INTRO

Listening to music is easier than it has ever been. Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud are all ready to fill your ears with more music than you could ever listen to. As a user, you pay a fixed monthly fee for this easy access and the streaming service then passes that money on to the artist right? Well, not quite.

The music industry in 2018: YouTubers are stars, stars are brands, brands produce content, content is everything, everything is content, and nobody pays for music. Things have changed a lot in the music business recently.

While on one hand, the traditional infrastructure has morphed and shrunk, the individuals who create and engage with the art itself have grown, totally changing the way they think about business, branding, and what it means to have a successful career.

What’s been going on in the music industry over the past quarter century has been a steady development towards decentralization. Where once institutions like record labels, studios, distribution centers, and record sales defined what success was in the music business, advents like streaming platforms, digital audio workstations, and the disintermediating power of the internet have eroded the landscape into a more even playing field.

The potential blockchain technology holds to take the music industry — and the entire entertainment industry, for that matter — to the next plane is multifarious. Whether it’s through crowdfunding, programmatic IP, distribution, event ticketing, ownership of non-fungible assets and collectibles, streaming, blockchain technology and (sometimes, but not always) digital currencies, blockchain can be used to re-imagine the entire process of how music and art is funded, created, distributed, consumed, and all over again.

This is why music and entertainment have become some of the most active spaces in the blockchain world for technological development. Many people may look at cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and think that blockchain is all about finance and deep tech that won’t affect them, but scores of music-centric blockchain startups are proving that not only can decentralization create substantive change in the daily lives of everyday people.

In theory, the artist receives a certain amount of money per play. Rights holders like music labels, producers, musicians, vocalists, etc., are all claiming their share of the revenue generated. Figuring out who to pay and how much to pay them, therefore, becomes a complicated task. Metadata, which accompanies tracks, contains info such as who the right holders are. However, this data is often incomplete and takes just a couple of seconds to be stripped away. Incorrect or missing metadata means that an artist may not get paid for their work. This is a huge problem for smaller artists, as every bit of revenue can make the difference between being able to pursue a career in music or having to find another source of income.

ϑ IMU tokens are used as the engine to support imusify’s multi-layered, decentralized music economy. This will create an immense potential value for the token’s use throughout imusify’s infiltration into the industry.

Through our smart reward and compensation system, ϑ IMU is either rewarded for contribution to the platform, or used as a currency for exchanging digital assets and services. By establishing trust and transparency between artists, supporters, fans, and industry service providers; a vibrant ecosystem emerges.

imusify

Revenue Sharing Solved With Blockchain

imusify uses a combination of innovative protocols and frameworks to facilitate direct peer-to-peer connection between artists, fans, and other stakeholders. The platform integrates the best practices of traditional crowdfunding, streaming, media sharing, economic and social networks. This way, imusify eliminates the need for existing intermediaries, resolving inefficiencies, providing transparency, and ensuring everybody is fairly rewarded for their contribution. Use cases include artist crowdfunding, transparent artist royalty payments, incentivized content curation, open-source development and network collaboration.

Blockchain has the potential to solve this problem. More specifically, the smart contract component of blockchain can include which percentage of the revenue goes to which member of the band, the label, the manager, etc. It can even give a quick way of contacting all the involved rights holders for licensing queries.

By logging all the rights holders to a specific song on the blockchain, you basically create one big transparent database which can be viewed by anyone at any time. Artists receive their share immediately instead of months or even years later as is now the case.