imusify: A Vision for the Smart Music Economy of the Future

Introducing imusify, a blockchain powered multimedia platform, striving to create a new music economy in order to solve the long-standing inefficiencies of the traditional music industry.

It’s time for the smart music economy.

How it began…

In 2014, imusify founder David Walters was an emerging yet frustrated, but not quite starving artist. As David was struggling to maintain control over his creative work, he began to ask questions about the state of the music industry.

What is changing about the way people consume music?

Why can’t music companies keep up?

How is this affecting artists?

After ongoing conversations and discussions with various players in the music industry, he realized that he was not alone in his frustration and that in fact, it was apparent that musicians at all levels were are getting pushed out of the music value chain due to the rapid digitalization that the industry has experienced. David was determined to solve the most pressing issues that artists face when attempting to emerge and successfully operate within the music industry. For two years, he worked tirelessly with a team of developers to design and build what would become the new music economy that he envisioned. By early 2017, David found out a hard lesson: that the technology available at the time just wasn’t sufficient enough to achieve what he wanted.

By mid-year David began to investigate the growing blockchain community and the implications of using decentralized technology to develop his idea. He could easily see that the growing popularity of smart contracts and tokenized economies could play a determining piece in improving the broken music industry. There were various other blockchain music projects in the works, but David saw a lack of functionality and cohesiveness beyond increasing of the shareholders of various project’s profits.

[June 2017] Enter the NEO Smart Economy, the most cutting edge blockchain for smart contracts, digital assets, and identities. David immediately latched on to NEO and put together a small, extremely skilled, team of developers to participate in NEO’s first dApp (decentralized application) competition. With the push of efforts towards the competition, imusify was thus reborn with a new burst of energy and opportunity. The proof of concept in imusify’s first prototype demonstrated the viability of an incentivized music distribution platform, where both artists and consumers were rewarded for contributing value to the platform via interaction with music content.

imusify won 2nd Place in the NEO competition and received an overwhelming amount of interest and positive feedback from both the blockchain and music communities. Immediately following this success, David began building a team in order to bring imusify to life. Despite the amount of interest in his project, David chose his team very carefully. He looked for individuals who had some experience in the music industry, whom were artists in their own right, and who absolutely had strong leadership and team building skills. But most importantly, David looked for passion. This strategic team building resulted in a collective of ex-artists turned professionals who all share a burning desire to create the new music economy of the future.

The smart economy

Within imusify’s growing team and network, the question arose: So what does the future’s smart music economy look like?

To best answer this question, we must first examine the broad vision of what a smart economy is, and then discuss the incremental steps required to make this vision a reality in the music space. imusify uses the three building blocks of NEO Smart Economy as a foundation for their music economy.

Digital Identity + Digital Assets + Smart Contracts = Smart Economy

Digital Identity refers to the identity information of individuals and groups/organizations in electronic form that is unique on the blockchain. These identities offer a secure end-point for individuals to conduct transactions with others.

Digital assets are programmable physical assets that, when registered through a validated digital identity, are protected by law. By establishing a trustful association between digital assets and identities, users can register, trade, and circulate assets to conduct business.

Smart contracts are protocols that facilitate credible transactions between users without the need for a third party or intermediary. A popular analogy of smart contracts is to compare it to a vending machine. Users enter a means of exchange (often a currency), and receive the requested assets, so long as the payment and asset is approved by the smart contract. In the case of a vending machine, if you don’t put in enough money, or the asset you requested doesn’t exist, the transaction is automatically cancelled and the currency is returned.

The music smart economy

Let us now examine the three components of the NEO Smart Economy in the context of a music smart economy.

Secure, transparent digital identities (DIs) allow artists, consumers, producers, managers, venues, record labels, and other music shareholders to establish an electronic identity as a means to interact, collaborate, and conduct transactions with other shareholders.

Users with music related digital identities can issue content, experiences, and projects as digital assets in order to protect their ownership of an asset, and track its life cycle within the music economy.

Smart contracts allow for music digital identities to trustfully conduct transactions. For example, an artist registered digital identity who distributes an album as a digital asset can use a smart contract to sell the asset to consumers and automatically receive payment from the transaction.

The imusify System

Now that we understand how digital assets, digital identities, and smart contracts make up the foundation of a music smart economy, let us take a look at how imusify is building upon the foundation to engage and deliver value to its users. imusify is focused on building a platform to serve the immediate needs of current shareholders within the music industry, while providing an open innovation space for developing new means of interaction and value exchange to serve the music economy in the near future.

imusify exists as a platform (web and mobile applications) that allows its users to connect, collaborate, and share experiences with other imusify users. Equally as important the imusify network leverages the benefits of blockchain to connect users in exciting ways. To further the conceptual vision of its music smart economy, imusify gives value to its utility token; which serves as a means of exchange for users within the imusify network on the imusify platform. imusify’s tokenized structure allows for the use of the IMU utility token to conduct transactions within the music smart economy. The platform’s user value will first exist in three different features: incentivized user contribution, artist crypto-crowdfunding, and the IMU marketplace.

Incentivized Curation and Contribution

At its most basic level, the imusify platform rewards users in IMU for posting, sharing, and purchasing content. By incentivizing user interaction and network growth with token rewards, consumers and curators increase the demand for new artist content. Additionally, by rewarding consumers and curators for actions that typically aren’t rewarded, these user classes now have a source of funds to purchase more content and support their favorite artists with the IMU they receive.

Artist Crypto-Crowdfunding

The next tier of imusify’s smart economy leverages the increased demand for new creative content with the increased supply of available funds for supporting artists. With its crypto-crowdfunding functionality, artists and creators can create campaigns to fund various content projects, from albums to tours and everything in between. If an artist needs $100,000 to produce an album, they can create a campaign to crowdsource funds ($100,000 of IMU) from the imusify network. In return, supporters of campaigns receive can receive a wide range of rewards, from exclusive access to content, concert tickets, VIP fan experiences, and affiliate licenses.

Affiliate Crowdfunding

It is worth noting here the value of affiliate licenses to artists. In this scenario, owners of a particular piece of content’s affiliate license receives a commission for revenue generated through transactions that used their affiliate license to purchase that content. Through this process, fans become supporters, supporters become content affiliates, and product affiliates become unofficial promoters of the given content. These unofficial promoters directly benefit from successfully “selling” certain content to others, effectively creating increased network growth through new, unique user interactions, and driving the success of artist’s campaigns and associated content.

IMU Open Marketplace

Beyond the scope of incentivized contribution discussed previously, imusify also serves as an open marketplace for various music related goods and assets. Such a marketplace opens up multiple opportunities for artists and collaborators to generate supporting income streams. For example, an artist can sell content licenses for commercial use in corporate videos, independent films, podcasts, and commercials to name a few. Collaborators such as producers and videographers can also offer their services on the marketplace, creating a trusted network of resources for the production of artist content projects. An artist may seek out a producer and sound engineer listed on the marketplace, and pay them for their work directly in IMU.

The Future of imusify

You thought we were going to tell you what’s in store for the future, didn’t you… well, you’ll have to join us to find out.

With love, the imusify team

The smart music economy. Get IMU. Get paid, on Blockchain.

imusify Demo: http://demo.imusify.com/

imusify Prototype: https://imusify.com/

imusify Discord: https://discord.gg/rrYxjBh