Disrupting the live music business with digital economy, blockchain and crypto-currency

Some say that prostitution is the oldest profession, others say that it is finance. I can’t keep my mouth shut and just note sarcastically that maybe sometimes there’s not such a big difference between these two professions. Be as it may, live music was around already then, and maybe even as a profession. At least male musicians surely were able to pick up girls if they played well. And probably they got some food or trinkets for entertaining the crowd around the campfire.

Thinking of it, it seems that not much has really changed in this business since then: Musicians are desperately looking for a gig and hope to get paid in one way or the other, only the campfires have gotten a big bigger.

And so did the fees for the top performers and celebrities :-)

But what about all the other small campfire musicians, who have to make a living otherwise but are happy to make just a little bit of extra money on the side? Or those that dream of making it to the top and becoming super stars one day? How can these “little fishes” determine and prove their value/price, negotiate terms, execute agreements and get paid? They all seem to be at the mercy of the tribe’s elders or medicine men, i.e. talent agencies, music managers, etc. And these seem to behave not too different from how the powerful behaved towards the meek in prehistoric times. Now finally is the time that they shall inherit the earth, or at least the music business. Viberate is going to do that, just like Uber changed taxis, Airbnb changed room renting and Netflix changed TV.

And the model is a mix of conventional digital economy, spiced up with cryptocurrencies, which makes it really, really powerful. Let’s look at it:

Absence of a powerful and honest intermediary such as a booking agency often means trouble for the artist. There is a clear need for an entity that would effectively and safely represent all world’s musicians those who don’t have a privilege of an agent. This is of course what the digital economy is here for and what is has been doing already in many other markets and Viberate is not different. It basically provides a match-making platform that digitizes the job that talent booking agencies have done for over a hundred years with one more important difference — any musician can join, regardless of genre, country, fame level or gig history. Here we already have our disruption by the book.

So why do we need cryptocurrency? Because it gets even better.

Actually, there are two reasons: one obvious and one less obvious but in return more powerful.

The obvious reason is efficiency and therefore reduced cost. The music industry has worked using booking (service) fees from the very beginning. The industry standard is that agents that represent artists usually take 10 to 20% booking commission on the artist net fee. This kind of system is proven and well accepted by the stakeholders, so we intend to keep it, but by using an automated blockchain-based platform, Viberate has much lower overhead costs. As a cryptocurrency/blockchain-based digital platform it avoids the middle man not once but twice: the agents and the banks! Therefore, it will charge a much lower fee, especially on the lower end of the range.

The less obvious reason is related to the question: how do we determine a fair price for the musician? The more famous and popular musicians should get paid more. But how would anyone know whether a musician is the 7000th from the top of the list or maybe the 8000th? And how much value to associate with that? Here we need the community to constantly vote and Blockchain technology offers the best tools for this task for all world’s musicians, especially for the long tail of the market. Basically, we have to crowdsource the process of rating the musicians and of providing the information about musician, venue and event profiles. Paying “the Crowd” to do this with the same cryptocurrency, our VIB tokens, is the only reasonable — actually an ingenious — way to keep the information up to date and relevant. Now this is a disruption by the book! Maybe we should even write a book about it, really.

And this is only the beginning. Now that we have the digital platform and cryptocurrency to reimburse any type of activity, the possibilities are limitless. We can even envisage a secondary market that will grow out of our platform and based completely on our VIB tokens. For example, here are just a few simple ideas:

• Fans will have the option to crowdfund the fee of a certain performer they want to see play. A campaign will be open for a defined period of time and anyone will have a chance to contribute towards the targeted fee. This way we will utilize the advantages of the decentralized economy to bring musicians to markets that are otherwise overlooked. The power of crowdfunding has proven to move boundaries and we believe that we can use it to revolutionize the way music events are being planned and executed.
• Listing hundreds of thousands of events, listed on profiles of performing artists, Viberate has the unique opportunity to tap into the multi-billion market of selling tickets. Paper tickets are giving way to electronic ones and we want to go a step further and implement a blockchain-based ticketing service, where we will charge a commission on every ticket sold through our system.
• We will implement a smart system of feeding the data from our partner’s platform to our Viberate smart contract so that users will be able to buy Etherium with a credit card and automatically send it to the smart contract, without even knowing or caring that they are on our platform. With this, we aim to reach the non-tech savvy music community and offer them a chance to benefit of our cryptocurrency platform, while using the good old way of payment that they got accustomed to. That is, until their grandmother shows them how she buys opera tickets with VIB :-)

It took humankind a long time to get from caves to current live music events, but it will take us only a year or two to finally bring them the digital economy, the blockchain and a good and stable cryptocurrency. Isn’t this the right time to be around Viberate? For me, it is!