If you want to ask everyone, what is the most indispensable thing in your daily life? Music must be on the list. With the development of the Internet, music streaming media has changed the way of music consumption to a great extent, enabling people to listen to various music works more widely and more conveniently. However, problems such as rampant piracy, difficulty in safeguarding the rights and interests of music creators, and the proliferation of scalpers in the performance market have become obstacles to the healthy development of the music industry."stumbling block"。
Just recently, the new album "When You See Yourself" of the American rock band Kings of Leon was released in the form of digital assets, becoming the first mainstream album to be released using blockchain technology as the basis, and its sales exceeded two in a week. Millions of dollars have once again ignited the industry's enthusiasm and expectations for the blockchain.
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The duplicity of the music industry
Traditionally, the music industry consists of three major sectors: the music record industry chain, the music copyright industry chain, and the music performance industry chain. However, in these three seemingly beautiful sub-industry chains, there are more or less industry pain points.
1. Rampant piracy
According to statistics, the annual income of music copyright holders in my country only accounts for about 2% of the output value of the entire industry. This figure accounts for 70% and 90% respectively in many developed countries such as Europe, America, Japan and South Korea. That said, it's likely that most of the music we've heard over the past decade has been bootleg.
Pirated music is rampant precisely because of the low cost of piracy and illegal activities. After the producers of pirated music are investigated and dealt with, they only need to pay 500-2000 yuan in compensation, which is insignificant compared to the huge profits they earn. However, when the era has developed into the era of digital music, my country's online music payment has not yet been fully popularized, and even genuine paid music products often have a poor experience.
It is not difficult to see from this that in order to fight back against piracy, both technology and law must be grasped.
2. Multiple stakeholders
The lyrics, arrangement, production, performance, etc. of a song are usually completed by different musicians, and the development of the Internet has also made cross-regional and cross-national cooperation mainstream. As a result, copyright ownership and profit distribution methods have become more complicated due to various factors such as different roles, different contributions, different contracts, and different regulations. The efficiency of remuneration payment is extremely low, and it often causes confusion and disputes.
3. The flood of scalpers
Friends who have watched the concert may have the experience of buying tickets from scalpers. Although the audience hates scalpers, the demand for reselling has always existed. Statistics show that the global secondary ticketing market has already exceeded tens of billions of dollars. But often in the second-hand ticket market, viewers not only have to endure "abnormal" prices, but also bear the risk of counterfeit tickets. However, most of the profits in the performance market are earned by ticket dealers and second-hand ticket platforms, not organizers, channels or musicians.
4. Second creation attribution
With the rise of short videos, the music industry is also facing another major challenge, which is the change from pure audio-visual to "secondary creation" of music using short videos and live broadcasts.
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Blockchain boosts the transformation of the music industry
So, under the empowerment of blockchain technology, can these pain points in the music industry be overcome one by one?
In the book "Blockchain Revolution", Don Tapscott listed music as the second largest application of blockchain outside the financial field. With the support of blockchain technology, music can truly become an irreplaceable digital asset. Once created, it can carry unique data and be stored on the blockchain, which cannot be modified to ensure the authenticity of the information.
In fact, as early as 2016, when the blockchain entered the mainstream field of vision, the music industry was one of the most anticipated application fields. Aiming at many pain points in the music industry in the digital age, such as many middlemen, complex value chains, and opaque copyright data, the decentralized, traceable, and non-tamperable attributes of the blockchain are considered to eliminate the "flaws" of the music industry , a "flawless strategy" to protect the rights and interests of musicians.
For example, in the field of copyright that has been plagued by the development of the music industry, blockchain technology can transfer the digital content of each new song registered on the blockchain platform, such as lyrics, album description, cover, copyright authorization, and user usage. Wait for all relevant information to be completely preserved. Since the distributed recording method of the blockchain exists independently, does not belong to any single entity, and cannot be tampered with, music creators can register the copyright of their works without a record company, thus simplifying the music industry chain and reducing middlemen The presence.
The music demand side can directly download through distributed nodes, reducing the "commission" of various channels. While the copyright is protected, the income of musicians will also be greatly increased, thereby encouraging them to create more and better works, and promoting the healthy development of the entire industry.
In the long run, the significance of applying blockchain to music copyright management is to realize the integration and standardization of copyright data in the whole industry, so that the same work can always have consistent and comparable copyright information in the complex creation and distribution process , so as to truly realize more accurate royalty payment. But the blockchain is not a panacea. It can solve the problems of copyright records and non-tampering after the works are uploaded to the chain, that is, the problem of music storage certificates, but the authenticity of the chained information itself is actually difficult to judge. In order to truly realize the protection of music copyright, the monitoring of infringement also requires the collaboration of various high-tech technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing.
At present, foreign non-profit organizations such as the Open Music Initiative are already trying to use blockchain and open source tools to establish a unified copyright owner ID in the industry. I hope this will be a beneficial attempt for the music industry to move towards the systematization of blockchain copyright management. .
In addition, in the performance market, blockchain is also "promising". Today, when electronic ticketing has been popularized on a large scale, there is almost no difficulty in connecting the ticketing system with blockchain technology. Since the ticketing data stored on the chain can be traced throughout the entire process, any abnormal transaction can be identified and intervened immediately without revealing personal information. In the past few years, performance ticketing is almost one of the most successful blockchain application scenarios with the clearest business model in the music industry.
epilogue
epilogue
Today, the blockchain has been tried in multiple application scenarios in the music field, proving its potential value in solving the pain points of the music industry to a certain extent. However, if the blockchain + music is to be applied on a large scale in the entire industry, it still needs to continue to work together.
As an early planner of my country's blockchain industry, Wanglian Technology has been deeply involved in the blockchain field for many years and can provide integrated solutions for blockchain applications. In the future, Wangchain Technology will continue to actively embrace technological progress. On the basis of building the underlying technology of the blockchain, it will comprehensively use new technologies and forces such as artificial intelligence and big data to complement the shortcomings of blockchain technology, empower the music industry, and develop Develop a sustainable landing and operation model to achieve efficient industry cooperation and establish a new industry ecosystem.
