Music industry Blockchain revolution Stream2Own and Fair Trade music, concepts debunked

I’m dedicating this blog to Todd Bovino, my colleague at Bloomberg, former band member/artwork “The Misfits”, resonates J with this blog, man of many talents helped me sketch my infographic below filling the gaps with Queen’s Brian May and Freddie Mercury’s hairdo,our mugshot included too, towards the end.

#Stream2Own infographic (sketched by me and Todd Bovino)

Today’s Blockchain blog…

Imogen Heap (Mycelia) and Peter Harris (Resonate) and a host of other music industry patrons are trying to coin the aspect of Fair Trade music with the power of Blockchain. This will revolutionize the way the music industry will deal with the life-cycle of the asset that gets digitized over the Internet & loses value & attribution easily when digitized; this has been such an issue with the known piracy prone #Cronyhouses. The current state “mechanism by which royalties are calculated and paid is often opaque. Some revenue ends up in a “escrow black box” beyond the reach of the artists and songwriters to whom it rightly belongs. In a culture of confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements, artists (or their managers) cannot properly audit their payments if they are not certain how much they are due.” Quote from mycelia

Though the asset, markets itself when the asset is digitized, it loses its value because of piracy and other vulnerabilities that lie with the download and sharing of the digital asset un-ethically.

The music industry is a perfect example on how preserving the genetics of the digitized asset and wrapping protocol.

Royalties and micropayments to the artists have become such a bitter experience that even stuff such as Spotify and Apple are unable to compensate the artist of what they deserve vs what they get and moreover there is no transparency in the transaction as the "escrow" of revenue and profitability is more centralized than decentralized.

This gives birth to the use case for the music industry ...where we work towards "Economy of Prosperity for all" vs a rich crony-capital basket shared between few hands that are dealing with the equilibrium of the platform.

I'm not promoting Peter Harris's Resonate here, but am truly inspired by their idea and their frame work of the #Stream2Own protocol. 
The #Stream2Own protocol is fully explained with all the redirects here, but I would love to have several touch-points through this blog to decipher my journey through their use-case/problem statement amidst all other players. You can also listen to Peter Harris on Frederick Munawa’s webcast Blockchain Music Co-op Challenges Spotify 
Also check what Imogen Heap has to say about the music industry Blockchain in this video 

What’s the use-case? For Royalty Payments?
Like others, I am a fan of many artists, covers and bands…I listen to music all day, I love my playlists & my LIKES (# of Plays of a song) resonate J with their(Resonate’s) use-case.

Like me, most folks lean on a specific genre or an album or specifically couple songs from an album that I we keep looping over and over again, even though I paid for the monthly subscription on the other streaming platforms.

And at the end of the deal I don't even have the song in a downloadable format to call it my own asset, unless I’ve been forced to pay upfront for a song even without enjoying it and decide, if I want to own it.

Resonate solves that problem, my info.

What role does the Blockchain have to play here?
You’ll be amazed to check-out already proven entities out there’s Ujo Music, Blokur, Aurovine, Resonate, Peertracks, Stemand Bittunes, which already claims users in 70+ countries. What links these projects is that they all are based on blockchain.

Blockchain concepts to apply to the music

·        HELP BUILD, PRESERVE/FIGHT IP Rights : Let’s say, someone comes up with a creative work, adding attribution immediately to it and putting it on the Blockchain as the (asset= music), any tether to the original attribution of the asset or its Intellectual Property will be recorded alongside the original asset –

·        ELIMINATE CRONIES: Royalties and Micropayments are opaque today, on the Blockchain, it won’t be anymore, and everyone will get a share of the pie for what they are attributed via a self-executing smart contract.

·        Flow of Money and the Life of a Song: the Blockchiain will be a decentralized distributed database that will help create, attribute, store, record change, record anomalies, downloads, contracts, royalties, payments, preserve IP and pretty much everything that a centralized entity did in the music industry helping look at the provenance via a trusted linked chain driving prosperity.The Blockchain Eco-system: allowing for direct purchase, offering licenses for streaming and downloading apps, authorizing sync rights for usage in film and television shows, music files connected to smart contracts running autonomously 24/7 sending out automated licensing, usage and payment agreements to all artists in the food chain.

What technically powers such a Blockchain platform?
A Decentralized Distributed Database with a powerful file system like IPFS and Inter planetary database and a powerful protocol, read more about it on my related blog on how #BigchainDB enables these music industry Blockchain pioneers to achieve such a powerful concept and building such a decentralized store and provide a network effect of outreach to it.

Now that you’ve got the pulse, don’t forget to read all these reference stories below that have inspired this music industry Blockchain blog.

FOLLOW-UP reading

(a)   CMU insight: The Life of a Song @ The GreatEscape 2017.

(b)   Resonate’s quest for accurate streaming RoyaltyData

(c)   How the Blockchain can change the music industryby Imogen Heap
(d) Resonate's article on blockchains for metadataand licensing

Todd and my mugshot today from office as we finished the info-graphic