Listening to music is easier than it has ever been. Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud are all ready to fill your ears with more music than you could ever listen to. As a user, you pay a fixed monthly fee for this easy access and the streaming service then passes that money on to the artist right? Well, not quite. The music industry in 2018: YouTubers are stars, stars are brands, brands produce content, content is everything, everything is content, and nobody pays for music. Things have changed a lot in the music business recently.
While on one hand, the traditional infrastructure has morphed and shrunk, the individuals who create and engage with the art itself have grown, totally changing the way they think about business, branding, and what it means to have a successful career.
What’s been going on in the music industry over the past quarter century has been a steady development towards decentralization. Where once institutions like record labels, studios, distribution centers, and record sales defined what success was in the music business, advents like streaming platforms, digital audio workstations, and the disintermediating power of the internet have eroded the landscape into a more even playing field.
The potential blockchain technology holds to take the music industry — and the entire entertainment industry, for that matter — to the next plane is multifarious. Whether it’s through crowdfunding, programmatic IP, distribution, event ticketing, ownership of non-fungible assets and collectibles, streaming, blockchain technology and (sometimes, but not always) digital currencies, blockchain can be used to re-imagine the entire process of how music and art is funded, created, distributed, consumed, and all over again.
This is why music and entertainment have become some of the most active spaces in the blockchain world for technological development. Many people may look at cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and think that blockchain is all about finance and deep tech that won’t affect them, but scores of music-centric blockchain startups are proving that not only can decentralization create substantive change in the daily lives of everyday people.
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