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Donna Lowe's avatar

I LOVE these ideas about the blockchain and music and I sincerely hope your response did make a difference. Time will tell, I guess...

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Riley Urbano's avatar

A company like Spotify's selling point is the proprietary algorithm by which it curates music for its users, and it generates revenue (although it has never turned a profit) by farming data from those users and selling it to advertisers. The business model has very little do with consumers loving music and paying for it accordingly; this is why Spotify is moving so aggressively into other mediums like podcasting and audiobooks, and why artists are seeing less money for their work then ever. A higher order consequence of this business model is that a lot of consumers probably won't ever go back to paying for music, at least not at the scale that they did before Spotify et al became the dominant media platforms.

Your vision of a blockchain-oriented modern arts economy runs completely counter to this model, and seems to propose an alternative by which artists might be appropriately compensated for their work again, but I disagree with some of the key premises to your argument:

First, I think it remains to be seen that the Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are truly as decentralized as they claim to be. User access to the blockchain and crypto wallets is currently controlled by companies, just like everything else on the internet, and it seems completely possible that artists could run into problems dealing with these mediating actors just as they do now with record labels and managers. Furthermore, the vast majority of the most valuable cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, etc) is held by an incredibly small minority of people, which inevitably leaves the emerging NFT marketplace vulnerable to manipulation by these large holders.

Second, I disagree with the implied premise that consumers in the age of Spotify will readily adapt the hyper financialized, web3 approach to artistic consumption that you lay out in your letter: for all of Spotify's problems, using it is an incredibly frictionless experience. In contrast, crypto wallets are still clunky and inefficient to use; I'm sure you've seen the video floating around of someone trying to buy a beer with BTC in El Salvador, where BTC was recently made legal tender. I'm sure that the user experience for small-scale crypto transactions will be cleaned up over time, but the "proof of work" tech so central to the blockchain as it exists today runs completely counter to one of the key aspects of streaming that makes it so popular today.

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