Blockchain For Music Credits

“If music be the food of love, play on.” — William Shakespeare

The demand for music consumption has created a vital business industry encompassing production, distribution, publishing, live concerts, and album sales. Currently, we are on the blockchain paradigm transfer. Blockchain has excellent opportunities to re-imagine many industries, and it holds tremendous potential to reshape the future of the music industry. Blockchain music applications include solutions for a broad scope of industry problems:

• Releasing music.
• Streamlining the distribution model.
• Funneling more revenue towards the creators by eliminating fees imposed by middlemen between end-users and artists.

Proper Rights

Blockchain technology can be used to establish who owns the intellectual property rights of creative items by using a distributed ledger. A distributed ledger is an open-source ledger that holds all records of all transactions within a blockchain. However, not all blockchains allow all people to view this information.

In theory, blockchain technology can be used as clear evidence of ownership and used in court if necessary. This is particularly useful for the music industry to help prevent legal battles between studios and artists. The music industry is known for its complicated laws on ownership — from ownership of the audio itself to specific lyrics within a song, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It also can make the process easier if using blockchain technology becomes the standardized way to establish ownership because different companies and institutions may state requests in different ways, with different wording, requirements, and even formatting, some of which may be manipulated as loopholes.

Blockchain technology can also:

• smooth over any issues involved in purchasing the rights of music (if, for example, one music company wants to buy the music rights from another music company)
• help other companies such as film studios pay for rights to use music
• be used to trace the history of those rights, as users will have a transparent record of its history

What could NFTs do for the music industry?

NFTs could allow songs, albums, music videos, live streams, interviews, and merch to be bought and sold as collectible items on the blockchain (a type of public database that exists across multiple computers in a network). Just assigned records gain value from their rarity and symbolic importance; NFTs could make the same true for digital items. Even if the thing is not rare itself, the token is rare, giving it its value.

The future of NFTs and fan relationships

There have recently been some talks about how artists can use NFTs to build and monetize a superfan community, with fans buying into an artist’s community by purchasing an NFT “ticket” or “entry pass.” Instead of subscribing to your community with money (like they can do on other creator platforms like Patreon and Twitch), fans would never cancel their subscription; instead, sell their NFT to another buyer interested in joining the community.

It’s clear that fans want to find new ways to be a part of their favorite artists’ projects, and the concept of owning a part of the creative process means that fans no longer need to sit on the sidelines watching artists create from afar anymore.

Birthvenue has been working towards adding value to India’s blockchain ecosystem by contributing not only through our enterprise solutions work but also through our learning and development division. We have built platforms to accommodate multiple use cases and deliver our solutions through robust partnerships with industry leaders.

Reach out to us at admin@birthvenue.in to discuss any potential ideas you might have. We will be able to actualize those ideas for you and bring them close to fruition.

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This is a post in our Medium blog, ‘Blockchain for Everyone.’

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