The Emanate Eight
8 ways Emanate is poised to evolve the music industry…
#1 . The history of the industry
The music industry has become what it is today through a slow, organic process. Over the last 60 years, the way music is recorded, distributed and consumed has changed dramatically but the structure of who gets paid along the way has not really changed. From a time where physical records, cassettes and CDs needed to be produced and distributed to a time when most new music is never sealed on physical product…. we’re a little stuck in our ways!
P2P torrents in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s shook the music industry and it took almost a decade to recover.
Industry revenue declined dramatically, and it has only just started to recover through the streaming services.
Another wave of P2P technology is on the way, and this time we have the ability to share not only the music, but also the payments! Emanate has the door wide open to the broader music industry because we believe it is important for us to evolve with the technology this time, not to fight it.
Could this be music’s ‘Uber’ moment?
As direct monetisation, ownership of music rights and self-publishing become more and more popular, platforms like Emanate provide the perfect playground for innovative, self-empowered musicians.
#2. Music Industry size
Various different figures are quoted when people talk about the size of the music industry. Let’s take a look at a few different aspects, and where things are headed.
Record Industry Revenue rose to $18 billion in 2018, and it is rising for the first time this millennium. Thanks to the streaming services which now account for 75% of this revenue.
This comes from 242 million paying subscribers around the world, these numbers are skewed towards western audiences. In China alone, NetEase music has over 600 million listeners, but the appetite for the premium account is lower.
Forecasters see global streaming revenue growing exponentially as these markets mature. MIDIA Research has this sitting at $45 Billion USD by 2026.
More broadly, the music industry is three times larger when you factor in software sales, instruments, tuition and merchandise. Start including events and other services on the fringe and many industry experts believe it’s a $1 Trillion industry.
So where does Emanate fit in?
Emanate’s ‘tokenised freemium’ revenue model will see artists, labels and even fans paying a subscription fee for the top tier of services with EMT token holdings mandatory, also offsetting the cost. In this new on-demand world where streaming revenue is growing exponentially, Emanate is positioned as the fastest way to get money for your streams. Either directly through Emanate, or by using Emanate as a central repository to push audio into various 3rd party platforms.
We aim to have 200,000 Pro Accounts (artists) and 5 million Basic Accounts (listeners) on Emanate by 2023, generating over $324,000,000 USD of Emanate network revenue every year.
#3: Not just crypto Spotify
When you first dig under the hood of cryptocurrency, blockchain and smart-contracts it’s pretty easy to get excited about the idea of decentralised music streaming or ‘Crypto Spotify. It’s logical to think about immutable contracts, digital rights management and meta-data on the blockchain.
But Emanate is not really about any of that.
Emanate focuses on 3 key things:
A) Artists and rights holders get paid as audio is consumed
B) Anyone in the world can collaborate and get the realtime payments
C) Users hold tokens to align incentives and give the community some say over governance
Anyone of these things would make a massive impact on improving the efficiency of the industry. But the combination of all three in a single technology platform is so powerful it has the potential to drive an evolutionary leap.
With this in mind, Emanate is offering creators one place from which to share their audio, collaborate with others and get paid. This is nothing like what incumbent services offers and is not like anything currently available anywhere else in the world.
Let’s dive deeper:
A) Getting paid as audio is consumed
Most audio consumption in the world today triggers a payment event that takes months or years to get to the artist. Broadcast in a cafe or radio play needs to be collected by a 3rd party agency who are slow, inaccurate and inefficient. These royalties usually take over 6 months to get to the owners. Even playback via a streaming service like Spotify or Apple music is paid quarterly.
The Emanate Demo shows how artists can get paid as quick as 6 seconds, but playback does not have to be limited to the Emanate User Experience — this could be consumed into any digital media channel which is a topic we will cover in the next few days.
B) Collaborate with anyone
Artists are used to holding their work close to their chests, and most musicians have a rip-off story or two from when they learned the hard way about the dark side of the industry.
