In 2017 this was one of my most popular Steem posts. However it turns out that a LOT has changed in the world of blockchain music distribution since last year.
images by @atopy
In fact out of the four platforms I featured in last year’s edition, only one of them is still viable at this time. That’s LBRY, which we’ll take a fresh look at later in this post. The other three (Dot Blockchain, BitTunes, and UjoMusic) all still exist - but right now, none represent the most exciting and immediate opportunities for musicians.
In their place, I believe two new platforms have become clear frontrunners in the race to distribute and monetize music content with blockchain technology. One of these blockchains will be very familiar to most of my readers… and the other is a more obscure one that you might have missed until now.
We have a ton of ground to cover. This article is packed full of original images, exclusive interviews, and in-depth investigations of the platforms covered. It's going to be a blast. By the end you will have a working mental picture of how to distribute music via blockchains in 2018.
With no further ado, let’s take a look at the first blockchain music platform on the list.
Part 1: Steem
I am convinced that Steem is the biggest opportunity to make money as a musician through a blockchain right now.
This is how I felt six months ago - and I'm still in love
It is a sight to behold the numerous opportunities available on Steem for musicians… in stark contrast to the rest of the music industry, here financial opportunities abound especially for people who create new, original, personal work.
Monetize The Creative Process
One of Steem’s talent incubator groups, called Sndbox, does a good job of summing up why Steem is so good for musicians and other artists.
source: sndbox.co
In the normal “music career,” it is very hard to earn money early on. You either take “General Business” gigs like performing in cover bands and teaching school students how to play basic musical scales, or, you may not be able to pay your rent.
The problem is that for many musicians, these business gigs do not help them get closer to their real dream: Creating and promoting their own original music as a full time “job.”
Steem makes it possible to monetize the whole process of being a musician. Works-in-progress, photos, video blogs, live clips, one-take digital performances, live streams, and so much more… All of it can be monetized.
Whereas before all of the building blocks of a music career had to be paid for, Steem provides the opportunity for any musician to build income streams before they pay for music gear and other expenses. Rather than lose money on each new initiative, the marketing and finance savvy musician can fund any project they want.
In the old world you needed a “head start” of maybe $100k to invest and survive on if you wanted to build a sustainable, independent music entity (a band, etc) from scratch. Now Steem makes it possible from $0.
Steem is a Top 30 Blockchain
Steem has consistently held in the top 35, and now recently it’s held up in the top 30, for all blockchains based on market cap as reported by CoinMarketCap.com.
I’m writing this paragraph on January 31st 2018 and Steem is currently the 26th most valuable blockchain:
source: coinmarketcap.com
Of course market capitalization by itself is not enough to prove the legitimacy of a blockchain - we’ve seen scam tokens reach the top 10 before.
That’s why it matters that Dan Larimer was one of the key founders of Steemit, building the technology that underlies the entire blockchain. You may have heard of Dan before - he’s the founder of three blockchain projects all in the top 30 by market cap - Steem, BitShares, and now EOS as well.
Dan is one of the most respected and influential developers in all of blockchain technology, and it’s an gift to have his mental DNA embedded into the core of Steem.
You can learn more about Dan in this article from Steem author (and legend) @stellabelle.
Other Opportunities on Steem
Steem is more than a single website. It’s a blockchain that anybody can build a music distribution platform on.
We have DSound, the steem-powered competitor for Soundcloud. Then there’s DTube, the direct competitor for YouTube which has attracted several million-plus subscriber YouTube channels over to the Steem side.
For the live-streamers in the audience, DLive has you covered there too. It’s a newer platform that is making good and fast progress.
Many community initiatives exist to help new users get involved with the community: Open Mic Challenge, Sndbox-Alpha, The Cut, Curie, and so many more. There is a LOT to do on Steem, and all of it can earn you money.
If you don’t have an account on Steemit, you should sign up. It’s free and it is the biggest opportunity for up-and-coming musicians in the music industry today.
Quotes From Steem Users
As preparation for this post, I asked my audience on Steem to offer advice for new users who want to join the platform. Specifically I asked three questions. Here’s each one, along with some of the most interesting answers:
Question 1: How did you first discover Steem?
@elliotjgardner is a long-time Steemian who has participated in dozens of Steemit Open Mic Weeks and regularly hangs out in Steemit Chat. He says:
“I saw a Facebook post from @Grantcardone that said you could earn cryptocurrency from social networking. I was sold immediately. I’ve never really been much of a writer but thought I’d do it anyway until then I found the open mic competition and it was pretty much a green light for posting other media.”
@soundscape is a newer member of Steem who says:
“I first found steem while talking about cryptos in a local coffee shop. We discussed a Justin Suntron live stream and what he said, saying Facebook owns all our content and how all they care about is $$$$. Someone next to me mentioned Steemit, then I went home and checked it out.”
