The music industry of the web 3.0 era?I'm afraid it's still empty talk

Author | Peng Peng Editor | Fan Zhihui

Audius, the web3.0 music streaming platform, has once again attracted the attention of the music industry, but this time the price is a bit big.

On July 23, Audius disclosed that hackers used Audius to control smart contracts and platforms in the platform "Community Treasury" to entrust the 10 trillion Audio token to themselves, and tried to vote through the community on the platform.

In the end, hackers successfully transferred 18.6 million Audio tokens to their controlled wallets. According to Misttrack's survey, hackers replaced these tokens into 705 ETH through Uniswap (a cryptocurrency exchange using a decentralized network protocol), with a price of more than $ 1 million.

Audius's encounter is pulling the entire music industry back to the moment, and reintegrating what web3.0 means what does the music industry mean.

Democratic dream divided by Audius music

Audius was launched at the end of 2019 and launched its main network in October 2020. It is a decentralized streaming platform that hosted on Ethereum and Solana blockchain. Read the entity.

According to the white paper written by the co -founder and CEO RONEIL RUMBURG, Audius is "constructed by public blockchain facilities and other decentralized technologies", musicians can distribute music to fans and "support the Audius platform to Audio Audio Audio Audio The third party stabilized currency and the Economy of the Music Anti -tokens "was paid.

The white paper also stated that the platform can realize "decentralized storage schemes and income distribution for sharing audio and metadata". Based on the platform -based decentralized governance agreement, "musicians, node operators and fans can be separate or collective alone or collectively Land enjoys rights in the decision -making decision to change and upgrade. " In other words, Audius intends to use blockchain technology to solve the problem of industry metadata that has been disadvantaged for a long time, and let all parties participate in the process of music creation, storage and distribution, and The record company and centralized streaming platform were transferred to musicians and fans.

In addition to the democratic atmosphere of music production and dissemination, the income distribution structure of Audius also attracted a large number of musicians.根据Audius在官网上公布的数据显示， 在Spotify这样的传统流媒体平台上，平台和唱片公司拿走了音乐收入的88%，而音乐人所占的份额仅仅12%；而在Audius上，除了In addition to 10%of the online operation costs, the remaining 90%of the income share is owned by the musician.

Audius's beautiful vision attracted a lot of musicians. After the platform was officially launched for less than two years, the monthly living users had exceeded 6 million. Although the growth rate of Audius's users at the end of 2021 slowed down, there were still more than 5.62 million monthly living users on the platform in July this year. At the same time, Audius was the first streaming platform to sign a strategic cooperation agreement with Tik Tok, making its market value exceeded $ 1 billion for the first time.

In addition, Audius has also attracted the favor of capital in the industry. In September 2021, the platform announced a new round of strategic financing of $ 5 million. Its investors are many of the traditional record companies, including Katy Perry, NAS, Steve Aoki, DeadMau5, Diplo, Skrillex and other well -known musicians.

Behind the co -creation and shared music democracy, Adius has been questioned a lot.

In addition to the industry's interest distribution system needs to be improved, there are still many basic problems in the music industry, such as the error leakage and non -standardization of metadata, the copyright matching of unknown audio, various copyright infringement, and the lack of credible audio copyright identification tools. For many practitioners, Audius did not solve these problems, but made the problem worse.

On the one hand, Audius can only ensure that the music content can be tracked after chain, and the confirmation problem before the chain cannot be guaranteed. For example, users can take the name to replace a musician to adjust the song slightly and upload it to the platform, and make a profit from listening; while the platform Fang Fang is a decentralized agreement, but the infringement content cannot be deleted, and the platform does not accept the platform and does not accept it. Copyright complaints, musicians cannot claim claims on the website.

On the other hand, record companies and traditional streaming media platforms have a large number of existing copyrights, resulting in Audius's audience markets very limited. After all, the copyright ownership of each song is very complicated. Take Katy Perry's song "Firework" as an example. Captiol Records has the recording copyright of the song. Five different songwriters from different music copyright companies share the creative copyright of the song. As such a copyright belonging model has become more and more mainstream in the industry, Audius wants to persuade major music companies and musicians to migrate to the blockchain. It is difficult to imagine.

Therefore, Audius is currently filled with a large number of songs produced and sung by independent musicians. They do not have a clear copyright management company, no complicated copyright ownership, and are completely controlled by the musicians. It is expected that the audiences that these musicians can attract are also very limited, and accordingly, the revenue of the musicians is also very limited. Today, tokens have also attracted the attention of AudiIns' security issues. As soon as the incident occurred, Audius stopped all smart contracts on Ethereum to prevent further losses. As of now, the platform's contract vulnerabilities have been repaired. Except for pledge and commission, other smart contract components have been updated and restored.

