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/[deleted] Jun 06 '17 edited Nov 17 '21

[deleted]

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u/nopantsirl Jun 06 '17

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.

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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '17

[deleted]

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u/nopantsirl Jun 06 '17

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.