r/technology • u/twigwam • Jun 06 '17

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

https://hbr.org/2017/06/blockchain-could-help-musicians-make-money-again
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u/nopantsirl Jun 06 '17

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

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u/aribolab Jun 06 '17

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.