Hello Steemians!
This is the first post in my series about putting my own skin in the game to invest in the creative economy of the future. I’ve been inspired by the last week of learning about the community here as part of the mission with Tron to “ultimately enable all ecosystems to form a mutually beneficial connection.”
I’m going to be too honest with you. The “business” of an indie content creator sucks. Don’t get me wrong, we live in the most empowering time to be an artist with unparalleled tools to create and share your work with the world. But every time someone (or a platform or company) receives money on your behalf, they get to determine your value and worth.
I’m not going to sling mud or name names, but you should know that literally every single project I’ve produced has not ultimately paid me all the money I was owed. Sometimes the company went out of business. Sometimes there was fine print I missed. Sometimes there was “creative accounting.” Sometimes the money wasn’t actually real. And sometimes they just straight up stole it.
The first couple of times, you blame yourself. You promise to get smarter, savvier. But when you swallow your shame and start asking around, you discover: This is just how the business “works.” There is a fundamental flaw in creating a thing of value and then handing that thing to someone else to oversee its revenue. And then trusting that person - a person with no skin in the game - to play fair.
Does this mean you can’t trust anyone? No. I meet people with integrity every single day, especially in the artistic community. But we are all drawn to sandboxes like Steem and Tron because we don’t subscribe to the societal norm of putting our trust, or our money, in the hands of a centralized gatekeeper. It’s simply too easy for strangers to not do the “right” thing.
As an early investor in several projects ($TRX, $BAT, $STEEM, $ADA, $LTC...) I was extremely excited about what I presumed was “turning the entire internet into Patreon.” I don’t use Brave’s browser or dApps to get rich or HODL. (Wasn’t I clear above I don’t have any money?) Instead I believe in the underlying technology to experiment with a new economy of people and transparency. I try my best to learn about what new projects are out there and participate in those transactions to help build reliable case studies.
I’ll admit when Justin Sun announced the purchase of BitTorrent and later Justin Knoll gave a speech on BitTorrentSpeed to “tokenize file sharing,” the cynic in me got real sassy. “Oh great, the torrent community is going to start paying each other to pirate other people’s content?” Years of bad bets and bad faith made me feel the way most of Hollywood feels about torrenting. Forbes recently reported $71B in lost revenue and up to 560,000 in lost jobs every year due to piracy.
So I did what most people do when they’re feeling snarky. I tweeted.
I figured if the largest peer sharing community in the world was going to introduce a token to pay multiple Seeds, why not go one extra step and offer that token to everyone? And I mean everyone, literally. Why not let every single person who participates in the creation and distribution of original content also participate in the revenue stream it creates? Instead of trying to decrease the victims of piracy, what if every single user became invested in protecting the revenue of, say, a movie…because they participated in the revenue of that movie?
My proposal is based on the single assumption that the easier it is for people to do the right thing, the more likely they are to do the right thing...especially if the right thing also benefits them.
At this point, I have to name names, because the community deserves all the credit. I went to sleep with a subtweet at Justin Sun. I woke up to dozens of comments and retweets, most notably from @MikeNerdUK who got the attention of @BitTorrent a few hours later. Then @redpillblue1 gave me his Telegram info and shared my open letter with the Tron Community. And @alwayshayleym connected me with @ryandennislive to set up marketing meeting with Tron. Serendipitously, this also coincides with the rolling out of new functionality for BTFS (BitTorrent File Share) and BTS (BitTorrentSpeed) which hopes to integrate a payment/escrow layer on its peer to peer sharing.
This series of posts will follow my attempt to release my next feature film as a tokenized “dMovie,” to calculate and pay real-time residual payments to everyone who participates in the seeding, creative, labor, promotion, and financing of independent media content.
I hope you’ll follow along and share your thoughts, ideas, (and, yes, even your snark) early and often.
Thank you for your time and talent,
@brendanAbradley
A 'dMovie'?... sounds interesting, and it appears that you have some interesting backers already! It will be interesting to see how this new model pans out!
I have featured you and this post for Curation Contest here:
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Thanks for featuring! And excited to share the journey with my new Steemian friends!
My pleasure!
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I can't wait to see how this venture works of for everyone involved! wishing you the best of luck!
Thanks! I’ll be posting here weekly to unpack my progress
Really interesting read so far, thanks for sharing! Steem first captured my attention for a lot of the same reasons. I was enthralled with the potential of a system that could encompass social media, crowdfunding, distribution, sales, and more all within a single account that I actually had ownership of. I still see that vision today and am encouraged by the advances in the various tools and user experiences that are needed for broader adoption.
Fantastic! What content do you create?
Well that escalated unexpectedly quickly XD
I'll be interested in watching how this works out as bittorrent was one of my planned methods of distribution down the line (way way down the line when I'm actually closer to thinking about these things), people getting paid to seed and host it and whatnot makes that idea seem so much more cooler.
What kind of video do you distribute? It’s a brave new world!
Nothing yet, I'm still in the very early stages of building ^_^;
Interesting! Very interesting, for a starter I gonna share this on C² and then I stay tuned on the progress...
Thank you!
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Nice post.
Justin Sun is a strange individual... I don't trust him very much.
Congratulations on being featured by @bengy in an entry for the Pay It Forward Contest
Thanks for supporting! Hard to know who to trust, but I trust the COMMUNITY over an INDIVIDUAL which is what makes this journey so exciting!