The Blockchain and music.

In the last 20 years, the ability to digitally share music between friends, as well as various platforms offering free music downloads has meant huge losses for record labels and artists. However, on the positive side, peer to peer sharing has meant artists can reach a much wider audience than earlier in the digital age. 

For example, The Arctic Monkey's first EP ‘Beneath the Boardwalk’ freely downloaded was the catalyst for their first single becoming number 1. Although initially they received no income from the EP, they attained a cult following and huge fan base. Consequently, they had so much more negotiating power when the record labels wanted to sign them.

Technology has evolved again since 2001 and Steemit is an exciting new avenue to explore, which will hopefully help put more power back into the hands of the artist.

'The more "upvotes" – likes, essentially – a post gets, the more it earns.’ (Strauss, 2016)

The users of Steemit have voting power, which means their upvote has value to the artist, but also as a curator. Incentivising users to find good quality artists. Whilst allowing both the artist and curator to benefit financially from the content.   

Similar to Steemit, there is a video blogging platform called DTube. It has the same upvoting system as Steemit.

‘DTube is the first crypto-decentralized video platform, built on top of the STEEM Blockchain. DTube aims to become an alternative to YouTube that allows you to watch or upload videos on IPFS and share or comment about it on the immutable STEEM Blockchain, while earning cryptocurrency doing it.’ (DTube, 2018)

The difference with blockchain technology is that it offers the artist protection, particularly in the music development stage. Songs on the blockchain cannot be duplicated as there is a specific barcode, so there’s a collectable value as the artist has control over the supply, which makes them special and valuable. For example, it is unlike Limewire, where downloads could just be copied and freely sent to others. Imogen Heap was one of the first artists to use the blockchain; she discusses the Blockchain with BASCA:

‘The blockchain builds upon itself each day with a memory of the past days accounting through the blocks. It’s a way for the artist instead of having to have money upfront, it could be a trusted way for people to invest and share in the profits of the artist.’ (BASCA, 2017)

 

I decided to test out Steemit. My introductory post made €79.09 steem dollars which is the equivalent to £98.86. My boyfriend @samcook and I went and bought a new four channel Interface by Scarlett, which we needed for performing our music. We posted a video of us performing an original song which made 130 Steem dollars, which is £182.97. This nearly covered the cost of the new interface, which was quite mind blowing and exciting for us as artists.

You can also draw out this money by sending the steem dollars into a bitcoin wallet and taking the money out at one of the bitcoin cash machines. However, if you keep the money in your Steem wallet, it will give you more influence and voting power within the community. What this means is your upvote (like) actually has monetary value.   

There is also a weekly competition for musicians and artists on Steemit called 'Open Mic', run by @luzcypher. This is an amazing community on Steemit to be part of and where you can post your music and join in with the weekly openmic competitions.  

During times of change such as this, there are definitely opportunities for artists.

Thank you for reading and hopefully you have found this information interesting and useful. Best wishes, Jordan X