Crypto and Music: What Do Blockchain, NFT, and Eurosong Have in Common?

Blockchain technology has found applications in almost every industry, and music is no exception. Let’s see how blockchain solves certain problems in the music industry, what NFTs mean for music, how Eurosong winners sold their NFTs for $900,000, and how to bet on Eurovision. Let us see how crypto and music blend together.

A Statista report says that the global music industry’s total revenue will increase to $65 billion this year, a significant increase compared to $51 billion in 2017. While the above statistics show a healthy growth rate, sometimes such statistics can mask underlying structural problems in the industry.

Problems of Today’s Music Industry

Today, the biggest music streaming platforms have 100 million users per month. Still, many artists, despite their efforts and number of views, do not get what they deserve. The musician is usually left with surprisingly little after splitting the revenue among crew members, producers, and the record label. The data that will be highlighted above is that the top 1% of artists earn 77% of all income that artists make.

Recently, a new technology has emerged with enormous potential to alleviate problems in this industry: blockchain. Famous musicians such as Lupe Fiasco and Pitbull are pushing for decentralized technologies in music, and advocates are championing distributed ledger technology as a fair and transparent way to efficiently publish music, simplify royalty payments, eliminate expensive middlemen, and establish a single point of origin for music.

A few more interesting and perhaps surprising data:

• Streaming platforms keep 30% of streaming revenue
• Music publishers receive 15% of revenue for representing musicians
• Music companies receive 55% of the income; they pay the artists a certain percentage of that amount, but they still get the lion’s share

How Blockchain Is Saving the Music Industry

As can be seen from the data above, the current system requires artists to depend on intermediaries such as record companies, radio stations, and streaming services. Their success depends on how these brokers market their work. What if artists could communicate directly with listeners? Consumers would thus get direct access to new talent, and artists could discover entirely new markets. That’s where blockchain comes into play, which is experiencing a boom in the popularity of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and thousands of others. Crypto and music have a lot of connections:

• Decentralization: Blockchain solutions work in a decentralized network without a central server. This ensures that every participant in the network has the same authority.
• Improving copyright management: Blockchain can bring artists direct copyright and intellectual property management. They would have a large peer-to-peer database to store detailed music copyright and intellectual property information. This uses smart contracts that contain up-to-date information that anyone can see and verify.
• Instant “micropayments”: Smart contracts could also solve the issue of adequate compensation for artists and rights holders with instant micropayments. With smart contracts, musicians could receive partial payments after each sale or download.
• Blockchain platforms for streaming music: Platforms are a great alternative to existing platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. Platforms connect artists and fans directly, without intermediaries, thus solving the payment problem to a large extent and capturing up to 90% of streaming revenue.
• A closer relationship between artists and fans: Blockchain also gives artists access to other important income sources for independent musicians: engaged groups or fans. Music distribution platforms could directly connect artists with listeners, creating a direct relationship between sellers and consumers. Everyone would have an equal chance of being found based on relevance to the search query instead of being pushed by an algorithm.

NFT: A Revolution in Music

An NFT can be unique, like a song or one copy of many – but the blockchain records who owns the file. These properties make NFTs ideal for music tokenization. Music NFTs can technically contain anything digital, such as logos, album covers, live performances, concert photo prints, videos, etc. NFTs make it possible to buy and sell ownership of unique digital objects, track who owns them, and profit from them by being able to keep a percentage of all future NFT sales.

Eurovision Song Contest: How Eurovision 2022 Winners Made Almost a Million Euros Selling NFTs and Helped Ukraine

The winners of Eurovision 2022, Kalush Orchestra, have successfully sold their NFT at a charity auction. The auction was held on the MetaHistory portal – Ukraine’s official NFT charity museum – and raised $900,000 in cryptocurrencies for Ukraine. The buyer of the crystal microphone was the Ukrainian crypto exchange WhiteBIT, whose purchase of NFT broke 2 Ukrainian records. They made the most expensive (500 ETH) NFT purchase and the largest donation during the live stream. The company aims to spread blockchain technology and expand the cryptocurrency community. Perhaps this is what prompted them to set a record and make the largest donation to support their country through cryptocurrency.

At the same time, the collaboration between crypto and music did not end there. The co-founders of Kalush Orchestra, the Ukrainian music label ENKO, started preparing an NFT music album with invited famous Ukrainian and foreign artists. The unique MetaHistory platform, with the help of which the auction took place, breaks stereotypes about NFTs and promotes them as timeless and important ways of communicating with the world.

Conclusion

As we can see, you can safely bet that crypto and music represent the future. It remains only to see in which direction this industry will go. We certainly believe that artists will benefit more when they leave their music on the blockchain.

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