long-term benefits to doing the recordkeeping with the help of a blockchain. However, we are yet to see, the full capabilities of this next generation technology.
