Muse Network: Bringing Music NFTs to the Next Level
Octopus Network Showcase Day 2021
Octopus Network has recently launched a series of introductory videos to the Octopus Network and its early Appchain projects building on top of it. In one of the latest videos, the CEO and founder of Muse Network, Robin Guo, gave an introduction on the Muse network, a music public chain that provides credible and low-cost copyright services to aspiring musicians and artists. What is Muse Network and why it matters is explained in detail below:
Muse Network in a Nutshell
Muse Network is a high-performance music public chain that provides the music industry with credible and low-cost copyright services. Muse Bapp will allow musicians to collaborate on music creation and upload their music onto the blockchain to generate non-tamperable data through hashing, time stamping etc..to simplify and cut the costs of copyright authentication processes. Such Music NFT copyrighting will not only increase distribution and value creation but it will also help redistribute the value fairly to those who have created it. Moreover, by incentivising all the participants into the industry to be active through a reward model based on tipping and engagement, everyone can share in the benefits of the ecosystem as new music and high value content is spread.
Bringing Efficiency and Fairness to the Music Industry Through NFTs
“We believe that the combination of music and blockchain can solve some of the biggest problems in the music industry, and music in turn can solve some of the biggest problems facing the blockchain industry” -Muse Network
There are various problems that the music industry is confronted with that range from cumbersome centralisation impeding discovery of new music, to unfair royalty distribution. The music industry, by and large, remains controlled by specialised companies run by a few people filtering and making decisions on a music’s specific distribution. This concentrated decisionmaking power naturally interferes with the relationship between artists and their audience. Such a centralised and standardised system is ultimately detrimental to artists, to listeners and to producers themselves as it perpetuates an inefficient system of discovery.
“The crux of the problem is that, traditionally, decentralized communities have not been able to further decentralize because they have not been properly incentivized for their evaluation efforts. Therefore, we will introduce a low cost NFT incentive based on blockchain to make fan community user reviews more feasible”. -Muse Network
The current centralised music system strongly limits the bargaining power of musicians and traps them into a loop of small returns. The Muse Network has the exciting potential of breaking this unfair distribution pattern and make the distribution proportion of musicians exceed 90%:
“We will give musicians their rightful place in the new distribution structure, enabling them to produce and distribute their music independently. By directly taking the on-chain copyright NFT as the settlement target, the payment and settlement of royalties are carried out, bypassing the traditional agency, so that musicians and copyright users can trade directly. Payments no longer have a long monthly settlement process, but can be achieved on a daily or even hourly basis. Income distribution among all stakeholders will also be automated through trusted smart contracts to minimize agency costs”. -Muse Network
In addition to solving the problem of unfair pay and inefficient gatekeeping Muse Network also addresses the issue of transnational copyright management, that sees billions of dollars in unpaid copyrights every year:
“We will use blockchain technology for copyright certification and plan to build a transparent and searchable universal copyright depository, which will allow unified metadata and NFT copyright query, automatic NFT royalty payment, authorization and transaction, so as to avoid the chaotic and inefficient situation of transnational copyright management” — Muse Network
An Ecosystem of Muse NFT’s on the Muse Network
The Muse Network NFT ecosystem is composed of five parts: the public chain ( Muse Network), BApp (Muse PLAY), NFT exchange (Muse Market), centralized copyright management system (Muse Copyright), and decentralized community (Muse Community).
“The public chain is the foundation of trust for the whole Muse ecosystem, and the BApp is the portal for users to import their creativity. The exchange is how value realization is exported and the source of ecological vitality. The copyright management system compensates the core efficiency of the whole decentralized system. And the community makes it easier for the whole ecology to obtain and retain users”. -Muse Network
All five components of the Muse Network express different functions for different actors involved in the loop of music creation, distribution and consumption. The Muse network is the backbone of the ecosystem. Muse Play effectively functions as ‘the App’ that musicians are going to interact with in order to create and store their NFT and the place where listeners can access music streaming. This platform creates the basis of Muse’s marketplace.
Muse Copyright is also an important element of the ecosystem since it helps NFT holders manage their music and also provides a suit of tools for musicians and copyright owners, including copyright administration, rights protection, artist packaging, publicity, distribution of copyright royalties etc..
Muse Toolkit is further help for musicians that functions to include AI-aided composition, matchmaking of the songwriting authors, and music inspiration community. Its purpose is to help more people to co-create, and record their share of copyright onto blockchain, and make blockchain and NFTs a default setting for music creation and distribution.
Altogether, the Muse Network revolutionises the way music is produced, distributed, accessed, and importantly, the way the value it creates is shared. By critically empowering artists and listeners, Muse Network provides them more possibilities of discovering good music in a truly fair and equitable manner.
Product Demo
To date, Muse Network is actively building out on Octopus Network, and has recently launched its first product demo called Pengyin App that has already gained traction among the artist community in China. Among the most famous signed up artists are The Brighter Band TFBOYS, Young 7 and Chen Hanrang, musicians with millions of followers.
To stay tuned with Muse Network check out their website: http://musenetwork.org/, or get in touch at robinguo@musenetwork.org.
LaDevochka is a writer for 4NTS Guild. You can check out their Medium for more content or follow them on Twitter.