@jessamynorchard is a Steem artist who posts several new artworks - from music to poetry and beyond - alongside life blogs and other great content. She tells her story:
“I first discovered Steemit in the Summer of 2016 and was introduced by my friend @quantumanomaly to the platform. He encouraged me to use it as a platform [for] my music, and after much persuasion, I joined in October 2016, and I quickly discovered it was exactly that. A perfect platform for undiscovered or underrated musicians.”
Question 2: Why do you think Steem is useful for musicians?
@fourfourfun is a musician and electronic music journalist who writes for Inverted Audio amongst other blogs. He’s cautiously optimistic about Steem, offering this quote:
“The idea that a musician could run a blog and get content, post tour updates, that sort of thing, and get money for it, is a good concept. I see that appealing.”
When pressed on his reservations, he offers the following critique of Steem:
“Gaming the reward pool, invulnerability through SP [Steem Power] - these things need to be addressed before you see websites start to pick it up [as Smart Media Tokens].”
@jessamynorchard has another great answer for this question:
“It gives musicians an opportunity to ‘make a living’ without ‘making it,’ and giving ‘making it,’ an entirely new paradigmatic definition. As a gigging musician, blogging on Steemit, and working a 40-hour a [week] job… it was tough. Now, between the support of the Steemit audience built over time, I was actually able to quit my job last August and focus completely on my creative endeavors. Since then, I have recorded, published and am about to digitally release an album. That wouldn’t have and couldn’t have happened without this platform.”
Question 3: Whats the one most important piece of advice you would give to somebody who is about to sign up for Steem?
@steevc is a long-time Steemian with more than 10,000 posts under his belt and deep ties to the music scene. He suggests the following:
“Don't chase the money straight away. Network with people who share your interests. They may follow you. Make it fun and you will want to come back even when you don't make much.”
Let’s bring back @elliotjgardner from question 1 for one more piece of wisdom, he says:
“Don’t expect magic to happen because there’s money/crypto up for grabs, you still need to do all the work you’d do anywhere else. It’s a social network so do as much networking as you can, otherwise it’s likely that you’ll be disappointed.”
That brings us to the end of our Steem overview. Up next, we’ve got a younger and also quite exciting blockchain to look at:
Part 2 - Musicoin
Musicoin is an alternative to Soundcloud. Any artist can upload audio content and fans can listen to all of it for free while the artist gets paid instantly. Think Spotify, iTunes, etc, but with more democratized access to the platform.
There is a lot to be admired about this blockchain. It is probably the closest thing we have to a full-featured decentralized music distribution platform right now. This is important - without a good distribution platform that caters specifically to music, musicians will be limited in their options. Musicoin is saving the day here.
On the down side, the user interface needs a lot of work. I have to be honest here, many people probably look at the Musicoin interface once and just immediately leave the site. It looks like a person’s first serious attempt at building a website.
The big question with Musicoin is: Will they improve to the point where it’s a professional-level interface?
All of this depends on the technology maturing in the right direction. I consider Musicoin a riskier investment of time or money than Steem, for sure, but also a place with potentially huge rewards down the line.
How Musicoin Works
I wanted to get the real scoop on Musicoin, so I reached out to fellow Steemian and official Musicoin Ambassador @djlethalskillz, real name Skillz, to help us understand what makes Musicoin special.
djlethalskillz
“I found out about Musicoin through my continuous research on the blockchain for alternative solutions to promote and sell my music. That’s how it started.”
Skillz began posting his beats and collaborations on the Musicoin platform while engaging with the community at a forum called “Let’s Rock”.
As he told me, “You can network and engage with other artists on the Musicoin platform and get engaged with various activities - from community networking, to pitching ideas…”
“In addition you can use the power of Steemit community, by sharing your Musicoin links on Steemit and engaging with the Steemit community you can increase your follower and supporters and earnings from the Steem blockchain.”
In other words, Skills is saying that you can use Musicoin as a way to improve all of your blockchain earnings. Your Musicoin activities will feed into your Steemit success and vice versa.
The ultimate strategy may be to sign up for all three of the platforms in this guide.
I asked Skillz if he had any last tips for musicians about promoting their music on Musicoin.
“Musicoin has an ‘artist of the week’ which is featured on the home page each week. It increases exposure and plays, which increases Musicoin token rewards for them. There’s also sections for the most played song of the day/week/month and great embedding tools to share on other social media sites like Twitter.”
“…and when someone clicks on your link from Twitter, they listen on Musicoin, so you still get paid.”
If Music is Free, How Do Musicians Get Paid?
This is a question that I had to figure out before I could recommend Musicoin to anybody. The answer turns out to be pretty simple and logical.
