The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / eMusic and Blockchain are the future of the music industry – anyone?

eMusic and Blockchain are the future of the music industry – anyone?

by 27 Comments

I’m hopelessly old school. Can’t get with Streaming, I like buying music on record and CD but I get some downloads for my mp3 player (yeah – I know!) particularly when I want to take a punt on a new artist or something a bit out of my usual wheelhouse and eMusic have served me well in that respect (and I know many Afterworders would agree). However the catalogue is dwindling to the point where I’d say 9/10 of things I’m looking for aren’t there. eMusic have been amazingly resilient – but now there’s this. I’m tech savvy and reasonably clued up on how the music industry works but this is baffling. Can anyone translate? Have they gone completely Noel Edmonds/David Icke on us or are they – as they claim – the future of recorded music as we know it? Should I hang on to the golden handcuffs a while longer?

https://token.emusic.com/assets/pdf/eMusic_Light_Paper.pdf

0

Comments

  1. Too much to take in on a quick scan, but one thing struck me: 50% to artists and labels, 50% to retailers. Given that artists are generally contracted to labels on a 10% royalty, they’re still relying on labels to give them a fair deal. If that label is Sony, say, as eMusic seem to be hoping, I don’t like their chances of being any better off.

  2. As far as I know (which admittedly isn’t very far) from following the blockchain buzz on occasion, the idea is just about using blockchain as the authorisation mechanism for access to the media, a bit like like buying a ebook on Amazon and being able to read it in the Kindle reader. It would be the encrypt/decrypt/rules for the media. Depending on the terms of the blockchain contract, the protected media is capable of being an independent item (like Kindle allowing you to access the media independently without logging in), you could confer it on someone else (gifting it and losing your own access to it) and lots of other rules you could code into it.

    That’s all a PS4 or X-Box is really, an anti-copy mechanism.

    Whether this blockchain hype really opens up a market where rights holders (artists or labels) have any more say in this is open to question. I’d say for the time being it just looks like another mediator trying to get their oar in for a slice of the pie. Longer term I’d expect publishers (like the music companies) or independent providers (like Amazon) to have their own apps to deal with this.

  3. Reading between the lines, this sounds like the return of Digital Rights Management. DRM was in the first generation downloads from iTunes Music Store and a requirement of Napster going legit.

    End users hated the experience of DRM as each device must be registered to an account to play the files. “I’ve paid for this and my device won’t play it, sod that – I’m off to grab a free mp3”. Apple dropped DRM with iTunesPlus, which must have been 10 years ago now.

    DRM is also a pain in the bum for developers to implement in the device.

    For my sins, I used to work with some of the people in the mugshots in the back pages of that document.

    I don’t know what the answer is to a fair deal for artists in the age of streaming, but I know it is not DRM.

  4. @dr-volume I don’t know, but as @fentonsteve persuaded me to get a Fiio X1 at Xmas, I am wedded to the MP3 for a little longer. I would say that on new releases alone I would struggle to find enough good stuff for my 75 credits, but the improved search has made it easier to track down good classical and jazz catalogue (digging Duke Ellington and Mahalia Jackson Black, Brown and Beige for example).

  5. I think that the music market is bigger than just the nerdy fans like us. We are historically collectors and completists. We were the golden ticket for the record labels in the 70s and 80s. But sometime in the 90s, popular music became super mainstream and super easy to share. The market has changed. In all other industries, when the market changes, you change or you disappear. Nokia, Toys r Us, Tower Records and Blockbuster are all examples of companies in markets who tried to carry on regardless.

    Artists do not make money the way that they used to. This isn’t going to change that. eMusic appeals to nerds like us. We are probably less than 5% of the market. They will not disrupt the new model even with the very fashionable Blockchain scattered liberally in its litrature.

  6. Thanks for shedding some light on this. So downloads have no DRM now and there’s no going back to that.
    I use digital files because I don’t want to reply on broadband or mobile data to access my music and . I also use digital for DJing. None more niche I know.
    The dealbreaker with emusic was they were reasonably priced..around 3 quid an album.

    I get that streaming is tied to whatever your platform of choice is so the idea here is you pay whoever you want (whether it’s Apple, eMusic, Spotify or the artists direct) and that gives you the right to stream the music anyway you want? That sort of makes sense but those percentages simply don’t stack up…the Publishers disappear on the 50/50 split infographic too…so they’re going to do away with publishing and PRS.
    Seem to have a big team on board but they’re pitching themselves against google and Apple…lets see

  7. I had a young musician on one of my radio shows recently who was taking this route, and was explaining it to me as I didn’t understand it at all. She has launched her own blockchain currency which people can buy – essentially I take this as a bit of a cross between crowdfunding and a share issue. She is using this as an alternative to trying to get signed by a label. I still don’t pretend to understand how these crypto currencies are mined and all that palaver – I feel like my dad must have done when I used to try to explain my job as a programmer years ago.

  8. I’m glad someone has posted about this, I wanted to, but didn’t have a clue what the email was on about – it just sounded intriguing. That said, there wasn’t much detail in the email, it’s all surface. In principle you have to give them credit for trying to implement a fairer model for the artist. Whatever happens next should be interesting.

  9. I’m afraid musicians are faced with the huge brick wall of economic reality – there are just far too many of you, all vying for the same limited finite amount of time of your potential audience.

    I have absolutely no problem finding new music thanks to a combination of Spotify, fan/music websites, and your bandcamps & boomkats et al. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether there is a flaw at the heart of this whole debate: the assumption that musicians should be able to make a living from their music: I’m not sure I agree.

    I kind of prefer it if they’re doing it in their precious spare time, fitting it in around a job they need to do to feed and house themselves (because they know their music won’t): this is likely to drive them to only do the stuff which “matters”, and are never in danger of treating music like a career or a 9-5 job.

    Might sound harsh, but surely at the end of the day, music is all about the listener, not the musician?

    • It’s bit of a chicken and egg thing, is it not?

      Without the musicians, there’d be no music to listen to. Although AI is being developed to replace them, AI isn’t producing anything I want to listen to yet.

      • You’re quite right, although it’s worth bearing in mind that:

        – there’s no shortage of interesting new music out there if you know where to look, despite the apparently unfair financing;

        – even if nobody made any new music ever again, none of us would be able to bring the merest scratch to the surface to sheer bloody volume of music which already exists. What’s so great about “new” music anyway?

        • What’s so great about new music? What, so you think everyone should just down-tools now, not explore new ideas, not change anything, not try and communicate something, not try and make art that reflects their own reality as it is now? You don’t think young people want to make music of their own that represents them and thrills a new generation of music nuts same as our favourite bands did for of us in our youth. You’d rather they all sat back and listened to everything pre 2018 then and found something productive and worthwhile to do then?

          You don’t think musicians deserve to be paid for their work because to you – music has no value.
          The trouble is, If music is just something people do as a hobby then you’ll get hobbyists music and music only made by people who can afford to do it – and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Also, what sort of work do you think *has* value? Given the already stretched job market and wobbly economy what jobs should these people get? What about musicians from the 60s, 70s, 80s -their recorded works have no value either by your reckoning. What age or ill health means they’re not able to do what they used to do all night? Do they all need to queue up at the labour exchange with everyone else from the labels, management, studios, music tech firms, gig venues, T-shirt sellers – listening to non-stop Absolute 90s radio and remember the old days?

          Yes I know since the dawn of Rock & Roll, artists have traditionally been ripped off, lived in squats on meagre rations and ground their way through poverty to do what they do – but that doesn’t mean that the art they produce should be seen as value-less – and who would begrudge the older artists of the past having their catalogue as a bit of a pension fund in return for all adding to the sum of human happiness.

          • Hang on, I think we’re in danger of disappearing down an avenue I didn’t intend.

            I don’t think most of the things you outline above, and I’m not sure why you might. My comment about “what’s so great about new music” was intended to mean “why should we consider that to be inherently more valuable and worthwhile than music which is there already?” I’ve absolutely no problem with people making music now and trying to sell it, and I do more than my fair share of buying the stuff – if I hear something on Spotify that I like after a couple of listens I’ll make sure I buy it, ideally physical copy from the band’s website. I’m not sure why you’d assume that to me music has no value?

            Newness of music is in the ear of the listener, not necessarily in the age of when it was recorded, that was my point.

            And do musicians deserve to be fairly paid for their efforts? The tricky thing is that there simply isn’t the money in the market to pay every musician a living wage – that’s the harsh economic reality I started off referring to.

            In summary, I object to people being ripped off, but neither do musicians have any *entitlement* to being handsomely rewarded if the public simply isn’t that bothered. It all comes back to market forces I’m afraid.

            • You said:

              “I kind of prefer it if they’re doing it in their precious spare time, fitting it in around a job they need to do to feed and house themselves (because they know their music won’t): this is likely to drive them to only do the stuff which “matters”, and are never in danger of treating music like a career or a 9-5 job.”

              The reason I went for you on that one is you said you “prefer” that – That may be the reality in these times but I just find it amazing that anyone would say they “prefer” that.

              You also said “music is all about the listener, not the musician?” – No it isn’t. Sometimes it’s about the Listener. Sometimes it’s entirely about the musician. More often than not, it’s about the relationship between them both. Hard to express that without sounding like a massive Hippy…which I’m not!

              Not looking for a scrap so I’ll agree to disagree.

    • If making music was just about making records then I think you make a very strong point but it’s also about live music and we’ve become used to being able to buy an album then see a lot of it played live. Some people manage to do that while maintaining a job but I’ve not sure it’s sustainable for long and I think we, as the audience, would be the big losers. If we just wanted new music then, for most of us, there’s probably enough we’d like that we’ve never heard, already out there to mean nobody ever has to make another record again!

      • You’re quite right, and I’d forgotten to add that point – the making of albums etc is the thing which it’s hard to see many folks making a living from. However, live tours, merchandise sales, crowdfunding from your dedicated fan base etc – these are all perfectly feasible ways of actually making money. The point is that none of these things involve Spotify, eMusic, record companies etc.

  10. Before the widespread adoption of the record and the record player and for a good while after, there wasn’t really that much of a music business. It certainly wasn’t an Industry.
    Dance halls, concert halls and theatres put on shows, sheet music and instruments were sold to musicians and aspiring musicians and that was about it.
    Most musicians earned their living in other ways and played for their own and their family/friends amusement. Being a professional musician was a very precarious life, only a step or two up from begging for most.

  11. Money for musicians on the one hand yet we have Twang putting his last 7 up for nowt. (OK, for the bandcamp whatever you like to pay: does anyone actually chip in?) Is he better or worse cos he works to fund it? It’s a rum ‘un.

  12. I really like my current music deal – 40 downloads for £6.30. I can still find plenty of interesting things there – this month: The Fall, Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Steve Reich – though I too have noticed some disappearances.

    I’m really not sure about this suggested model and what it would mean for me as a user.

  13. Whenever I start to feel sorry for the music business (not the artists but the business), I think back to the time they were charging me £15 for a CD with 12 songs on it. Those that live by market forces cannot complain when they die by market forces.

    And I think that many musicians can make a living through gigging and direct sales. And many musicians who don’t make a living (and who wouldn’t have in the heyday) can at least make albums and get them out to listeners. The means of production are pretty much in the hands of the artists now.

    If that basically means there are a few less mega rich rock stars living off their hits from 20 years ago in a country house, then I think that’s ok. I did some great contracts at work in 2003 but I’m not being paid for them now.

Leave a Reply