Emanate allows artists to collaborate over ‘smart-collaborations’ a framework where the consenting parties agree to the terms of the collaboration before it is ‘published’ and the payment splits are executed in code. If the music is published on Emanate, the payments automatically go to the right people. If it is taken off Emanate and exploited in other ways… the originator has hard, publicly available evidence of the original agreement within the smart collaboration, sealed on the blockchain.
On top of the protection this offers, Emanate should quickly become a hotbed of creative exploration with world’s best selection of community-sourced sounds, samples, loops, lyrics, acapellas, drums, remix packs, sound effects and synths. And of course, everyone gets paid. This also does not exist in any other platform.
C) Decentralised governance
Artists on Emanate must hold EMT in the long term to publish work and get paid. This requirement means each participant in the community has ‘skin in the game’ which will help prevent foul play.
Emanate community members who don’t make music will also play an active role in moderation, playlisting and helping to promote the healthy use of Emanate.
On top of the functional benefits, active EMT holders will be paid rewards for their efforts. More on token economics to come soon.
Emanate is working with eosDAC to develop a framework for decentralised governance. The early stages can be seen here on the dashboard.
Huge credit to eosDAC for building this DAC toolkit for the benefit of the community.
Clearly Emanate is a lot more than a crypto spotify or soundcloud. Our User Interface on our Alpha platform looks a bit like that, but behind the scenes and on the roadmap is so much more.
#4. The World’s Fastest Music Payment Engine
The Emanate team know the competition pretty well, both in the blockchain space and amongst centralised incumbents. We’re pretty certain at this point, that what we have created, is the fastest music monetisation engine on the planet. When we were invited to London by Block One to showcase our DEMO, we were executing payments every 2 seconds of audio streamed. Check it out below:
And it’s not just about payments.
At the start of the video you saw a simple version of the ‘smart-collaboration’ framework that will be sitting behind the Alpha Platform set for launch this month.
So not only do artists get paid instantly, so do their collaborators, managers, labels and anyone else involved. Anywhere in the world, no matter where it is played from.
The only way to get paid faster is to go busking, and let’s face it… that’s pretty limited in terms of audience.
Emanate is like a digital busking gig where the whole world is your audience!
We hope we can keep this claim for as long as possible!
#5: VR/AR/Gaming
On February 2nd 2019, EDM star of the moment, Marshmellow played a virtual rave inside the game Fortnite to a live online audience of over 10 million people. Even the YouTube video has over 37,000,000 views.
The result of this media mash-up is two-parts awesome, one part sad, and another part slightly scary. Whether you like or lump it, it’s easy to see that there will be more of this in future and let’s face it… there will be some way weirder shit than this on the internet in years to come!
So what does this have to do with Emanate?
Emanate is positioned to artists and labels as:
“one place to store your music where it can be consumed, collaborated on and paid for by anyone or anything, anywhere in the world”
While it won’t be a feature in Alpha, we are quickly making these integrations a focus of the Emanate Audio Exchange Protocol.
While the Marshmellow/Fortnite gig was a collaboration between two of the biggest brands in the music and gaming world in 2019, we foresee gaming, AR and VR environments developing with much more niche audiences.
Imagine, a virtual Rave Cave, Bush Doof or Festival, procured by underground 3D artists and filled with virtual (pre-recorded or live) performances by artists globally.
Imagine a game developer needing new and interesting music every time the player enters a new room or level.
Picture every band or music producer having an interactive audio-visual element to each of their releases.
There is no question that audio-arts and visual-arts are becoming closer and closer together and Emanate could be the protocol for consuming music into the environments without complicated licensing deals, ensuring the artists is paid for every second.
#6: Focus on a niche (at first)
There is an old saying that goes;
“If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing nobody”.
This resonates with us here at Emanate and it is pertinent to the music industry. How can you market a music service to lean-sipping mumble rappers at the same time as tea-sipping classical music fans? Country music lovers and Ravers? Forget it.
Many music products try, and fail, and wind up with a weird music industry logo with a flaming guitar wearing headphones or similar imagery.
