If you've been following me since my first post you would have read that I've outlined 3 major areas in the Music Industry that I can see obvious cases for decentralization. Middlemen in all these categories have been reaping the rewards of hardworking artists for decades, because we didn't have the technological infrastructure to bypass them. They became culture controllers.

These in my opinion are the centralized systems that need rebuilding:
-Social Media Networks
-Royalty payments
-Funding & lending sources for bands

In this post I'm going to start with covering an existing project that is attempting to address some of these fundamental infrastructure issues in the Music and Entertainment Industry. 

Musicoin

OK... the name is pretty stupid. That was my first impression. But hey, concepts with stupid names work out all the time! Tiktok (Which was even renamed), Google, Napster, Polkadot. They may be stupid but they are at least memorable. Musicion is both stupid and for me, not terribly memorable. But I'm the fickle type so..

I also don't like the idea of creating a new coin specifically for musicians. Do we really need more blockchains when there is already excellent infrastructure available?
(as I researched further into this coin I soon discovered that the company is migrating their coin to an ERC-20 Ethereum coin.)
This is at least a step forward, Etheruem has a lot going for it as far as public attention in 2021 and plenty of speculation on it's potential to be a blockchain that lasts. As you'll soon learn from following my blog, I think Ethereum has many "Gaps in the Armour" that could allow competitors like Cardano and Polkadot to take a good portion of the Ethereum marketshare.

But for now, Ethereum is a strong choice to migrate to. My first red flag about hearing the migration to an ERC-20 Ethereum token is that fees on this network are currently not ideal.
I hate sending ETH. I've never had a problem with a Bitcoin transaction, but ETH transactions have caused me serious stress. Ethereum is attempting to fix this issue with Ethereum 2.0, but that is still off in the distance. For Musicion to be effective at sending lots of small royalty payments they will need to innovate further than the current ETH ecosystem or hope that ETH 2.0 is successful and drop gas fees to a reasonable rate for their purposes. I assume they intend to do the smaller transactions on their own network and I HOPE they plan to offer larger payouts in ETH. As a musician I want hard money I don't want any Musicoin.  ETH is ok. Bitcoin or a stable-coin pegged to the dollar like Ampleforth or USDC would be exponentially better.

Getting into the details

The Musicion "yellow paper" which defines their new approach on the Ethereum Blockchain is a much more promising read than the original "white paper". That being said, it really seems from reading both papers like they are in transition and not really sure where exactly they are going.
It seems to me that they are predominately trying to tackle the problem of discrepancy between performance royalty rate of indie and major label signed musicians. The idea seems to be that they are going to pay a standard rate for all streams and level the playing field.

Through collective bargaining, royalties from streaming services are negotiated by big music corps on behalf of the artists they represent. So if you are an independent musician on a streaming service you are more than likely getting paid less per stream that a major label artist is.

The big labels and publishing companies have something the streaming services need. They by nature buy up the most popular artists and song copyrights and thus have catalogs of value that the streaming services need to survive.

So how do we get the acts that draw the most streams to move away from the centralized streaming networks and honestly ultimately leave their labels?
You have to incentivize them. I'm not seeing that incentive anywhere yet. But it may be on the horizon.

Musicion has a system called UBI (Universal Basic Income) which is really their revolutionary idea as far as I can see.
This allows them to offer free streaming to their users while still paying good royalty rates to creators. The blockchain is the defining difference that allows this to happen by eliminating the middlemen and diverting those funds. They don't explain this well in version 2.0 of their whitepaper or the yellow paper. So I'm skeptical to say the least. Also calling it "Universal Basic Income" rubs me the wrong way!
Apparently a percentage of the proceeds from mining their coin goes into a UBI account. I'd love to read further about the "tokenomics" of this idea. for now, I'll remain positive but deeply skeptical.

In Conclusion

My assumption is that the next wave of emerging artists that the major labels will want to own, have to choose not to go down that path and something like the Musicion is attempting to offer these artists another profitable option.
But if nobody KNOWS about this new path for emerging artists to take, then it will go nowhere.

Enter the Decentralized social media platforms.

Once a transition of millions of Facebook users to a new decentralized network has begun, I believe there will be an opening for projects like Musicion to thrive. Until then I just don't see the path. But when the masses realize that they should be making money off their own user data and social media contributions, not Facebook and Instagram... Then there is certainly going to be a revolution in perspective and something like musicoin can make a run at transitioning some influential artists over to their side.
Keep your eye out for Musicoin.
I'm not investing in it, or really giving it much more of my attention.
But at least they are making some moves in the right direction, and maybe they will gain some momentum.

* EDIT
In an earlier edit I stated that Musicion had worked with Imogen Heap. It was actually Mycelia which I will be covering in future posts.

Links:

Musicoin Whitepaper: (for those new to Crypto, this is the document that outlines the use-case of the coin)

https://musicoin.medium.com/musicoin-project-white-paper-v2-0-6be5fd53191b

Musicion Yellow paper
https://musicoin.medium.com/
Musicoin website

https://musicoin.org/