Subscription-based music streaming platforms that revolutionized the way people listen to songs by their favorite artists like Spotify and Apple Music have long been criticized by artists for unfair distribution of profits. Artists only get paid $0.003 to $0.005 per stream of a song, and many are protesting that this is not nearly enough for artists to get by, especially indie ones.
Last year, veteran artists Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Inia Arie were among those who joined the protest against the music giant. Although the center of attention was the racism in the content of Spotify’s own podcaster Joe Rogan, who was allegedly paid $200 million, many artists also opposed the low streaming fees.
“My last royalty check was $432. I’m not ungrateful, but I can’t live on that. Honestly, I liked working at a restaurant in my hometown of 1,000 people better than working for free here,” songwriter Kennedi Lykken, who already won a Grammy Award for Dua Lipa’s “Boys Will Be Boys,” said in a news article for the Los Angeles Times.
With this state of discontent of artists when it comes to traditional music streaming platforms, Michał Ścisłowski, founder and CEO of blockchain-based Soundoshi, thought of introducing a new model that will protect artists and boost their income.
“Most of the artists right now know that streaming is not made for [their] purpose, that it’s a cannibalistic model that benefits the huge names in the industry at the expense of everyone that is smaller than them. And we want to solve this by bringing the pay-as-you-go payments,” Ścisłowski pointed out.
Soundoshi is a platform that tokenizes songs into NFTs. Once bought, the song can be listened to an unlimited number of times on the Soundoshi platform. All songs bought as NFTs will stay forever in the possession of the buyer, unless they resell it. Reselling will be an option that Ścisłowski said will be made available in the years to come.
Considering the recent popularity of NFTs as digital assets worth investing in, selling songs as NFTs will not be a difficult concept for consumers to grasp and patronize. Buying NFTs allow for fans not only to support their favorite artists, but also to provide them with a collectible token that has the possibility to increase in monetary value in the future.
On the other hand, artists will benefit as payment goes straight to their digital wallets. With this type of system, fans will be able to directly support artists of their choice. It not only promotes a healthy kind of competition within the music industry, but it also removes intermediaries that eat away at the profit of artists.
“So, instead of competing with all of the industry at each time when you’re releasing your music, you will actually be able to deliver your music to your fans. And they will be able to pay you directly for your music, which means that we won’t bring any unhealthy competition that ruins the industry,” Ścisłowski explained.
And because blockchain data is recorded immutably and in a chronological manner, artists can easily monitor and track their transaction history. This gives them confidence in the platform and allows them to focus on their songwriting, rather than be constantly worried about whether or not they are being cheated out of their income.
But in order for all this to be possible, a scalable blockchain is necessary. Why does it have to be scalable and not any blockchain will do? This is simply because music files necessitate an enormous amount of data storage. Also, as Soundoshi grows, the amount of data it would necessitate would be enormous. So, the blockchain needs to scale in order to be able to accommodate this massive repository of songs.
Another crucial thing is the price of transaction fees. Actions, such as songs being minted into NFTs and fans buying them, are transactions made on the blockchain. Each action incurs a transaction fee, and it will be highly impractical if the transaction fee will be greater than the cost of the NFT itself.
For instance, the current average fee per transaction on the Ethereum blockchain is $5.1. If a song costs just $2, and the buyer would have to shell out more than double that amount just to process the transaction, then who would buy it? Furthermore, Soundoshi itself would go bankrupt before they even take off as each action on the blockchain would cost them $5.1. If they have to tokenize 10,000 songs, then it would immediately cost them $50,100.
There is also the problem of fees rising when there is a surge in the number of transactions. Take Ethereum, again, as an example. Last May, fees surged to $27.7 per transaction. This surge is due to the network being unscalable and being unable to handle a high number of transactions.
It is obvious that this simply will not do for Soundoshi. The blockchain needs to be able to scale on demand—meaning increasing data blocks and throughput while lowering and stabilizing fees. And this is why Sounboshi is built on the BSV Blockchain. At present, BSV is processing 4GB data blocks at a throughput of 50,000 to 100,000 transactions per second. And it is doing this at a transaction speed of less than two seconds and at an average fee of only $0.000003.
This not only ensures the efficiency of Soundoshi, but also its affordability—something that is highly important, especially for budding artists. There will be no need to spend big in order to mint songs into NFTs, and fans will also be able to buy NFT songs at a very economical price. And this is the reason why the pay-as-you go model that Soundoshi is introducing will work.
“I believe we have reached the peak for the subscription-based model. It was the model that dominated the industry for the last 10 to 12 years, but obviously, it has its own drawbacks that we as Soundoshi actually want to mitigate. So, I believe that 10 years from now, the industry will be switched to the pay-as-you-go model,” Ścisłowski predicted.
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