I've been thinking about the yours.org model. Wouldn't it be great if there was a paywall on an audio player?

At the moment Soundcloud has this feature where a song stops halfway through so that musicians can give the listener a preview of their track without giving the whole thing away. If the user has a paid premium account they can hear the full track and part of that money is then given to the musician, fairly similar to how Spotify works essentially.

There are big problems with this model, firstly if the user just wants to hear one track they have to sign a full monthly subscription. Ridiculous, they’re not gonna do that, especially seeing as Soundcloud is mostly made up of unknown artists (whereas Spotify has large catalogue of mainstream music). Soundcloud is currently facing huge issues with monetising their platform.

The second problem, with Soundcloud and Spotify, is that artists receive minimum amounts for the content they work incredibly hard to provide. It should also be noted that it costs musician’s money to be added to Spotify! Doubly ridiculous.

This isn't necessarily Spotify or Soundcloud's fault. It's really difficult using a subscription model to create money for content providers because users will only pay so much for a subscription.

There is loads of room for crypto integration with online music platforms. They're something that I think has never really been worked out and it's surely a better system than advertising.

Having a paywall on an artist's track means that they could control how much they charge listeners, they could create their own deals using Colored Coins . You could also have the same system that yours.org currently uses for likes but also have it for comments that build hype for a track.

How about if it had a chaining system for playlists? So if a 'taste-maker' puts together a playlist that other people follow for new songs to listen to, every song that is given money through that playlist, some of that money then goes to the tastemaker also.

You could have another level where users can pay for a full playlist rather than every individual track so they can listen to the playlist through without having to stop to pay every time a track has a paywall. You could also do this with albums.

The music industry was broken by the internet but it never really got fixed again. It's actually required for an artist to sign up to an online distribution company in order to be listed on Spotify. What are they distributing? Huge volumes of packaged CD disks? Trucks of records to vendors? Do they have a warehouse full of heavy mp3s?

Bandcamp is possibly the only example of a music website I know of that is monetised while being fair to it’s content providers. They take a tiny proportion of sales revenues and they enable musicians to charge whatever they want for their content. It’s main problem (if it has one) is that it has almost no social element whatsoever, which pretty much makes it an online shop. A great shop but still just a shop.

Yours.org has the potential to compete with Soundcloud’s model. One that has been extremely important for thousands of independent artists in creating a buzz for their music, building an online community and discovering other artists. It’s such a shame that this platform is now resorting to spoiling it with ads and in-your-face subscription promotions that are alienating many of those artists.

So what do you think? Do you think there’s a totally different system that would work better? Do you have any other ideas for a player of this kind that I haven’t even thought of? You might love the direction Soundcloud is going in, or maybe you think Spotify rules.

It's free to comment on this article so please feel...um free to tell me what you think.



