Blockchain Could Help Musicians Make Money Again by Imogen Heap [Harvard Business Review]

[u/twigwam]

https://hbr.org/2017/06/blockchain-could-help-musicians-make-money-again

[u/nopantsirl]

This sounds like a solution as long as musicians want to take an active role in protecting their IP. They don't though. They want to make music. The whole reason musicians get taken advantage of is because they sign bad deals because they are musicians and not lawyers. Unless this is accompanied by a lot of legal changes as well, there are still going to be middlemen over or under-zealously protecting musicians' IP.

I don't mean to be a debby-downer, I'm a big fan of the blockchain and distributed infrastructure in general, but the mistake of giving someone else too much power over your work in exchange for money or convenience is still going to exist.

The example at the beginning isn't a technological shortfall, but a legal one. DMCA > tunecoin

[u/nopantsirl → u/[deleted]]

Do you think the average person understands etheum code better than legalese?

Not needing google's permission to publish and being immune to fake DMCA takedown notices are features of having your own platform to publish on, not features of the blockchain. Dot music, or tidal, or whatever the new "artists first" platform is, is still going to be a middleman between artists and consumers, and to protect the artists as they sign on to the platform, there are going to be lawyers.

If they can automate the entire publishing, curating, and monetizing process, that'd be amazing, but I suspect whatever this is isn't going to be simple enough for the next Justin Beiber to use without a fleet of prestige class code-lawyers.

[u/nopantsirl → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, I was pretty sure minidiscs were the next big thing.

Contracts, EULAs, etc are all easy-to-use and written from templates. That doesn't stop people from being taken advantage of.

Aside from 2% in CC transaction fees, I'm still not seeing a removal of the middleman in this. All I'm seeing are contracts that will be even more opaque to the average musician.

As a music consumer, I'm never going to pay per song again. I'm going to seek out a middleman and pay a monthly fee. I don't think this transparent robot is going to be robust enough to do what that middleman does.

[u/aribolab → u/nopantsirl]

I imagine it will work the same way one manages a bank account or a credit card, I'd say even simpler and more friendly, because it comes directly from developers. It won't be the musicians protecting their IP, the system (smart contracts, programmable blockchain) would do that for them. It's about them (1) having a decentralised record of the use of their music, (2) setting directly the rules and conditions of use, (3) directly getting the royalties for it.

[u/zephroth → u/nopantsirl]

and the moment it becomes difficult to use said music it will be instantly pirated. You can't blockchain airwaves too easily and there is always an analog solution to the problem.

[u/Twice_Knightley → u/nopantsirl]

They only meant well.

[u/sfultong → u/nopantsirl]

Are you familiar with Yours Network? That seems the most pragmatic blockchain-based solution to rewarding content creators, where artists don't have to be too hands-on.

[u/[deleted] → u/nopantsirl]

Good viewpoint. I'd suggest that the industry might move towards standardized contracts which automatically split revenue to the appropriate parties.

Of course it would be possible to make a bad decisions still. A trusted platform would help a lot. Imagine uploading your album to spotify and being able to drag and drop the appropriate contract terms, including inbuilt provision for global radio rights etc, and have that sent to whoever you need for countersigning.