Investigating MUSICOIN: This Blockchain Protocol is Trying to Fix Digital Music Monetization. Can They Do It?

Musicoin is a music distribution protocol that claims to offer great streaming royalty rates and a ethical approach to music sales.

Music is perhaps the most frequently “revolutionized” industry in the entire world… can MusiCoin finally change it for the better? I have heard more about them than any other music-related blockchain project in the last six months, easily. It’s not even close.

Until now, I was so deeply embroiled in my “Top 50 Token Investigation” series that I did not have the mental bandwidth to think about a single additional token.

More recently though I have become intensely curious about Musicoin. What is this thing, and why do people care so much about it? Is it a viable source of income for musicians?

Visiting Musicoin

The home page gives a great first impression. Clean, professional, but not too hip for its own good.

Clicking on the “I am a Musician” button leads to an explanation of the project’s benefits. This is pretty hypey and generic, so I don’t put too much stock into these claims. “best compensation in the industry, instantly and automatically” is a particularly un-provable and unlikely promise.

The stuff about Transparent Licenses is the most interest part of the sales pitch to me. Setting up licenses so that a bunch of people can receive the appropriate percentage of income would be amazing.

For example - what if @emelanson and I create a song for The Walding Family featuring a lead vocalist, and also with a small contribution of trumpet from another person?

Ideally I could list the song across all digital platforms, with each upvote/listen generating a micropayment, and with those micropayments automatically splitting up amongst the four people like this:

Matt - 30%
Elijah - 30%
Singer - 35%
Trumpet - 5%

If each play generates a half of a penny, and hypothetically if the song generates 100k listens in its first month, we’d earn the following amounts:

Matt - $150
Elijah - $150
Singer - $17.5
Trumpet - $2.5

…and the payouts would accrue instantly, our wallet balances steadily growing with each new listen.

It’s not much, but imagine a moderately successful artist averaging a few million plays per month across their entire catalogue and the numbers can start to work.

Now imagine this happening with every song that comes out - from newbies earning beer money on their mixtape, to up-and-comers earning side-income from their first few records, and so on.

This feature has existed in theory for a few years, but I have yet to see a viable implementation of it.

Even Steemit lacks the feature for a layperson to automatically split a post’s rewards between multiple people - only ChainBB makes that easy so far, as far as I know, and they take their own beneficiary reward in the process.

So we’ll end this tangent here, but suffice to say this is the kind of thing I am looking for when I assess a service like MusiCoin.

Signing Up

You have to use one of these three options (Gmail, Facebook, Twitter) to sign up for MusiCoin, which is a huge fail. Why should you be forced to use a centralized service, to log into a decentralized payment system? Meh.

Immediately upon picking my poison of which sign-in option to use… I was sent to the home page.

I have to be honest. My first impression was: “This looks really bad, as far as user design goes.”

I don’t know where to go to listen to music. I’m not sure where to start. All I do know is that I probably won’t enjoy whatever music is being put in front of me at the start of my journey, lol.

The entire top half of the screen is taken up by this mediocre-looking “Artist of the Week,” It’s just not a good look. I am hoping to see something a lot more professional upon login.

Contrast the MusiCoin homepage with Spotify:

Spotify conveys more information in a cleaner way and all of the content is much more professional.

Regardless, the bottom half of MusiCoin’s interface has two halves: One side shows an activity / microblog Feed, and the other side shows recent tips. The tip interface should be exciting but I can barely tell what is going on there.

Compared to Steemit, where the payouts are obvious and unavoidable, MusiCoin’s interface is not making me excited about the potential earnings on first glance. But this could just be a design issue.

There is also no clear indication of how to do anything - to find new music, to upload music, to experience any joy.

So I went searching…

and the results are…

No results.

OK let’s try an easier one.

leads me to:

OK, this is a lot better. I can see fellow Steemian @djlethalskillz in there, let’s go take a listen!

The playback widget is great. This makes up for a lot of the other complaints that I have with the site. The buttons all respond quickly. When I clicked play, the site told me “This play was paid for by UBI - enjoy!”

The actual page that this widget is located on does not look amazing, this is another example of where some site design improvements could go a long way.

The share button allowed me to quickly signal boost the track to my Twitter audience, which was good:

This is awesome as an artist - I know that Lethal Skills got paid instantly when I clicked play, and I love it. But as a listener this site will not be good enough to attract serious usage. It is more ethical, but it is not actually better for users than Spotify/iTunes/etc.

MusiCoin is an Excellent Protocol, But Needs a Better Front-End

MusiCoin is a great protocol. The problem is, it needs a way better front-end.

If this technology was incorporated into a professional app like Spotify, I would absolutely use it. However it’s going to be hard to get other people to switch over unless MusiCoin can actually build or partner with an app that is substantially better than Spotify.

Being as good as isn’t enough to force a market to switch products - you need to be better. MusiCoin is a good idea but the big challenge is going to be for them to compete with Spotify and the others on the level of user experience.

Here are a few paths forward that I can see for Musicoin:

(1) Become an independent music ecosystem like Bandcamp. Build a healthy community around the ethos of fair trade music and enjoy your small but meaningful corner of the music industry.

(2) Go B2B with the technology and try to get it implemented within the other niche platforms that already exist. Help artists monetize stuff like Daytrotter sessions, Tiny Desk Concerts, and so on.

(3) Become the Next Soundcloud, literally replace soundcloud but with monetization built in

What do you think about MusiCoin?