On Musicoin, each “free” listen is actually compensated by the blockchain, which credits the artist with one token for each unique listener. These tokens come out of the “mining rewards” - basically, the system pays for itself out of its own token supply.
You can assemble playlists of your favorite songs and follow new artists to keep up with their music. In this way Musicoin is much like Spotify or Soundcloud.
However - on Spotify, artists are compensated in weird ways. It takes months to earn your money for streams and the exact amount and distribution of the per-stream royalty is largely out of your hands… What can you do about it?
On Soundcloud it’s even worse - with few exceptions, basically nobody makes any money on Soundcloud. Even the superstars with sponsored accounts are barely earning anything there.
On Musicoin it is simple - one token per unique play. And you receive these tokens instantly, not months after the fact. It’s possible to have each song distribute the royalty proportionally, so your bandmates can each receive part of the money without anybody having to keep track of the numbers.
For the modern artist, who is constantly creating, remixing, and collaborating - Musicoin represents a simple way to make sure everybody gets paid a fair stake for their contribution to a project. This is a huge thing that artists desperately need right now.
I know it’s a huge relief for me… Even on Steemit, my band The Walding Family has to manually keep track of our rewards and split them up accordingly. On Musicoin we can finally automate this process - a song could pay 20% to my wallet, 20% to my bandmate’s wallet, and then 60% to our “band fund” wallet.
Furthermore if we collaborate with 10 different people across 6 different songs, with each song having different percentages owed to different people…. this is impossible for one person to track normally, but it is easy on Musicoin. Amazing!
Musicoin and the Abundance Economy
Musicoin is designed as an abundance economy. That’s why tipping is built into the model - because when a music distribution platform is set up right, tipping should be easy.
Think of all the songs you’ve heard and loved - wouldn’t you want to tip, say, $0.10 with a simple “thank you” button next to the song? Musicoin makes this possible and easy.
You can tip as many or as few tokens as you want - the default is one token, worth about $0.03 as of this writing - and the reduced friction around giving and being generous helps for Musicoin’s community to become stronger.
People want to give tips to musicians - they simply do not have access to the right tools that would make it easy. If you could be slinging pennies around all day, micro-tipping at a moment’s notice, you might find yourself becoming more and more generous as the time goes on.
The Best Strategy for Musicoin in 2018
Right now, here’s what I would recommend based on my general music promo experience:
(1) Upload a few of your older songs to get started - just 2-3 songs, not all of them.
(1b) Every week upload one more of your older songs until they are all up - if you have a large catalog that’s even better. You can upload one song per week for a year - that would be great. This way your “new” uploads are always showing up on the feed.
(2) Spend 30-60 minutes per day, at least 3 days per week, listening to other people’s content. Leave comments on everything you enjoy at all - no generic spam comments, always be honest and be clear that you’ve actually heard the song - doing this a few hours a week will help you get integrated into the social network of Musicoin.
(3) Make friends, collaborate, and keep an eye out for updates…
It’s so early for Musicoin that just uploading content and engaging with other users’ songs will go a long way.
Beyond that I would not spend too much time here, just be in “wait and watch” mode and hope for the site to get better and grow its user base. In a year, we should hopefully have a better idea of the long-term potential for Musicoin.
Part 3 - LBRY
LBRY is an unusual media distribution platform which has the potential to become a major Steem competitor in 2019.
To explain why LBRY is so cool, first I need to provide some blockchain industry context.
Generally speaking, most of the best technology projects in the blockchain space are bad at communicating with their users and maintaining a happy, healthy community. The same is true in reverse - the most hyped, seemingly community-oriented projects are sometimes quite lacking in the technology department.
LBRY is cool because it already has both of these good qualities.
With LBRY, we see the unusual combination of cutting edge, scalable technology AND friendly, approachable humans who actually talk to their users. You can join the LBRY Discord channel and within hours you’ll be talking to the top members of LBRY - the CEO and main developers are all regularly in there, along with other staff.
What’s The Catch With LBRY?
OK so the one thing about LBRY is that they are entirely focused on developing their own protocol rather than a website. In fact the main LBRY “content portal” right now - their equivalent to “steemit.com" - is the LBRY app, which is not a browser-accessible website.
Having to download an (computer, not mobile) app rather than access it via the web browser is probably the biggest thing that stands in the way of LBRY’s user adoption. At least that is how I see it.
You hear a lot more about Musicoin than LBRY, for example, even though LBRY’s technology and interface are clearly superior at this time. That has to do with LBRY requiring a downloadable app, whereas musicoin's main services can be accessed via the website.
Also LBRY is oriented more towards video content - in the music context it is very new, with only a few musicians regularly posting content.
Here’s the other thing, though: You know how Steemit existed for a while without DTube, then once DTube became useable enough, we all saw way more video content happening? With LBRY this process is in reverse - They are starting with videos, but soon there will be better music distribution options.
