BEHIND THE NEW ECOSYSTEM FOR MUSIC (Part I)

The imusify Manifesto

“Yeah man, it’s that bad. The music industry is broken,” he said with a sigh. “5,000 downloads of your song on iTunes translates into about 15 cents. Probably less than 10 cents after taxes. Your best bet to make it as a signed artist these days is to sell your merch…unless you signed in a 360 deal with the label — in which case even that won’t cut it.”

I stepped right to avoid a puddle on the path; We were walking through a park towards our hotel in Berlin, only a kilometer or two from the Wall that once stood to divide the Eastern Bloc from the West. “Is that why you stopped making music,” I asked. “No, I stopped because I realized the lifestyle I lived to lead me towards a place I did not want to end up at. I loved music. I still do. However, it can get crazy. After one of our shows, the fans broke into the backstage. We had to run out the back door and hide in our tour bus as they climbed up on it. Those were crazy days man,” he said.

It must have been six months since I first spoke to David on Skype. Back then, all they had was an outline of the Whitepaper for the imusify project, or so I thought. A twenty-page document, suggesting that blockchain technology could be used to bring the music industry to the 21st century. Something between a business plan and a manifesto for musician’s rights. Having been an aspiring musician and entrepreneur myself, I was hooked.

The author — long long time ago, in a galaxy far away.

I agreed to set my clients and other projects aside for the day and followed the link to the discord server. Legal, Marketing, Development, MS Competition, there must have been at least fifteen channels and threads, each full of posts from hundreds of people I never met before. There was more to the project than that twenty-page Whitepaper, making a case for the merger of music and entrepreneurship. I was not the only one hooked. Over two hundred people had already joined to pitch in and do what they could to bring the idea to life.

I flew in from Ljubljana that Friday to meet David and the core team behind the imusify project. I first met him and Eva at the Factory, an impressive building hosting the headquarters of SoundCloud. Christian and his friend, apparently one of the people, connected to the high officers of NEO joined us at the door. David explained the idea: “imusify combines streaming service, crowdfunding, and social media, allowing musicians to connect with their fans. The artists get paid for the content they create, receiving the proceeds from the streaming service, and get to fund their projects through crowdfunding campaigns. Later, we can add producers, labels, events, studio artists, and others, and they all get to interact. We are already discussing a partnership with some major labels from the U.S. Once we can get over the hump of the crowdsale, this thing will take off like a rocket. I do not think anyone has a similar platform developed as far as we do.”