The ever-growing music industry started facing its challenges and changes due to the pandemic situation and the advent of digital technologies. It is hard to remember when people used to line up to purchase albums or tickets for concerts. With blockchain technology reshaping online experiences and business practices, the music industry is facing revolutionary times.
MeMusic: shifting the music industry from companies to you
At MeMusic, we believe the problems in the industry are caused by having a corporate-centric supply chain, revenue model, and ecosystem. The primary focus is not on artists or fans who are essential in driving industrial growth. MeMusic’s goal and ambition are to resolve issues in the market by recreating the music industry to revolve around the contributor.
Problems in the Music Industry
The music industry has taken its damage from the pandemic situation. Now artists cannot host global tours or concerts. Yet, the market is booming with revenue growth, and the current market estimates at 42 billion dollars. Unfortunately, artists capture only a minimal portion of the revenue. Fans are also not rewarded not in this process.
Problems in the Blockchain Approach
The earlier approaches from the blockchain sphere were to tokenize the streaming supply chain. Most blockchain-based streaming services resembled a tokenized version of SoundCloud. However, most users could not benefit because there was no steady stream of music or revenue.
In more recent projects, the potential of combining NFT technology to music has been receiving the spotlight. While NFTs are beneficial to the music industry, there are limitations without integrating into a streaming service.
MeMusic intends to create the most personal, curated, and interactive experience with music through innovative technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, and more. MeMusic will create an inclusive ecosystem of different ecosystem contributors: artists, labels, listeners, investors, distributors, and more.
Enabling Music as an Investment Class
Music has always been considered one of the simplest forms of entertainment. The introduction of the iPod revolutionized personal music listening, and smartphones enabled live music streaming over the internet. MeMusic will allow music to be the simplest form of investment. Through MeMusic, individuals can invest in the next one-hit-wonder or Justin Bieber.
MeMusic implements NFTs in the supply chain of music to enable music as an investment class. NFT (Non-fungible tokens) allows users to create immutable, unique, and digitized assets on the blockchain. On MeMusic, artists can practically tokenize any item. Artists can tokenize their album, concert tickets, related rights, merchandise, and more. MeMusic team is expanding the potential of NFTs by empowering artists to digitize any asset not limited to music.
“At this moment, copyright plays a great role in the industry. However, many NFT marketplaces offering music-based NFTs do not have a comprehensive implementation of music distribution or legal restrictions. Markets that allow copyright trading also disregard that neighboring rights can be co-owned by fans and artists. When users later co-own the copyright, they will be paid out royalties according to their owning ratio. Through our approach, MeMusic can be the true, first copyright investment and trading marketplace through NFTs. As a long-time attorney involved in the entertainment industry, protecting artist interests from legal issues is also one of my personal priorities.”
Kyongsok Chong — Chief Executive Officer
MeMusic does not only utilize NFTs but also the concept of social tokens. Artists can tokenize themselves using Artist Tokens. Through Artist Tokens, artists can establish a platform-agnostic economy with their fans and investors. Artists can provide exclusive access to live concerts, merchandise, or even NFTs.
Streaming, but not just streaming.
MeMusic team has been conducting extensive research for over a year on the user experience and user interface of mainstream streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. We have identified the recurring problems that are existent amongst the major platforms. Our team focused on designing features that will resolve issues of supporting indie artists, interacting with fans, and monetizing music.
Music streaming services perform perfectly one function — the ability to quickly listen to music in good quality, but none of them fully covers related needs such as interaction with the community, tracking concerts, donations to artists and podcasters, and online broadcasting of concerts and performances.
When designing MeMusic, we take all the achievements of the long journey travelled by giants like Spotify and Pandora, complementing the best of such platforms like Twitch and Patreon, Soundcloud and others. Our goal is not just another music and entertainment service or social network, but creating a service with music at its core: creating, listening, interacting with fans and discovering and growing/nurturing new talents. My personal goal is to create a service that will provide the best experience of interacting with music regardless of the country or device of the user.
Andrew Danilov — Chief Design Officer
Blockchain to ignite transparency and better payouts
When listeners stream music of their favorite artists from Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube, they do not realize that they might not contribute to their beloved artists’ earnings. Most streaming services choose a pro-rata payout system for royalty distribution. This mechanism rewards artists that generate the most amount of streams to the platform. Therefore, indie artists without mainstream popularity will have difficulties consistently earning.
MeMusic strongly believes that better artist payouts are crucial in establishing a user-centric ecosystem. We introduce a ‘Pro-Artist’ distribution mechanism, which accounts for streams made from each user to different music. Pro-Rata proportionally distributes after an accumulation of plays & services over some time.
MeMusic will implement blockchain on the royalty distributions to provide transparent records. By publicizing royalty distributions, artists can know which platform benefits them the most. Through our transparent revenue records system and pro-artist system, artists can earn at least 30% more.
Focusing on functional enhancements than decentralization
There have been several attempts to decentralize the music industry by tokenizing the music distribution. While the conceptual approach to tokenizing the supply chain is pleasing, it is impossible to disregard the essential players in the market. Therefore, MeMusic is focusing on maximizing the benefits of blockchain technology to the end-user instead of achieving complete decentralization.
Blockchain implementation often distracts users with complex onboarding processes and user interfaces. MeMusic team is dedicating time to make sure that the application is beneficial with all the different innovative technologies, but in the most simplest manner. What we try to achieve is a philosophical approach in decentralization rather than just focusing on the decentralized technical approach. Metamask for busy musicians? I think otherwise.
Youngsung Chong — Chief Operating Officer
Limitless platform with infinite possibilities
Many experts could state that the music industry is halting from innovative growth. MeMusic will focus on utilizing advanced, innovative technologies to provide beneficial services for the different ecosystem participants.
MeMusic team is focusing on reshaping the music industry by providing an intuitive user experience and beneficial services. Through our platform, we will build a new ecosystem and experience for all the contributors to the music industry.
Website: https://memusic.io
Pitch Deck: https://memusic.io/assets/pdf/deck_v2.1.2.pdf
Telegram Community: https://t.me/memusic_official
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeMusicNews
