By Michael Scott

Hip and rhythmic: that’s the vibe one gets while visiting an online community at the intersection of blockchain technology and music.

Known as Viberate, it is a blockchain-based, live-music marketplace for musicians, fans and event organizers. As one of the world’s largest databases of artists, it captures information on musicians, booking agencies, music venues and event organizers. The site is updated daily with media stats, recent content, show dates and contact information for musical artists throughout the world, from superstars to garage bands.

But as an emerging hub for the entire music ecosystem, Viberate is much more than a directory. Musicians are chart-ranked based on popularity, filtered into categories such as global location or genre — creating a seamless, easy and efficient site-navigation process.

Event organizers are able to book musicians directly through its service, in a manner similar to how accommodations are booked on Airbnb. Blockchain technology is used throughout this process to negotiate terms via smart contracts and transfer payments.

Another feature of Viberate? Event organizers have the opportunity to sell tickets via a decentralized system without intermediaries. In addition, the platform gets fans involved, allowing them a chance to sell tickets they may have already purchased on a secondary market.

By targeting the $250 billion music industry, Viberate — with roots in Slovenia and headquartered in San Jose — aims to utilize blockchain technology to support musicians and music creators in securing their fair shares of revenue. According to company leaders, more than $35 billion is being spent annually by musicians on event fees. With the blockchain, musicians will be able to greatly reduce their expenses while securing their musical rights.

Viberate, despite being in its early stages, has the backing of a number of key players, including the European Commission, the Republic of Slovenia and other well-respected experts, including entrepreneur and Bitcoin expert Charlie Shrem and Stanford professor and Pinterest chief scientist Jure Leskovec.

Viberate’s founders — Matej Gregorčič, Vasja Veber and Uroš Umek — began their musical journey together when Umek, a DJ, asked the other two to be his managers. After years in the global club scene, they now have their eyes set on building Viberate and the quest to topple the prevailing model of how musicians are promoted and booked.

“We’ve always followed trends closely and when we started exploring the world of cryptocurrencies, we immediately saw an opportunity to implement the revolutionary [blockchain] technology into Viberate,” said Veber. “It turned out to be an ideal solution for many problems we [were] intending to solve with the service.”

Veber added that Viberate acts as a sort of IMDb for live music, because the profiles capture everything that matters in a performer’s career: daily updated statistics from social media and streaming sites, gig dates, content feed, as well as management and booking contacts. Statistics captured from this, he said, are particularly useful, because they allow Viberate to not only measure how many followers a musician has and how they grow, but also provide insight into how the fans are engaging with the content the musician puts online.

“Right now we’re actually the only service that is implementing the blockchain technology on the live music segment,” Veber said. “Royalties are definitely a huge business, but at the same time, extremely centralized and controlled by only a handful of major publishers and powerful record labels. In our opinion this will be a hard nut to crack.”

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.