That’s why we are focussing on music niches first. It’s all about bringing ‘tribes’ to Emanate and tribalism is alive and well in the music world. We can do this one group at a time, with a strong brand that resonates the essence of what we stand for — bringing music lovers Sound from the Source.
For us, first out of the starting blocks is electronic music. Nowadays Electronic music is everywhere, having well and truly infiltrated the pop and hip hop scenes. We’re lucky enough to have an electronic music network that is very strong globally so let’s check out a few of the Emanate crew:
Tommy Trash
Tommy has spent the last decade dominating the dance music world, rising from his bedroom in Bundaberg to the mainstage at Electric Daisy Carnival off the back of hits like The End and All My Friends. Before long he was living in LA and collaborating with the likes of Deamau5, Zedd, Empire of the Sun and the Swedish House Mafia. Tommy is the Head of Music for Emanate and his genuine global connection continues to open new doors for Emanate.
BLOND:ISH
Not only is Vivie-Ann an A-grade DJ and music producer, she is an avid environmentalist working tirelessly against the use of soft plastics. Not only that, she’s a founding member of the shEOS Block Producer! Vivie is fully aligned with the Emanate ethos, and as an artist, she has remixed music for Pete Tong and released tunes on Noir, Kompakt, and the formidable Get Physical Records.
LO’99
Fellow Sydney lad LO’99 is a busy boy. Running Medium Rare Records and regularly touring the globe, he fills nightclubs and festivals with his bass-heavy future house sounds. He is a man of the moment, who regularly gets the sweat dripping from the ceilings inside Sydney’s own Chinese Laundry. LO’99s club chart-topping music is already up on the Emanate Demo and there is a LOT more coming to the Alpha platform from him and the Medium Rare squad.
Beyond a firm start in the electronic world, the Emanate team are working on finding the right influencers across all genres to tackle them one at a time.
Ultimately, the world is a very big place and we want all types of music to have a home on Emanate. There is no other truly global music platform right now, all DSPs have some sort of east vs west bias.
We have a few tricks up our sleeve in that regard, but we won’t reveal those just yet.
#7: Token Economy
Token economics (tokenomics) is probably the most important, yet often overlooked the component of a blockchain project. Tokenomics is not the number of tokens minted and % held by the team etc. Tokenomics is about the token model itself.
Token models, like business models, need careful planning and modeling, trial, testing, and tweaking. There is not too much point in launching a project that simply tokenizes a traditional business model… the idea with decentralization is to change all that right?
Emanate’s token model was developed in consultation with Mark Roddy and the Coin Hunter Research Group and we already posted an in-depth article here about it.
Since we started publishing this two-token model, a number of music projects have picked it up and some of our other favourite EOS projects have picked it up too!
For those looking for a high-level snapshot, here are the key points:
- Emanate runs on a dual-token system, where users stake the EMT token for network access and governance, but an internal stable token circulated for plays and rewards (we call it MNX). This eliminates 10k bitcoin pizza type problems
- Maximum supply for EMT is 208,000,000 (59 million currently in circulation) The MNX supply will be dynamically managed according to how many EMT are available to be claimed as rewards and how many dollars are held in the pool from subscription fees
- A user’s EMT holdings determine the amount of rewards collected from the network. Over time, EMT will also give weight to user votes in the decentralised community
- EMT holdings will also reduce subscription fees, as low as zero in some cases.
- When a user pays a subscription fee, MNX is minted, when a user cashes out, MNX is burned.
- MNX represents the total value of the unclaimed revenue and rewards available at any one time
- For 2019, 200 EMT will give basic accounts unlimited listening
- The threshold amount of EMT to hold to earn revenue as an Artist in 2019 is 1000 EMT
- For every $1 passing through the network, 85% goes out to rights holders through smart-collaborations based on seconds-played and 15% goes to EMT holders
- Only active EMT holders get the rewards, as it is a payment for services to the network, not a passive dividend
Users will be given various cash-out options, especially as the platform matures. In the near-term, EMT cash out will be an option. Users might get a better price if accepting EMT into a vesting period, and a higher price if taking EMT unlocked. We are also talking to Carbon.money about fiat on and off ramps. This will reduce the sell pressure on EMT from artists who need to collect earnings.
