Blockchain in Music Industry

Music piracy is considered one of the biggest factors in the downfall of the music industry over the past two decades. Piracy in the music business is estimated to cost the U.S. economy:

• $12.5 billion in total output
• 71,060 jobs
• $2.7 billion in earnings (in the sound recording and retail industries)

Indeed, it is incredibly easy to find pirated music free to download online. Ever since Napster started offering content for free in the 1990s, pirated music has become the normal way most people get hold of their tunes. Individuals don’t need to look much further than YouTube to find blatantly illegal music to listen to, and if they want, they can even convert the video into an MP3 file and download it.

If the industry can take back control over pirated music, it will be a lot stronger economically and, in turn, the people who work for the industry will be paid more fairly for the work do. Blockchain technology can halt piracy in several ways.

Blockchain technology can be used to establish who owns the intellectual property rights of creative items by using a distributed ledger. A distributed ledger is an open-source ledger that holds all records of all transactions within a blockchain. However, not all blockchains allow all people to view this information.

In theory, blockchain technology can be used as clear evidence of ownership and used in court if necessary. This is particularly useful for the music industry to help prevent legal battles between studios and artists, for example. The music industry is known for its complicated laws on ownership – from ownership of the audio itself to specific lyrics within a song, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It also can make the process easier if using blockchain technology becomes the standardized way to establish ownership because different companies and institutions may state ownership in different ways, with different wording, requirements and even formatting, some of which may be manipulated as loopholes.

Blockchain technology can also:

• smooth over any issues involved in purchasing the rights of music (if, for example, one music company wants to buy the music rights from another music company)
• help other companies such as film studios pay for rights to use music
• be used to trace the history of those rights, as users will have a transparent record of its history

Smart contracts can be particularly useful in this area as well. Smart contracts are basically pieces of code that hold the complex agreements that are made on a blockchain and fulfilled when certain conditions are met. It is incredibly hard to manipulate them, and they are growing in popularity. By utilizing smart contracts, artists and studios can ensure that intellectual property agreements are met by other parties.

(An excerpt from the text on https://www.singlegrain.com/blockchain/will-blockchain-technology-be-a-music-industry-savior/)

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