Over the last few years there has been a steadily growing uproar from musicians who feel that they are not getting a fair portion of the money being made by their songs. In an age of streaming music, there are more and more middlemen taking a cut from the proceeds and it is estimated that a song has to be played a million times from a streaming service for the artist to make minimum wage. And this applies to those who are signed with major studios, not just the independents. Some people estimate that only 15% of the hundreds of millions of dollars paid by Spotify for the rights to stream music actually make it back to the original artists.
Today, one innovative singer is trying to break free from the established methods of music distribution and streaming. Her name is Imogene Heap, and she is a singer/songwriter who produces her own music and is the only female artist who has won a Grammy for engineering. Her idea was to have a single place to download her music, and include cover art and other extras with that download, instead of having to distribute her songs to all the various music services. To accomplish this, she and the people who have joined in the project have turned to blockchain technology. This is the same technology used in digital currency, like bitcoin.
The basic difference in this new technology is that contracts to use or listen to the music can be made in seconds and payment will be equally quick for the original artist, instead of royalty payments taking weeks or months to complete. Heap's new blockchain model is called Mycelia, and ideally will mean that:
transparency and clarity can be introduced into the music industry; a decentralised registry will make it easier to locate the owners of the song to obtain a legal licence to use it; money can be quickly sent where it needs to go with far fewer intermediaries; and there will be a far richer ecosystem of data and information around each song.
Heap will release a new single using the blockchain technology today, October 2nd, as a first experiment with the new distribution model. The name of the song is Tiny Human. I wish them luck in the endeavor, but getting more artists involved with take time, and I'm afraid the effort to cut out middlemen will die on the vine.
There is a very good, in depth article on the subject at The Guardian. If you want more details on the blockchain technology, I strongly suggest taking a look at their write-up.
