The Music industry has some issues in its infrastructure that are exacerbated by the tradition of its centralized nature.
When I went to school to educate myself about the Entertainment Business, I learned ad nauseum about the structure of a Record Company and Music Publishers. One of the cornerstones of knowledge I championed out of that education was the understanding of structural control points and how that has shaped the culture of the Music Industry.

When you wanted to move millions of units of a Record or CD before the internet, You put that product at the front of the store. The front of every store. This required control of a very large centralized distribution network because the success of this system was dependent on that 1 successful platinum artist who paid for all the rest of the bad investments the record company made. Production costs were high for physical products. Many an infamous album was recorded and never saw the light of day, because it just wasn't the right timing to fit the distribution systems greedy needs.

Peer 2 Peer file trading and torrent technology, in a matter of years made those age old concrete physical distribution chains almost obsolete.
While this revolution of "endless free music" offered so many positive results for society it also opened the proverbial "Pandora's box".
How do you attribute value to recorded music when it's so easily accessible and ultimately disposable. The new supply is as endless as the creative juices of humanity, and more humans get access to the internet everyday. Demand is constant, and due to advances digital devices and portable speaker technology recorded music is consumed more than ever before.

Soon after p2p networks blew the doors open,  home digital recording technology became accessible to every band, resulting in more poor quality supply of music flooding the system. There was no longer larger teams of seasoned professionals making all the recordings you heard. Now there was competition from millions of kids on laptops at home.

Some of that art will last as avant-garde, most of it in my opinion will disappear in history as if it was never made. Not because the music wasn't good, or that it didn't mean anything to an audience or demographic. But because many of these songs never reached their full potential due to the poor quality tools and workflow they were recorded with; and the spaces they were recorded in being vastly inferior to the high standard of the prior 4 decades of recorded music. Many a recording technique that the ears of the masses now consider iconic was nearly lost to the past until youtube became a venue for classic producers and engineers to share their techniques with home studio creators. This of course was profit driven and was often to help sell home studio recording gear and get the producers paid. 

Now that I've painted in your mind some perspective of where I'm coming from, here are some of the problems areas I've experience in my music career that I'm hoping  the great crypto and blockchain minds out there can help me find solutions for!

Problem # 1. Centralized social media networks control a majority of digital music marketing.
Digital Marketing is KING and is done predominately now through a handful of social media networks that we are all familiar with.
When my first successful band started it was the early days of facebook, and we could reach all of our friends with a new song or video post. Easily hundreds of views, then thousands of views and we didn't have to pay anyone to achieve those numbers. There also simply wasn't much content in our friend networks to compete with. Not yet. We had a control point over our audience and nearly direct access to them. Our band could almost guarantee our shows would sell out if we created good content for Facebook posts, because our fans would see it. They saw content they wanted to see. This was before the algorithms and company matured and facebook began profiting off its user's data.

There is no transparency in facebook's paid advertising programs and they have been less and less effective for me over the years until I eventually left the platform completely. I no longer invest money in paid advertisements, not just out of principal but because the results were as cheap and fake as the system. I determined this after working with 3 different acts over 5 years who had 3 completely different audiences. My super fans who buy at least $100 worth of my musical products every year are almost never made through digital advertisements. It's when a friend brings them to my concert and I give them a real unique human experience that can't be captured digitally. My marketing has to be as honest as my product or my fans notice the discrepancy and are turned off.
I personally don't click on paid advertisements anymore on Instagram. There are too many great artists I choose to follow already and my choices are always better that the push marketing sent my way by the algorithm. That's why radio DJ's and music trend setters still exist. Although few and far between. Solicitation by humans is still better than by math... for now. Maybe you think differently, Please comment below and educate me on your experience.

Problem 2: Performance royalties. Can you trust the centralized Performance Rights Organizations and are they too slow? 

Most artists have forever been short on cash. Its in the nature of the beast. Impulsiveness, social awkwardness, it all adds to unique perspectives on the world that often lead to beautiful emotional ideas. Of course, artists are also often financially destitute and when asked about their assets by a banker the inevitable reply is, "My guitars are my only assets".  It's where their priorities are at!

The current royalty collection systems takes forever, and there is little to no accountability. Spotify and other streaming giants have fought to set the rates and the rules of the game with their centralized control points.  If you haven't heard, they are still poverty level prices. You see someone just found a way to recreate a control point something like the Store front charts of the old record stores. The major artists get millions of plays, and those who used to feed themselves off CD sales have to tour and live in a poverty cycle because the streaming system doesn't properly represent their art. I learned as a band manager that musicians are often constantly selling any assets they manage to inherit or acquire just to keep their career going.

When I have got some music publishers drunk at music business conferences I've been privy to stories about them discovering "lost royalty money" from major artists, and then basically demanding a commission on that money to tell the artist how to access it.

-A public blockchain record of royalty payments could be a huge asset to artists. A HUGE equalizer. Eliminating the "middle man's" fingers in the pie would change many musician's lives for the better and allow them to fund more art.

-A public database of decentralized steaming music data could create charts that are truly democratic and algorithms that solicit you music could be more trustworthy and valuable. My basic understanding of Oracles sounds perfect for this application.

-An efficient and fast public ledger of royalty collection data tied to a Stable coin payment network could revolutionize the music publishing industry and empower the actual creators instead of the copyright collectors!


Problem 3: Funding

I have been lucky enough to have secured funding for bands I was in, early on in my career. We won a clean $25 000 from a local radio station and subsequently had the song that won us that money played on a decent rotation across the continent for a year or so. These kind of opportunities are few and far between for artists and so they are left writing redundant Grant applications that usually get nowhere and paying money into songwriting competitions that they will statistically never win with prizes too small to fund the making of a good record. Nevermind enough to pay to market the record.

Crypto backed loans like those offered by companies like BlockFi eliminate the middle man that has for ever said NO to musicians, when the question was "can I get a loan for my band man?".  "Even if I have customers, defined demographics and a metric based marketing plan?".
The answer was still NO.
Now the middle man is the Smart Contract. BOOM.
Artists who can work hard to first build some crypto collateral can now take calculated risk and get a loan at a competitive rate determined by the community they are borrowing from. If they believe in their product all the tools are available to raise capital, leverage it within reason and produce properly funded quality products. Obviously as the bitcoin marketcap grows the presumed decrease in volatility will make this a more and more viable option.

My wild imagination can also see defi protocols evolve new ideas and concepts for crowds funding art projects.

In Conclusion:

I've been making money making music now
for about 13 years.
As i've progressed through my career, it has become more and more of a challenge to make a living solely off musical income.
Not impossible, just more difficult and always requiring and evolving set of skills. Covid has humbled me in a profound way. I am one of the few of my professional peers that has been performing live through almost all of the Pandemic. I'm located in a small vacation town in a conservative part of America, and I perform at least once a week. Although I'm playing 1/4 or 1/5 of the gigs I did last year, I make hundreds of dollars in tips and physical CD sales every gig that I dump almost immediately into Crypto. People are hungry for music with real emotional value, and I think that Crypto and Blockchain innovation can help free those songs and stories from the shackles of an old distribution and funding system that crippled certain art and supported mediocrity for far too long.

I'm just a humble Songwriter, Audio Engineer and Crypto day-trader looking for some help to solve tangible problems in my Industry. If you think you have the structures to answer to the problems I've outlined, lets start a discussion and get them solved. It's about time. 
I'll be diving deep into Crypto ventures already in development to solve problems in the music industry in future blog posts, Please follow me to go further down this rabbit hole.