Music was once scarce. Before the days of MP3 and P2P file sharing, you didn’t have the ability to hear songs whenever you wished unless you bought them. Today one does not even need to download songs, as platforms such as VEVO and YouTube host many of the most popular songs of yesterday and today. The industry was faced with a definitive problem in an age of liberal copy and distribution technology: finding new ways to monetize digital music files that lacked scarcity. A gang of computer programmers – united by the Bitcoin technology – are trying to revolutionize an industry after 15 years of disruption which began with Napster and was cemented by BitTorrent. Bitcoin’s blockchain – a decentralized system powered by a network of computers – serves as the transparent backbone of the Bitcoin network. The blockchain, which functions as a public ledger, maintains the accounting of the Bitcoin network, timestamping each transaction and assigning a unique ID. Numerous individuals and companies are excited about the future of the blockchain and the music industry. Three companies, PeerTracks, Bittunes and Ujo Music, each claim their business model will liberate musicians from being under the thumbs of overbearing music labels and streaming services. Peertracks, strives to use the blockchain technology to develop an artist equity trading system. Bittunes, strives to create an independent music market. Ujo Music, seeks to design a system to fix global royalty distribution and licensing problems faced by the industry. These entrepreneurs believe that in the future when an artist creates a song it will be stored on the blockchain with its own unique ID, just like bitcoin is today. The music industry has attempted to solve some of these problems before. But projects such as the Global Repertoire Database (GRD) never came to be. […]
