imusify: A Music Platform for the People
A new business model that uses blockchain and smart contracts to allow music lovers to not only access their platform for free but also make money through their involvement in the imusify community.
If there are two words that have been the most talked about in the last few months, they are cryptocurrency and blockchain. Since the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed, everyone wants to learn more about the potential of these technologies.
What even is Blockchain?
In essence, a blockchain is just a fancy word for an immutable, distributed ledger that is consistently updated with blocks of data. This ledger is verified by many parties simultaneously and uses mathematical techniques to ensure that the contents of the blocks of data aren’t fraudulent. The first major use case of blockchain was cryptocurrency, since it was now possible to ensure that people can actually use digital currency in a way that can be guaranteed not to be fraudulent. The second major use case of blockchain is smart contracts.
What is a Smart Contract?
A simple analogy for a smart contract is a vending machine. To buy a chocolate bar from a vending machine, you first put your money in and choose an item. The vending machine checks if the amount of money you put in is enough for the item you chose and will either automatically dispense it or refund your money. This decision making is all based on conditional logic and is all automated.
The idea of smart contracts is to use the trust and immutability facilitated by blockchain to encode autonomous legally binding transactions.
With smart contracts, two parties that don’t trust each other can facilitate a legal transaction based on certain specified conditions without the need of a trusted third party (i.e. lawyers, notaries, banks, record labels, etc.).
What does this mean?
This means that for a platform like imusify, transactions like royalty payments can go from the user directly and immediately to the artist. Currently, these transactions are handled by multiple intermediaries and can take weeks to months to reach the artist. These intermediaries also take profits from the artist, which results in more expensive music.
Using smart contracts, for the first time ever, you and the artist themself are able to transact with each other directly, peer to peer.
Blockchains automate away the centre. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly. — Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum
The IMU Token
Using blockchain and smart contracts, imusify aims to not only create a music streaming/listening platform, but an entire smart music economy. imusify will use cryptocurrency for all transactions on their platform, so that the users can transact with each other internationally, without the need for fiat currency (like USD). This enables an international economy with three parties: users, artists, and industry professionals.
imusify will have an international music marketplace on their platform to facilitate the transactions between these three parties. Artists can sell things such as concert tickets or merchandise to users, they can license their music to overseas advertisers/filmmakers, and can also hire contract graphic designers, or purchase things like recording equipment from international providers. This can all be done without leaving the platform and without any currency conversion.
In addition, when buying items online, there are always fees associated with making purchases (Usually 1.5–3% of the purchase amount). Using cryptocurrency, these fees are reduced to a fraction of the current rates.
Revolutionary Music Recommendation Algorithm
Most music platforms like last.fm, Apple Music and Spotify recommend music to you by taking data about what type of music you listen to, then matching you with other users in their database with similar music tastes. Once this is done, the platform essentially recommends music to you that your match listens to and that you haven’t heard yet. This type of music recommendation is called collaborative filtering. This becomes a problem because it can cause you to only get recommended popular music and not actually discover any new artists.
Pandora changed that. Pandora is another music streaming service that recommended music in a way inspired by biological taxonomy. In order to do this, they started the Music Genome Project. Their company hired over fifty analysts to listen to each song on their platform and categorize it using a set of over 450 different attributes. With this information, they could develop a sort of musical DNA for each song. This was extremely powerful because now if you liked a song, Pandora could cross reference it with it’s entire collection and come up with a comprehensive list of songs that they think you’d like based on how the song actually sounds.
This was revolutionary, since it gave all the songs on their platform an even playing field while also giving much better music recommendations. One of Pandora’s best features is that they can actually justify why they chose a song with all of the attributes that it shares with the initial song you selected.
The issue that Pandora ran into is that since this classification process is highly manual in nature, their music selection is fairly limited in comparison to other platforms because the number of music curators wasn’t enough.
For the first time, we can overcome that problem.
By using cryptocurrency and smart contracts, imusify can now reward their users in real-time for curating new music on their platform.
This reward system will have two tiers. The first tier is open to all users, in which new music will be rated in terms of quality and will determine whether or not it should be listed on the platform. The second tier will consist of more qualified music listeners, who will be trained in curating new music in accordance with imusify’s musical taxonomy. These curators will assign attributes to songs in genres that they feel the most comfortable analyzing and will be rewarded with more IMU tokens than the first tier curators.
Pandora used their characteristics of songs to provide recommendations for users based on one song, since they were an online radio. imusify will use Artificial Intelligence to create an entire musical profile for each user that will cluster groups of preferred “musical DNA” and will constantly recommend new music based on these.
This new method for music recommendation was proven to work well with Pandora. It recommended music to users that they may not have been otherwise exposed to, providing them with much more opportunity to discover new artists that suited their tastes. Unfortunately, it was limited due to a lack of manpower.
imusify will leverage their user base and the convenience of using cryptocurrency and automated smart contracts for rewards to overcome this issue, and provide a more comprehensive and equal method of music recommendation than its competitors.
As with any new startup with good technology behind them, one of the biggest challenges is always user adoption. How will imusify disrupt the gargantuan streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify? There are multiple ways that imusify aims to tackle this problem and incentivize new users to move to their platform (Reasons that artists will want to use the platform are outlined in this article).
Three Reasons for Users to Switch to imusify
You can support your favourite upcoming artists’ projects and profit from their success.
One of the biggest problems for talented upcoming artists is raising the funds they need to become successful. This is always a struggle, and a lot of new artists get exploited by bigger corporations, who will exchange funding for a large portion of the artist’s future royalty payments.
By using Initial Token Offering (ITO) infrastructure on NEO’s blockchain, artists will now be able to crowdfund for new projects by issuing their own token. These tokens can be programmed to include private access to things like:
- Discounted tickets/VIP access
- Private chats with the artist
- Access to exclusive content
As the artist becomes increasingly successful, the token will appreciate in value, and can be sold on imusify’s token marketplace for other digital assets.
You can get rewarded by the platform to curate new content.
Since the barriers to entry for new artists on the platform will be so low, the content will need to be curated. Whenever a new user creates an account on imusify, a new cryptocurrency wallet is automatically created for them. This means that if you decide to help curate content for the platform, you can actually get paid to listen to and discover new music.
Buying concert tickets will be easier, cheaper, and safer.
There are two major issues with the current online ticket industry. First, concerts are now selling out in seconds. People are using bots to purchase as many tickets as they can online, and then once the concert sells out, they sell their tickets on third party websites at a huge mark up. Second, once the tickets are on this third party websites, it is almost impossible to tell whether they are actually official.
imusify will use blockchain technology to overcome both of these issues. On the platform, every ticket that is sold will have a digital fingerprint and can be verified on the blockchain (which will also include the original price it was bought for). In addition, a users digital identity must be used to purchase tickets, so a user cannot create multiple accounts and purchase large amounts of tickets simultaneously.
imusify is a new music platform that will support both artists and users, make the music industry more equitable, and provide an international music economy that will allow users, artists and industry professionals interact in a safe and efficient way that wasn’t previously possible.
