By Robert Levine •Jan 13, 2018 ~ At tha' Palace we never quit...We never
fold!!
HIP HOP CULTURE | HIP HOP ARTS
AND LIFESTYLE HIP HOP COMMUNITY NEWS
[Tha’ Palace]: Sacramento,
CA—Welcome to Tha’ Palace! A specter is haunting the music business -- the
specter of Bitcoin. To be more specific, it's the Fear of Missing Out on
Bitcoin, which is only natural given the digital currency's climb from a value
of about $1,000 to more than $19,000, before it settled at about $15,000.
Suddenly, a business that has spent the last decade making it more convenient
to pay for its products is experimenting with digital cryptocurrencies that are
technologically innovative, mathematically secure and actually fairly inconvenient
to use. What is to be done?
In November, Bjork began selling her album in Bitcoin and three other
digital currencies. (The first major artist to accept Bitcoin seems to be -- go
figure -- 50 Cent.) Ghostface Killah got involved in issuing his own cryptocurrency,
which seems uncomfortably close to the Chappelle's Show's "Wu-Tang
Financial skit that shows the hip-hop group offering investment advice. In
early December, a team involved with the cryptocurrency Monero announced
Project Coral Reef, which allows consumers to buy merchandise from Mariah
Carey, G-Eazy, Fall Out Boy and other artists who have deals with Global
Merchandising Services. Now the DJ Gareth Emery plans to release, sell, and pay
royalties for music using both digital currency and the blockchain technology
that it often runs on.
Digital cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could be transformative and
they're rising in value so fast that they're impossible to ignore. (Even J.P.
Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon turned around.) At the same time, the only person
I know who has ever actually bought anything with Bitcoin is my former neighbor
in Berlin, who ordered LSD by mail from the online Silk Road marketplace for
illegal drugs. It's not clear how much this will help the music business,
however, since rising Bitcoin transaction fees are making the currency so
impractical that even a bitcoin conference stopped accepting them.
As cool as cryptocurrencies are, it's still not clear what problem they
solve. Consider Monero, which offers users even more privacy than Bitcoin by
obscuring the identities of payers. That has potential and it makes sense for
businesses to accept whatever currency their customers want to use. "It's
what we want to do," says Christopher Drinkwater, Global Merchandising
Services' head of e-commerce. "Make things as easy as possible."
The customer is always right and Drinkwater says purchases made with
Monero are increasing. Once the novelty wears off, though, isn't it just easier
to buy things with a credit card? Sure, anyone who's embarrassed about their
love for the Backstreet Boys can now buy a T-shirt in secret. Wearing it will
still be a giveaway, though.
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So far in the music business, there are more serious discussions about
the blockchain technology that Bitcoin is built on, since it can store
information on a database that's distributed widely online -- and thus both
open to read and impossible to alter in secret. "The blockchain is
real," Dimon said recently. Dot Blockchain Media wants to use this to
replace the industry's many, old, incomplete rights-holder databases with a
music file format that contains rights information along with recordings.
Theoretically, at least, this would solve the problem of streaming services not
being able to identify or find the rights owners for the songs they use. Which
some say has the potential to change the business. Theoretically.
"Blockchain technology is coming like a tsunami," says Dot
Blockchain CEO Benji Rogers. (Why are digital technologies always compared to
destructive weather events?) "Every business in this space needs to start
thinking about a Blockchain strategy."
Some have. In April, ASCAP joined with SACEM and PRS for Music in a
venture to explore the potential of the technology to track rights ownership.
"The same real-time update and tracking capabilities that make blockchain
attractive to the financial industry also make it an attractive option for the
music industry, where accurate, real-time ownership data will grease the wheels
for the money to flow to songwriters and copyright owners with less
overhead," says ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews. "It is not a panacea to
solve the music industry's problems, but we see potential in the future as one
of many data initiatives the industry should be exploring."
