Music Streaming on the Blockchain
Musicoin ($MUSIC) is an open-source blockchain-powered advertisement-free music streaming platform where musicians can share their artistic output while keeping full ownership of it and 100% of the royalties earned. There are various ways in which musicians are compensated through the service, which utilizes it’s own cryptocurrency (also called Musicoin). Firstly, for every streaming of a song a Universal Basic Income (UBI) of one unit is paid from a portion of miner’s rewards set aside for this purpose. Secondly, a listener can give one or more ’tips’ (each of which can range from one to a thousand units) to an artist from their own wallet. The dollar equivalent of the compensation fluctuates with the value of Musicoins (currently worth over a cent, at it’s highest so far it was above 12 cents), but generally it is quite a bit more than music streaming services typically offer.
There are currently over 4000 musicians on the platform, the target being 20,000 by the end of the year, a million by 2020. In February of the current year there were over 35,000 registered users on the site, listening to an average of 11,000 songs daily.
Musicoin is the brainchild of Isaac Mao, a successful venture capitalist born in Hong Kong. A strong advocate for internet freedom, he led Creative Commons China, and was the Board Director at the Tor project. China’s first blogger, he co-founded CNBlog.org to promote blogging in that country. The Institute for the Future had placed him on the 2006-2016 Map of the Decade list. He received a BS in Computer Science and an MBA, and is on the advisory board for Harvard University’s (where he is a Fellow) Global Voices Online project.
Musicoin’s market cap is currently around US$8 million. Its blockchain is a fork of Ethereum, which means that there is no limit on the number of coins. This does not imply that the cryptocurrency cannot rise in value, just look at how Ethereum’s price has surged since it’s inception. Right now there are just over 776 million units of Musicoin in circulation. No Initial Coin Offering (ICO), pre-mine, or pre-allocation of funds for development ever took place.
Later this year work will begin on a mobile app. While the Musicoin web site is quite usable on a phone, this development should attract many more users to the platform. I expect that the unit price of the cryptocurrency will increase in the future. For one thing, it is quite undervalued at this time. Also, it was the first blockchain-based music streaming service with an actual usable/working platform (established in February 2017), so it got a head start and is the most mature project of it’s kind.
Disclaimer: I am currently holding some Musicoins.
Thank you,
Bolko Rawicz