Revolutionizing the Music Industry with Blockchain

Blockchain plays a prominent role in revamping the music industry by fixing pain points like piracy, dealing with intermediaries for licensing, and overcoming payment disputes.

We are now going to unleash the harsh truth about the music industry. While you might not believe it, the music industry is in trouble. The industry faces numerous hard-to-resolve challenges and burning issues. Its first and the foremost challenge is piracy. Did you know that every year, there is a loss of more than 12.5 billion US dollars for the music industry due to piracy? Quite a large number, right? Music piracy eats up a lot of money that rightfully belongs to artists and record labels. Added to this, the artists are not given enough rewards for her work. The problem is, record labels keep a significant amount of money that comes from streaming platforms, thus not allowing artists to enjoy their rights. Basically, the music industry today lacks the correct ‘rights management approach’ and ‘transparency of selling music.’ Let’s stop here for now (however, the challenges are endless). What could be an appropriate solution for these problems? What if we tell you that the music industry can resolve all of these issues just by leveraging technology? Yes, you heard that right. Say hello to blockchain! This technology has the potential to not only revamp the music industry but also to solve almost all issues that the industry possesses. If you are thinking that the idea of leveraging blockchain is new to the industry, then you are wrong. Let us tell you that the peer-to-peer music network already had its existence in the music industry in the form of ‘digital music.’

Revealing the First Emergence of Digital Music

Music fans never love to pay for music. And, this was the case 15 years back too. Hence, smart minds developed a music sharing service that did not require any money. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, Napster, a peer-to-peer audio sharing platform on the Internet, allowed music fans to download free music. Napster also allowed its users to share files with their friends. But, due to this free music service, the music industry had a fall in its revenue graph. Later, other similar music platforms were developed, but, these earned money either by adding ads or charging ‘monthly’ or ‘yearly’ subscription rates.

Revamping the Music Industry with Blockchain

For quite some time now, blockchain has been creating a lot of buzz across the globe. Functionally, due to its decentralized record keeping feature, blockchain contains non-hackable and unmodifiable records secured by cryptography. Blockchain offers a promise of revamping the music industry by dealing with the following issues that are affecting the people within the industry.

• As blockchain entails decentralization, artists can interact, share, and sell to people directly without any go-betweens.
• With the help of blockchain, the music industry can keep track of every artist, popular or mediocre, by storing their details in a global ledger. This lets the people not miss out on any artist’s work when shared with the world.
• Sometimes, as mentioned earlier, record labels do not provide enough money to artists for their work, due to the lack of revenue transparency. With the help of blockchain and smart contracts, artists have got the opportunity of a transparent payment system. As the code is predetermined on smart contracts, each player in the music industry will get a fair revenue based on their work.
• Did you know blockchain is to become the cure for piracy? As cryptography secures content stored across a blockchain network, the music industry can protect their work and copyrights against any infringement. The music industry can use a combination of keys (a private key and a public key) and a hash, which is usually difficult to hack, for sharing, updating, or selling their work to avoid piracy.

Just like Imogen Heap leveraged blockchain for decentralizing her work so that she gets fair compensation, you can also decentralize your content, protect the copyright, get good revenues, and eliminate the frustrating mediators by capitalizing on blockchain.