This makes sense. So far, though, the music business is more interested
in a tsunami that may never appear. (And if it does, wouldn't it actually make
sense to hide? Does anyone ever look at a tsunami and think, "Hey, I'd
like to incorporate that tsunami into my business strategy"?) Gareth
Emery, who will soon launch Choon, wants to pay performers and songwriters
accurately and immediately by transferring digital currency into their online
wallets as soon as their songs are streamed. His idea is that blockchain
technology can help musicians run their own careers, without so much money
going to "intermediaries and middleman." It's a compelling vision,
rooted in the kind of techno-utopian optimism that has fueled the rise of
Bitcoin, but, like most music business blockchain ventures, it reflects a
fundamental disconnect from what the technology can and can't do. Apparently,
when you have a technologically innovative, encrypted hammer, everything looks
like a nail.
Blockchain ensures the integrity of information by keeping records of
it that are distributed online. That's awesome, but it only matters if the
information is actually present and correct in the first place. And the main
problem with music business record-keeping isn't that rights ownership
information gets changed without authorization (although that does happen
occasionally) -- it's that it's simply not there in the first place. As an
example, think about Spotify's failure to license mechanical rights to the
compositions it streamed, because it couldn't identify or find rights holders.
The problem isn't protecting the integrity of information -- it's gathering and
getting it right it in the first place.
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The idea that blockchain will transform the music business is full of
this kind of magical thinking. Dot Blockchain's new file format could help
solve some of the music industry's problems going forward -- which could
improve efficiency in several ways -- but it won't magically fill in
information that's now missing. (Rogers says the project could solve that in
another way that wouldn't involve blockchain.) In a blog post about Dot
Blockchain Music, Rogers writes that songwriters now have no way to say that
they don't want their compositions used to soundtrack objectionable videos --
white nationalist rallies for example -- and this technology would allow them
to express this as a series of permissions that travel with a song. Cool!
Except that in almost all these cases, the makers of such videos already need
to get permission -- that's the law. The problem isn't that creators can't
assert their rights -- it's that they can't enforce them. If Dot Blockchain
gave them a way to do so, would YouTube implement it?
Choon is even more disconnected from the current reality of the music
industry. The reason businesses don't pay right away isn't usually because they
don't know where to send a check -- it's because they'd rather delay doing so
in order to preserve their cashflow. Blockchain won't change that. Sure, it
could eventually help eliminate some of the middlemen who divide up pools of
revenue, but be careful what you wish for -- some of those same middlemen
negotiate on behalf of right sholders to expand the overall amount of revenue
to split. Without them, individual creators don't have much leverage.
So far, blockchain is still a solution looking for a problem -- it
hasn't fundamentally changed a single business, except for conferences about
blockchain technology (which, to be fair, are enjoying an unprecedented boom).
"Blockchain is about solving problems that only exist because the people
trying to do so have a fundamentally weird view of the world," says David
Gerard, a technology consultant who wrote the book "Attack of the 50 Foot
Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts." (How's that
for a B'accuse?) "Here they're trying to use it to keep track of the data
but the problem is that the data is crap."
In the long run, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology probably
will change the music business -- just a lot less quickly and glamorously think
people think. In 2014, years before Ghostface went crypto, the
singer-songwriter Tatiana Moroz issued "TatianaCoin," digital tokens,
not unlike Bitcoins, that her fans could exchange for memorabilia or access to
exclusive events. It's an interesting idea, and Moroz was in the process of
helping the company Tokenly make the technology available to other artists, but
the SEC crackdown on initial coin offerings put those plans on hold. For now,
at least, any artist experiments with crypto-tokens will be overshadowed by the
SEC's efforts to prevent investors from being deceived by "initial coin
offerings."
Blockchain could also change the way the music business tracks rights
ownership, much as ASCAP's Matthews suggests. But it will probably do so in
ways that aren't especially cool -- or even, perhaps, visible. The idea that
rights holders will get paid the instant consumers stream a song just isn't
realistic -- blockchain technology simply can't process that much data fast
enough. But it could be used to compare rights databases in real time, flag
conflicts for examination and improve back-office efficiency for collecting
societies in all kinds of ways. This is a bigger deal than it sounds -- more
efficiency for collecting societies means more money for creators and rights
holders. But it's not much of a tsunami -- more of a steady, gentle wave. It
only makes sense for music companies and creators to test the water -- but
anyone who dives in expecting big waves might be surprised at how shallow it
still is.
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Contributing Author: Robert
Levine