After this battle, whether it is Audius or the entire industry, it may be re -examined with the music ecology of Web3.0.

Is the music industry in the web 3.0 era coming?

Not long ago, Audius's co -founder and CEO Roneil Rumburg had just participated in the sandbox music summit in London.

In the web3 music service group discussion, Roneil expressed his understanding of Web3.0 music services, that is, "a set of tools that belong to the musician, attracting them to fans, and let the musicians and audience have autonomy." He added, "As long as the musicians are willing ... they can use these music content in different experiences, different products, and different scenarios."

From the music version to digital collections and NFT, we can see the opportunities of commercial capital and digital creativity to the music industry in the actions of companies that are dedicated to web3.0 music services and traditional music giants that are committed to Web3.0 music services.

Behind the idealization of optimists, reality is not so satisfactory.

The first one is the security problem facing Web3, which is not difficult for the Audius family. According to the second quarter of 2022, the "Web3 Safety Report" released by the blockchain audit and security company Certik pointed out that the cryptocurrency field is still plagued by hackers, fraud and online fishing. At the same time, it is also facing Flash Loan ATTACKS) such as relatively new threats. In the first half of 2022, the Web3 project lost more than $ 2 billion, exceeding the total of 2021.

In addition to the basic problem of security, from the game of digital investors to the practical tools of the music industry, web3's music services have a long way to improve practicality.

Today, music NFT is more like a marketing strategy. The relationship between fans and musicians is still a certain distance from the vision of Web3.

In China, NFT, which cannot be traded in secondary transactions, can only appear in the form of digital collections, restricting fans and community participation gameplay. At the same time, domestic digital collection platforms rely on various alliance chains, unlike the public chain, which can flow across the platform. Therefore, there are extremely high investment risks for emerging digital collection platforms. It's right.

In foreign countries, there is a phenomenon of income division asymmetric and web2 music industry. According to Water & Music's series of research reports in the "Status of Music and Web3", when it involves music and web3, the amount of funds flowing into music / web3 technology is at least 3 times more than the amount of funds flowing into the musicians.

With the gradual cooling of NFT purchases abroad, the music NFT has also fallen into a dilemma of no one. For example, the well -known American male singer and actor Christ Brown released its own series NFT BREEZYVERSE on July 1. This series consists of 10,000 Chris Brown in different postures in the building. But after half a month, only 299 were sold, accounting for 3%of the series, and the market response was cold.

At the same time, the entire web3 field lacks technology to reduce infringement and content abuse. Based on the decentralized agreement, the Web3 platform cannot be infringed before the upper chain. Taking Audius as an example, a large number of pirated music content has emerged on the platform, and the lack of effective regulatory tools on the platform. If it is not handled, it is likely that the platform will be drowned by infringement. Therefore, the most urgent task in front of Web3 music services is to establish a set of effective metadata management models.

Finally, the infrastructure of DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is also an important development path for the web3 music industry. The friendship and convenience of DAO tools determine the frequency of musicians on it, and then determine the practicality and nature of Web3 music. Today, many music DAOs have launched custom Discord robots to improve new consumption and planning layers, and pay music consumption directly to musicians in more web3 native ways.

For example, the free Discord music robot Tone, launched by the American independent label TopShelf Records, can extract songs from platforms such as SoundCloud and Bandcamp and pay the musicians with cryptocurrency CELO. How to promote the popularization of such technologies is actually testing the normality and vitality of Web3 music services. It can even be said that it determines whether the web3 can set off the revolution in the music industry. All in all, based on the current practice of the music industry, web3 is still a beautiful but slightly distant dream. How to enter the reality requires the development and exploration of the entire industry.

Conclusion

Blockchain confirmation, NFT creativity, and meta -universe scenes are a gap in the future.

Through this gap, it can be seen that it is not only a new possibility of the music industry in the Web3 era, but also the dilemma that has to face the technology and supervision.

In the eyes of optimists, web3 is the era of democratization of music creation, distribution and monetization. More musicians can get higher income from a more transparent distribution pattern; in the eyes of pessimists, web3 represents technical abuse and abuse and The copyright is out of order, and it is still unable to get rid of the current income distribution and head carnival.

Therefore, whether web3 can become the revolutionary force of the music industry depends on the extent to which the beautiful vision can improve its legitimacy and standardization.

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