Cryptocurrency has been around for a while now, and if you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s high time you start your research. At its simplest, a cryptocurrency is a digital form of currency that uses mathematical algorithms to verify the security of transactions and allow users to keep their spending anonymous.
It’s different from cash in that it exists digitally and emits no paper trail, which allows users to spend as much as they want without leaving a record of where the money went—or how much they have in the first place.
You can use a cryptocurrency exchange to buy or sell crypto tokens and check the prices of different cryptocurrencies. Modern cryptocurrency exchanges like OKX even let you convert cryptocurrency into fiat and store your tokens in a crypto wallet.
Besides being an excellent alternative investment asset, cryptocurrency is also disrupting various sectors, including the music industry.
Crypto music refers to any song or album that can be purchased using cryptocurrency or is distributed on a blockchain platform. Everyone involved in music production—from artists to producers and managers—can benefit from this new method of producing and distributing music.
Crypto Music: Understanding Its Scope
Crypto music has a huge potential to change the music industry and improve the lives of artists.
Artists are now able to distribute and promote their music on decentralized platforms where ownership, revenue, and control of data remain in their hands. They also get paid immediately for every stream without waiting for months before receiving any revenue from their work.
Here are a few crucial benefits of crypto music for artists and listeners:
Better Earning Potential
Decentralized music distribution platforms can make more money for artists.
The biggest thing to note about these decentralized music distribution platforms is that they allow artists to sell directly to fans and cut out the middlemen. The peer-to-peer nature of blockchain technology means there’s less overhead for the platform and, thus, more money for the artist.
It’s also worth noting that no one’s telling artists what they can charge for their music (or when they can release new albums) anymore. Artists are in total control now, which is great. And fans will love it, too, because they’ll be able to pay whatever price they want for a song (or album).
Secure Music Sharing
Blockchain, cryptocurrency’s underlying technology, can make music sharing more secure and could help with copyright issues.
When you share your favorite song on the blockchain, that song is recorded in a record book called a ledger. The ledger can help you determine who first created the song and where it came from. These records will be helpful when musicians have to file for copyrights or sell their work.
The blockchain can also ensure copyright protection by adding new digital rights management (DRM) layers over top of old ones without changing anything else.
This makes sure your music is protected even if someone tries modifying its permissions later on down the line because whoever created these changes would need access back into every single previous layer before they could do anything else with their own changes on top.
Enhanced Listening Experience
One major advantage of the blockchain is that it can store metadata about songs, giving each song and artist a unique identifier. This makes it easier for people to find the music they want and verify its authenticity.
Metadata can be thought of as information about information. In this case, when we talk about metadata in relation to music, we’re referring specifically to data about the composition and licensed usage of a song.
Metadata includes things like who wrote the song, who has licensed it for use in advertisements, when and where it was recorded and published, what album or playlist it’s on—the list goes on.
Record labels commonly include this information within their databases (or “catalogs”) so that users can search through their content more effectively. But as you might expect from such a large amount of data being stored in one centralized place, these catalogs are prone to fraud and error.
As with most other types of digital files (e.g., images), when MP3 versions or audio files are distributed across decentralized ledgers (like blockchains), they become much less vulnerable to tampering or deletion since there are multiple copies across many different locations instead of just one copy that could be easily corrupted or deleted by an attacker.
More Freedom to Artists
One of the key things to note here is that with the blockchain, artists are able to connect with their fans directly. Artists can directly share their music for free, for a limited audience, or for sale. They can also interact directly with fans and so forth.
This is possible because the blockchain serves as a decentralized database that’s both secure and accessible to anyone. It allows artists to reach out beyond gatekeepers like record labels while still retaining ownership of their intellectual property (IP).
Improved Audience Engagement
The blockchain is more than just a trend. It’s quickly spreading across the music industry and changing how artists, fans, and investors interact with one another.
With apps like Musicoin, fans can buy songs or albums in exchange for cryptocurrency. They can also sell their copy of the song or album as well. Artists can sell their music for cryptocurrency tokens that are exchanged on the blockchain.
These transactions are recorded on an immutable public ledger that anyone can view and verify without a third party.
With this technology, musicians have found innovative ways to monetize their work and give more control over their intellectual property to consumers. Some fans might be incentivized to listen to music because they have partial ownership of it on the blockchain.
In Conclusion
Cryptocurrency is changing the way music is shared between fans and creators, and that means more money for artists, more security, and more control over how they share their art.
The songs you love from your favorite artists haven’t changed. Neither have the artists themselves—they’re still writing music in their bedrooms, in recording studios, and on tour buses.
But as a fan of music and as a cryptocurrency miner, you can play an important new role in the relationship by rewarding them directly with cryptocurrency if you like what they do.
