Musicians aren’t convinced by blockchain’s potential

SEOUL, Feb 1 — Blockchain is attracting curiosity within the monetary world for its promise of absolute safety. The expertise can also be attracting curiosity from sure gamers within the music trade, who see it as a possibility to facilitate transactions between followers and artists. However musicians are extra measured about the actual advantages they may derive from this innovation.

Promoting

Promoting

No less than, that’s what Yujun Park and Seongcheol Kim, two Korea College researchers, declare in a paper printed within the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. They discovered that the South Korean musicians they interviewed as a part of their analysis have “ambivalent” attitudes to the adoption of blockchain within the music trade.

It is because the expertise is each new and sophisticated, though the primary blockchain in historical past dates again to the early Nineteen Nineties. Blockchain has the potential for use for a variety of functions within the music trade, providing artists the prospect to take (or take again) management of the usage of their music by slicing out the intermediary. Certainly, that is the argument usually put ahead by supporters of the usage of blockchain in music.

However, in actuality, doubts persist as to blockchain’s means to supply truthful remuneration to all artists and enhance the customarily obscure administration of royalties. “As a lot because the artists believed that the adoption of blockchain within the music trade may create potential floor for brand new alternatives, in addition they held a cynical view relating to the actualisation of the subsequent paradigm in a practical context,” write Yujun Park and Seongcheol Kim of their paper.

Rebalancing the music enterprise?

Certainly, some specialists, equivalent to Tom Allen, CEO and co-founder of the startup Curve Royalties Methods, consider that there’s nonetheless some method to go earlier than blockchain may be deployed on a big scale. At current, the amount of cryptocurrency transactions this expertise can deal with concurrently is restricted, which has monetary repercussions. “To harness the true potential of blockchain-based royalty reporting, the size of the networks must be 100x greater, and the associated fee must be 10,000x smaller,” he defined in a 2022 op/ed piece for Music Business Worldwide.

Typically talking, the artists interviewed for this examine don’t consider that the deployment of blockchain expertise would allow complete disintermediation within the music trade, such are the technical and authorized limitations. They do consider, nevertheless, that this expertise has the potential to alter their each day lives, by establishing a sure transparency and stability within the distribution of royalties linked to their music. Nonetheless, that’s offered that intermediaries (report corporations, streaming platforms, and so on.) play the sport and likewise see blockchain as a possibility to be seized.

A number of alerts recommend that the foremost music gamers are exhibiting some curiosity on this expertise. In 2017, the Swedish streaming large Spotify acquired Mediachain, a blockchain-based firm for managing royalties and defending copyrights. Just a few years later, Warner Music participated within the US$11.2 million (RM52 million) financing spherical led by Dapper Labs, the corporate behind the Circulate blockchain and CryptoKitties, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing digital cats, experiences Forbes. As such, there’s good motive to consider that we haven’t heard the final of blockchain in music. — ETX Studio