Just like Dtube and Steemit, LBRY will have a “LBRY-Sound” or similar platform. Just like Steem, they’re an open ecosystem that anybody can build upon.
By now a lot of people can see the potential in Steem. LBRY is much more obscure - but I’m more confident than ever that the LBRY blockchain has the potential to become a huge part of the blockchain media ecosystem.
I suspect that LBRY will become Steem’s number one competitor in the world of media distribution on the internet.
How LBRY Helps Musicians
“I first discovered LBRY when I was discovering GPU mining - I came across the project on BitcoinTalk and then joined the slack channel. I started talking to some of the folks on the project and fell in love completely.”
That’s Tom Zarebczan, Community Manager at LBRY, speaking to me via a private chat within LBRY’s Discord community.
Tom Z
Tom and I have been internet friends ever since I first stumbled onto LBRY about a year ago. He’s quick to retweet anything with a whiff of LBRY interest and is one of the world’s foremost LBRY evangelists.
I wanted to know why he dedicates so much of his time to this project. Specifically, what benefit could a platform like LBRY have for musicians?
“Musicians, just like other content creators, want to get compensated for the work that they put into creating music. By using a platform that gives them control over their content and monetization strategy, they can cut out middlemen and choose their best distribution process.”
That’s exactly what we hoped to get from the internet - “control over content and monetization” - but as we now know, the internet has mostly helped us with content and not with monetization. Tom’s point about LBRY is simple: It solves the other half, giving you not only content control, but monetization control as well.
With a system like LBRY, you won’t have to pray for your videos to avoid “demonetization,” as so many successful YouTubers still struggle with. On that note, I asked Tom the elephant-in-the-room question: How can LBRY compete with a huge company like YouTube?
His answer made sense to me: “[People should] understand that LBRY is still a very young project that has a long way to go in terms of feature set and performance. You can't compare it to a service like YouTube which has been around for 15 years. By getting in early with LBRY, you can appreciate how it works early on and experience how it evolves over the next few years.”
I have to agree with Tom here. In my own experience watching one year of LBRY development - it is astonishing to see the app improve over time. I’ve seen it 10x itself once already in terms of user interface and performance speed/reliability.
Thanks to Tom for taking the time to talk with me about LBRY - you can connect with him on Twitter for more information.
One Other Cool Aspect of LBRY
With Steem it’s pretty hard to buy a lot of influence. At this point it costs $50,000 to purchase 10,000 Steem Power, and even that only makes you a small-to-medium—sized dolphin.
In contrast, there are only half as many LBRY tokens currently in circulation — and they cost 10% the price of the Steem token right now. In other words you can think of each LBRY token as buying you 20x as much influence as an equivalent USD value of steem tokens.
What I’m trying to say is that I think LBRY has similarly huge potential to Steem, but much less hype, so it might be a chance for noobs to get a bigger stake on an equally important blockchain.
As a guy who joined Steem more than a year ago and STILL feels like a small fish in the sea - it’s worth considering the power of buying influence on up-and-coming blockchains. Or, in lieu of funds, earning influence by creating content.
LBRY is a promising blockchain project that deserves a lot more attention from the music world.
Conclusion: Does It Make Sense For You to Put Your Music Content On The Blockchain?
Short Answer: Yes.
Blockchain technology will help to complete what the internet started, so far as liberating musicians goes.
The hope was that the internet would change everything for the better. Musicians hoped to share their music directly with fans and earn a fair amount of the sale price for it. Unfortunately the internet only solved half the battle.
The internet made information free but that wasn’t enough by itself. This actually ruined the music industry for a while because music IS information and it became much harder to sell a thing that, in some sense, wants to be free.
Blockchain takes it a step further by allowing money to flow as freely as information does.
Once upon a time, you needed to have access to a printing press to publish a book. Then anybody was able to do it and now almost everybody publishes their thoughts to somewhere - a blog, Facebook, Yelp reviews, whatever.
Once upon a time, you needed to play by your nation’s arbitrary rules if you wanted to participate in the monetary system - in other words, if you want to buy bread, you have to buy into the entire system of the American dollar. I’m not talking about taxation - I’m talking about the literal usage of the dollar in your day-to-day transactions.
And our current monetary system, as well as aspects of the legal system attached to it, sucks. Regardless of your home nation - money does not flow to musicians like it should in most of the world.
Blockchain changes that by giving us the same amount of flexibility over money as we do over information. The same way that there are now a million blogs, each exploring different concepts, so too will we have a million currencies…
..and just like blogs, only a few dozen of them will be “mainstream” and will have major relevance for the world as a whole.
Steem may be one of those. Perhaps it’s LBRY or Musicoin. