The stroboscopes shone through the fog while a tight audience was looking to have a picture of the DJ.

Revered for his contributions to electronic dance music, Gareth Emery was in the box at the Ministry of Sound in London last weekend, there to show the synths that helped him win the prestigious "Trance State Award" of the year "three times.

Fans were quickly sent into delirium, almost as delirious as crypto enthusiasts can sometimes seem – an interesting link since Emery, along with his new startup Choon, wants to replace the old digital music industry with ethereum tech

Like many concerts that Emery has played in recent months, the evening is a sold-out market.

"I'm one of the lucky ones," Emery told CoinDesk. "I am very well paid because I have a lot of fans coming to see me doing concerts."

However, many musicians are less privileged because their audiences have turned to recorded music, Emery said. In this market, musicians are paid ridiculously low royalties on notoriously unreliable payment rails with long waiting times.

"It's horrible," says Emery. "Basically, we have this system that was designed at the time of the scores and jukeboxes 60 years ago and it has never been changed."

According to Emery, although the music industry is not short of money, it has not been able to adapt to technological advances.

But Choon is trying to fix that. A streaming service that "mines" via a smart contract, Choon directly gives 80% of the profits to the musicians – an increase over similar services like Spotify – that pay paltry fees (some musicians felt that it's also as low as $ 0.004891 per flow)

Emery tells CoinDesk:

"We took a different path and said:" If you were to design the music industry today, how would you do it? "

Musician as a miner

And according to Emery, using blockchain "for what it's really good – money and contracts" is exactly how to create a more equitable music industry.

It's not alone there, the music industry has been one of the favorite blockchain entrepreneurs to disrupt. For example, Viberate, based in Slovenia, is trying to eliminate the paying intermediary in the music industry, and several personalities in the music industry have also started their own blockchain projects in this domain.

But for Choon, Emery is working alongside the developers of CryptoPunks, a collectible forerunner of CryptoKitties, in hopes of launching it in the next six months.

The technology is based on a customizable "Smart Record Contract" which stores the copyright on the blockchain ethereum, and evenly distributes funds earned between the creator and the producer, in the form of a token ERC-20 called NOTES

These NOTES will be sold in an initial offer of coins (ICO) in the coming months. According to Emery, more than 500 artists are already registered to use the platform, including several big names in the music industry as Daruge, creator of the infamous trance "Sandstorm", and dubstep DJ Datsik.

Tokens are programmed to distribute based on the number of times that a track has been broadcast directly into an artist's portfolio. (A breakdown of the distribution can be observed live on Choon's testnet.)

Artists can cash NOTES on participating scholarships, but to keep the price high, artists are asked to keep their money in the Choon system, Emery hoping that this token will be widely accepted throughout the music industry .

And he has a chance, since the artists who use the platform retain the full ownership of the copyright of their work – a change from the labels that buy the full copyright right in the framework of the transaction.

In the wrong pockets

The global music industry exceeds each year some 130 billion dollars.

Despite this, the funds are lost in the machinery – taking complex and unnecessary twists to end up in pockets that are not musicians.

"It just goes to the wrong people – copyrighters, publishers, record companies, streaming companies," Emery said. "I do not see for the most part that we need record companies and publishers."

Due to the availability and cheapness of production currently, artists do not need to be sponsored to rent a studio, explains Emery, and social media allow artists to take the control of their own marketing. In addition, making and distributing music has become easier for individuals.

Yet, despite everything, monopolies still exist and musicians are struggling to make ends meet.

And because it is so difficult to make money through recorded music, more musicians are being pushed to rely on live concerts.

"I earn 99.5% of my touring revenue and 0.5% music streaming and recording," says Emery.

And it's upsetting because some great musicians can not or would rather not turn because of their health and their family, he continued, adding that he wants to bring back these people in the lucrative music industry.

The solution, according to Emery, is to annihilate the third and replace it with a system where artists and their audience are connected directly.

Emery tells CoinDesk:

"We do not really need it anymore, yet they have more power than they've ever had before, and the only reason is that they do not have it anymore. Have only a handful of iron on the flow of money, on the flow of payment. "

Gareth Emery's concert via Facebook

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