BEHIND THE NEW ECOSYSTEM FOR MUSIC (Part II)

Flashback

David dreamed of establishing an accelerator hub for musicians ever since he moved from live music to producing. Most musicians lack the entrepreneurial mindset to make it on their own. Hence most of them depend on the labels, which too are struggling due to the massive drops in record sales since the internet age.

With the music so easily copied, and distributed globally within seconds, the market value of a song is next to nothing. Most artists quickly learn that their talent and passion will not cover their monthly expenses. In response, they take on jobs as recording artists, music teachers or start a different career entirely. One has to wonder how much talent we waste every year. How many masterpieces are lost, never to be heard by another soul? Would it not have been better to teach the musicians how to present themselves and run their gig like a business — to “teach a man to fish, and he will get fed for a lifetime”.

It is not true that people are not willing to pay for music they enjoy. The Radiohead “In Rainbows“ experiment, with the pay-what-you-wish campaign, is a proof to the contrary. The fans contributed more than two USD per download, and the band netted more with In Rainbows, then all the albums before.

Blockchain technology allowed the idea to grow beyond an accelerator for musicians. It opened a possibility for a different approach to interaction between the musicians and fans. First, the musicians could get paid automatically. Second, that pay was based on the merit of the musician’s organic popularity, rather than the choice of the labels, on who has the right face for the billboards to push the new hit. Instead of “teaching a man to fish,” it enabled musicians create a whole new pond, governed by currents of smart contracts and blocks running under the surface of the online platform. It all suddenly clicked.

David started bootstrapping imusify, but like so many ideas before, imusify was conceived ahead of its time. In 2015, the blockchain technology was merely a toddler, and the Ethereum network that allowed for the writing of smart contracts with a “turing complete” programming language was barely an infant at that stage. The programmers kept running into one issue after another. These issues exhausted David’s resources. He finally gave up. They concluded that the project of such potential magnitude could not possibly scale on the Ethereum network. Had there been hundreds of millions users, imusify would have slowed down, or even threaten to collapse the system. Besides, the costs of the gas, required to fuel the contracts would have been too high. The developers were right. Last year, CryptoKitties craze resulted in slowing down all transactions on the Ethereum network. The scalability issue was now confirmed in practice.