The Three Challenges That Every Music Blockchain Startup Faces

In my view, there are three main challenges that have to be overcome for a music startup to make an impact using blockchain technology.

So far there have been a lot of people talking like they are going to change how music gets monetized. But outside of steem, there hasn’t been much progress. Here’s what I think is holding us back:

(1) Convenience

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The kind of work that needs to happen on a hardware level for a music streaming service (reliable search, fast load times) is hard to accomplish on a blockchain system. So far nobody seems to have found the way to load large files quickly without a central server.

Projects like IPFS are trying to make it possible to host songs on the blockchain - but so far results have been slow and unreliable.

YouTube and Spotify are two examples of companies that can load up music on demand with no lag. Blockchain services will need to perform at that level in other to succeed. Most likely some kind of hybrid centralized/tokenized system will arrive first, where hosting is solved by a central server.

(2) Collectability

It doesn’t feel good to have an endless abyss of music to choose from. People like structure and they like limitations. That’s way Spotify offers so many playlists. You can find your playlist and listen to whatever comes out of it.

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Vinyl collectors enjoy building up their personal collection. You can’t hear the latest hits, but you have a cultivated batch of records that reflects your musical taste.

Bandcamp is a service that did a great job of building the collectible aspect of music. Every user has a profile where they can live stream any of the music they’ve ever bought on bandcamp. This is the closest thing to “digital vinyl” that I’ve seen.

With blockchain projects, you are up against all of that collectability. There is so much focus on cheap and easy access to anything in the world, but not enough focus on the real user experience. How can people be convinced to switch away from their current collections?

(3) Authority

The hard part with building a new form of music distribution is getting the big artists. Spotify struggled with this problem early on too. When you can’t hear all of your favorite artists on the blockchain, you are unlikely to switch over.

So far there haven’t been many stories about famous musicians using blockchain in a serious way. Apparently Bjork is giving away cryptocurrency with her new album, but it’s some super random token.

_{bjork. source: wikipedia}

When I see Justin Bieber or Kayne West getting involved in a blockchain music startup, I’ll pay attention. Right now there are a lot of unestablished startups all vying to change the music industry. The end result is a lot of noise without too much action to back it up.

When Will We See Blockchain Music Apps Gain Traction?

To be honest, I think we are still a little early to be expecting good blockchain music apps. I think that the steem ecosystem is as close as we can get for now, where we monetize the act of blogging about our process.

The actual action of selling a song is still best done through Spotify, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and other centralized services. They are just better at that right now.

I have no doubt that in 5 years, everything could be different. I’m just looking at the next year and not seeing 2018 as a big break for music in the blockchain world. I honestly feel like we are going to be early adapters for a while longer.

It’s weird because with the internet, music got hit really hard really quickly. But I think the opposite may be the case with blockchain.

What do you think? Is there a big future for blockchain-related music services?