The Blockchain: Audiochain & The Future of Music
In the early 1930’s, songwriters and composers became aware of what we now know as Performing Rights Organizations (PRO’s). Their mission? To provide a solid service approach for music creators to properly collect royalties. There was one thing that was impossible to predict: The future technologies that would bring music to the masses with just a touch of your fingertips and how that would affect music consumption and royalty collection.
The ability to understand the consumption of new ways to listen to music will require many centralized platforms, creating, at some point, an industry that will provide less and less ability for music creators to be able to make higher profits on platforms within what we now know as the worldwide web also known as, the Internet.
Why are royalties being paid to music rights owners becoming less and less? Well, for one, building a website or app and the up-keep is costly. Two, any gatekeepers could have their hands in the cookie jar. And three, the record labels were losing money from the lack of tangible music product sells, like CD’s. I noticed this first hand while I worked for The Musicland Group, Inc. (Sam Goody music store) in the late 1990’s as record sells declined due to MP3 file sharing.
When Steve Jobs created iTunes, one of the problems he was solving was the stoppage of piracy, e.g. the Napster days, while providing a faster way to access music. He saw the file sharing and MP3 approach was an avenue to take and sealed the idea by adding payments for music downloads in one place — A marketplace for music streaming with the “nod of approval” from the five main parent record labels in the world.
Why did the record labels agree to join forces? Because the music industry is not in the business of developing technology but in the business of selling records. A win-win situation.
The issue still stands: Digital Streaming Platforms (DSP’s) are still paying music creators low streaming royalties to date. Here is where new technology comes in. A technology that can do what the internet did for Steve Jobs but with a more powerful protocol — Blockchain technology.
Blockchain technology is the new buzz around the world. In short, Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger that provides transparency, immutability and decentralization when something is being transacted. The smart contract, a computer program ran by cryptography, provides the ability to add utilities and agreements within the transaction being sent from one peer to another on the Blockchain, making it immutable and adding a timestamp for proper ownership verification and a source of certificate of ownership for both digital and physical assets alike.
In 2014, I discovered Blockchain technology and quickly realized no music company or traditional DSP’s where taking advantage of its utilities. After two and a half years of studying Blockchain and crypto currency, I started the process of creating what I now call Audiochain. Audiochain is a new music ecosystem powered by Blockchain technology. As someone who has been in the music industry for over 18+ years, I had a clear view of things within an industry that needed a new approach, a transparent approach. Blockchain provides that.
An ever-growing by-product of the Blockchain are Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s). Remember smart contracts? NFT’s are just that.
An NFT represents a digital or physical unique asset and provides proof of ownership.
Audiochain will provide music creators an ecosystem for tools to tokenize their entire music rights and has developed the first Music Rights Master NFT™ (MRM NFT).
The MRM NFT, curated and developed exclusively by Audiochain, will allow music rights owners to house copyright verification, allocate publishing split-sheets, and document music composition and masters information with complete metadata. Allowing the deployment of proper percentage collection via pre-recorded split-sheets for both music royalty collection and music sync licensing in an autonomous protocol via the Blockchain.
Audiochain will also release an NFT music marketplace. A marketplace ecosystem where the music creator can set fees for their own NFT’s to unlock music streaming, experiences, metaverse access and much more. You control it all by adding engament and unlockable content.
Our mission is to create the tools music creators, listeners and businesses need. All of the above will be coming with the first beta launch. Beta launch number two will provide a virtual world — a metaverse for all things music entertainment and fashion, concert ticketing, artist booking, and advertising within the metaverse.
The approach we are taking is an approach with utility as the main source. We are utilizing the technology and its by-products to the fullest extent for the best problem-solving solutions.
Technology has proven that things can be improved with the way we interact with music. The Blockchain provides a deeper and functional way to make it completely transparent, equally accessible and a way to bring in the new music business: Music Controlled by You. At Your Fingertips.
–– Paula Reina (Founder of Audiochain) www.audiochain.io
