Musicians have been forced to place a lot of trust in other parties in the music business to deliver on copyright, contract and other business outcomes in order to get ahead and forge a music career. This has often left the artist and band at the hands of manipulative industry people who look to exploit the weak bargaining position of an artist; forcing them to sign contracts which give away large parts of the earning power.
If the artist then becomes successful, they often don’t realise how much ‘power’ they gave away in the early years of their career. We can point to the cases of George Michael and Prince who battled to extract themselves from onerous contracts they initially signed
The issue is compounded by the fact that the industry bodies control a lot of the process and the information contained in the process. The net result is musicians have very little power is effecting the process to their favour, in order to create more visibility and develop further trust in those that govern it.
The bodies that govern that process also can use that lack of transparency to derive greater profits for those bodies; further alienating the musicians they are supposed to serve
To counter this, we believe that BlockChain technology now presents a great opportunity to build greater levels of trust in the music industry.
Blockchain is a shared and trusted public ledger. With no centralised server, software applications are run on a peer-to-peer network of computers not controlled by any single party.
This means they can be used to co-ordinate the activities of a large number of individuals, who can organise themselves without the help of a third party
The result is that musicians and other creative artists now have greater visibility and greater abilities to determine their own futures by having a greater influence on the type of contracts they sign or setup and the mechanics of how those contracts reward them
