Micropayments for music with Kendraio Pay — a Grant for the Web update
In the face of government inquiries into streaming platforms and during a pandemic that has left many musicians without their main source of income, there’s a visceral need for more transparent and granular payment methods that go beyond subscription and advertising business models. And while web monetisation and micropayments have been researched and implemented within the blogging world, Medium being a big example, web monetisation solutions like Coil have so far not been optimised to work with music. Many have hailed the blockchain and tokenisation of digital assets and rights as the solution, but the highly specialised technical infrastructure is often too difficult to implement for the layperson. Enter Kendraio Pay, a proof of concept for a more open, transparent and empowering universal music player with micropayments to artists.
Retrofitting micropayments into streaming providers with Kendraio Pay
Kendraio Pay is Kendraio’s 100K USD project funded by Grant for the Web. Grant for the Web, from Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons, supports an open, fair, and inclusive standard for monetising content on the web. Kendraio Pay and its components, Kendraio Player and Kendraio Stream, collectively form a proof-of-concept for an end-to-end reimagining of the interactions between DSPs (Digital Service Providers), artists and consumers and how we monetise music on the web.
Our goals with Kendraio Pay are to
- allow streaming platforms to use web monetisation as a business model for fair, user-centric, and transparent payments to artists
- to create an end-to-end demonstration of a complete value chain from artist interface to multiple DSPs to a content-aggregating universal player
- to develop a way to distribute and bulk upload tracks that can be web monetised once ingested into a streaming DSP.
Adding micropayments into Kendraio Player
We built Kendraio Player as a component within Kendraio App. To allow listeners to find and play tracks from multiple DSPs within one interface — so we’re calling it a universal player.
The concept of micropayments has been around for a long time, but they have been hard to implement, until now. Open protocols have recently been developed to enable micropayments on a ubiquitous and cross-vendor basis. And that’s what we’ve been using in Kendraio Player. The standard that we have adopted is called Interledger Protocol (ILP). And we used the Web Monetization API to tie payments together with Coil and Uphold using ILP.
Because we are building a universal music player, we need to be able to play music from multiple creators, each with their own payment pointer (ILP speak for a wallet address) on one page. The Web Monetization API, not being optimised for our use case, didn’t allow for such functionality outright. But we found a solution: Dynamically adding and altering the payment pointer in the meta tag header when a new track is played. This solution helped us with another problem: Starting and stopping payment flow as a track is being played.
To minimise the number of lost payments, we also developed a way to integrate Coil that didn’t require the user to have the Coil browser extension installed. Read the nitty-gritty technical details in our last blog post.
Enhancements: DDEX, MusicBrainz, bulk import, transaction tracking and analytics
Because some of our Kendraio Player partners are music streaming services, receiving repertoire from record labels and/or distributors in bulk DDEX form, it became clear that we had to develop a tool that could decode the music industry metadata standard DDEX format.
One of our partners is Audiotarky, self-described as a new music streaming platform, that puts privacy and fairness in front of algorithms and shareholders. Together, we just launched the first of our developer bounties, awarding $500 USD to the developer who can integrate Audiotarky’s streaming service into Kendraio Player. While our first bounty has been snatched up, we are offering three more in the coming months. Our next bounty will integrate Kendraio with MusicBrainz, and we’ll share more info in our public Slack, and on our LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Next: CMO reporting, revenue splits and Uphold wallet balance
Our next priority is to integrate with Uphold’s API to be able to investigate reading and displaying an artist’s balance, which will give them a better overview of their financials. We’re also working on automatic payment pointer creation as part of the bulk song import process. We also want to investigate reporting royalties directly to CMOs and implementing a mechanism for revenue splits using different methodologies, including smart contracts.
We’re currently looking for
- artists to test our player; if you have published music on Spotify and you’re registered with a CMO, get in touch!
- developer feedback; specifically on DDEX, Kendraio Player, our Coil API integration, UI/UX, as well as
- A new developer to join the Kendraio team! If you’re interested, come and say hello in the #kendraio-jobs channel in our public Slack!
Kendraio Pay and Kendraio App are projects by Kendraio, the interoperability advocacy initiative. Kendraio App is an open-source dashboard application currently focused on music/media creators, copyright and related rights owners. The app is being developed to investigate how the transformative benefits of interoperability can improve existing processes — and to demonstrate how they can impact business, personal and public life.
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