Right now 86% of all circulating EMT is staked into our Monthly Bonus Contract for token sale participants…
… over time this will move into network staking and as we onboard users.
A few weeks ago we released this overview of Rewards and Bonuses:
#8: Long term plans
The Emanate roadmap is detailed on the website and the vision in the whitepaper is well documented. We couldn’t be happier with the opportunities that EOSIO is presenting from a technical perspective, and so far it is all coming to life!
Let’s take a little look at what lies ahead.
Alpha
Emanate Alpha is just around the corner. We’ve been pushing the community to come and register for an Alpha account, loaded with 200 EMT right here.
The Alpha platform is an MVP. It’s all about testing the EOS main net, running our smart-collaboration technology (live, but managed by us), tweaking the token economy and continue to build our community and brand.
The MNX/EMT integration will also see artists earning real value for their plays, with an ability to pull value out. Alpha will be a simple platform, with some game-changing features for musicians. We’ve focused on design and UX in order to make the whole experience enjoyable and to enable us to onboard artists and labels into an experience that feels premium even though it is in its infancy. All accounting will be on-chain, but most of the storage will be centralised.
Beta
Post-alpha, we will deploy several updates and new feature sets, but as we head towards 2020, these will stop as we prepare for the Beta milestone release. What might Beta look like?
- Monetised playlists
- Community incentives (rewards for non-artists)
- Test run of DAW integration
- Embeddable players
- Native smart-phone apps
- Open smart collaborations framework
- IPFS trial and possible rollout for storage
This list will probably change, as the technical environment changes and as we take feedback from artists and the community.
Production (Audio Exchange Protocol)
In 2021, things really get exciting.
In the next few weeks, we will announce a new technical development partner who has reached out to help the Emanate team fulfill the end vision. This team has had significant early experience with EOSIO itself, including direct work with Block One and many other globally leading tech companies.
So what’s the plan?
Look how far EOS has come in 11 months. The amount of innovation is remarkable and the community is thriving. Now imagine where it will be in 2020, what about 2021? We anticipate in the next 2 years, it will be possible to run a completely decentralized Emanate network; from storage, to computation, right through to DNS and IP routing. Other advances like 5G make this likely to run with low latency and little downtime, perhaps even supported by mobile devices in some way.
It’s possible, or even likely, that Emanate will need a network of its own at this stage. It remains to be seen whether it is a sidechain, sister-chain or fork… or some other layer-two solution that may or may not connect to the EOS main net. One thing for sure is that in order to become a global standard for collaboration and payments in the music industry, Emanate needs to handle millions, if not billions of transactions every single day.
This is why we often talk about Emanate as more than just a DAPP. Certainly our Alpha, or even Beta releases will run on existing chains… but in order to fulfill the end vision, something greater must be built.
If you have not yet read the Emanate Whitepaper, please do. We are proud of the fact that Alpha will exceed what we envisioned in that paper and with the addition of some new partners and the continued support of the community, we can see a clear path to our ambitious end vision.
In 2019, there is no truly global music platform that transcends geography, culture and language. NetEase and Tencent music dominate in the East while Spotify and Apple Music dominate the West. SoundCloud gave the up-and-coming artist a voice… but it pays them nothing.
Imagine a world where any artist, from any corner of the globe can publish their work, collaborate with others, stamp it as their own and start getting paid instantly. Imagine if that network ran on thousands of connected computers and servers, where the artists feel in control of their files.
Imagine feeling the joy of knowing an artist is being paid instantly as you enjoy their music… and then you get paid to send it to a friend!
This world we imagined is becoming a reality thanks to the support of our music community and the awesome EOSIO blockchain community. The best thing of all is that this world will be governed by you, as an EMT token holder.
