Tokenizing the Music Industry with PLAY Protocol
At Tendermint, we believe that the Cosmos SDK uniquely serves the needs of application and protocol developers who want to deliver commercial token economics immediately. The Cosmos SDK is ready for developers today as we put the finishing touches on Proof of Stake for the hub launch.
Streaming has created a boom in the music industry, yet centralization and misaligned incentives — legacies from the days of physical distribution — limit market potential and the number of artists getting heard.
Playlist is reinventing the music industry with the PLAY token and distributed consensus mechanisms. Playlist provides a fully licensed, ad-supported music streaming service that generates 10 times the user engagement of Pandora and Spotify. For the first time, token economics can enable millions of music fans to participate in the music economy. However, bringing Playlist users into the token economy right now would overwhelm conventional smart contract platforms. To overcome that challenge, Playlist is leveraging the unique capabilities of the Cosmos platform to bring incentivized cooperation at consumer scale.
Cosmos and Playlist deliver the three key requirements for a successful dApp:
- Economics: user experience and community driven incentives
- Speed: instant gratification and reward when sharing something of value
- Security: trustworthy interactions, exchanges and information for the entire community
Playlist, already a top iOS App, unites people, music and messaging. Its technology includes synchronized streaming, behavioural based music programming and social-driven recommendations. Ever since we started listening to music on mobile, it’s become an isolated experience. On Playlist, people listen together at the exact same time and message while they listen, follow one another, collaborate on playlists and become influencers. This highly engaged community of listeners, artists and influencers provides the perfect launchpad for the PLAY token.
Karen Katz and Steve Petersen, the founding team behind Playlist and the PLAY dApp, have a passion for music and technology and saw the opportunity to use blockchain to revolutionize the music industry. They are both Stanford engineers and serial entrepreneurs with 2 IPOs, a $300M exit, 36 patents, and over 10 years experience each in digital music.
Cosmos provides a scalable platform and SDK for accelerating the extension of Playlist onto the blockchain. Its base, Tendermint BFT, provides fast finality and a performant chain for developers building decentralized applications. Currently decentralized applications built using Ethereum, or other smart contract platforms, face a scalability issue — they can only run as fast as the underlying blockchain, and they must compete for resources with other applications on the same chain.
The Cosmos SDK addresses this pain point. In addition to its Tendermint BFT consensus mechanism, the Cosmos SDK adds a modular framework that makes building application-specific blockchains easy for developers. Applications built with the SDK will also be able to transact with a universe of liquid assets over the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. This combination of performance, security, and interoperability allows application developers to build their communities on decentralized platforms that run as quickly and seamlessly as centralized ones.
Cosmos enables Playlist to create a milestone for the blockchain industry with the first large-scale, consumer dApp.
