Opus are launching a blockchain version of Spotify with the purchasing element of Bandcamp thrown in.
It came to my attention today while browsing through some music news that a new streaming service is in the process of raising funding (yes, another ICO)
Having a keen interest in music, technology & music technology I spent some time reading up about OPUS & what their offering was all about.
There were some good things, some bad things & some things that I cant make my mind up on which of those categories to file them under!
After skimming the whitepaper & searching with a few keywords, I felt like i'd gotten a pretty decent idea of what they are all about.
Essentially, OPUS are looking to contend with the likes of Apple Music, Spotify, Bandcamp. It's a crowded market already so what are they going to do differently?
1. Artist Revenue
All revenues generated from music uploaded by an artist are theirs to keep. This will definitely be a welcome change to the situation with other platforms where artists get a fraction of the subscription fee & lose a percentage of the purchase price.
OPUS claim that Spotify can pay as little as $0.0003 USD per play.
OPUS will follow Bandcamp's model of allowing artists to price their music however they like. The whitepaper suggests that this is to encourage free-market behaviour.
2. Crypto
Allowing users to purchase music using cryptocurrency is probably the biggest distinction between any of the other services around. Users will be able to purchase copies of tracks using the token 'OPT' and it will 'always' be available to them.
From a streaming perspective, OPT seems to be required to listen to the music on site - suggesting that music must be purchased before it can be streamed? This will hopefully become more clear in time as it would be a shame to not have a non-purchase streaming element attached (even if it costs a small amount to be paid to the artist)
3. Paid curation
Artists will be able to set a promotion budget of sorts, allowing users who craft playlists to earn tokens based on purchases made from their curation. This works like a commission, set by the artist who is prepared to give away part of their share for enhanced exposure.
If you're interested in a platform that allows purchasing with cryptocurrency then this should be for you. I like the idea of the artist keeping 100% of the revenues but it's not clear how the site will maintain itself or the IPFS hosting that it uses.
Although I love earning curation rewards on Steemit, I'm not sure that I'd feel so great about being incentivised to encourage purchases - that said, there are plenty of albums that I've told my friends they should buy & it would have been nice to make a little something on them!
You can check out a functional demo at https://opus-foundation.org/demo/demo.html
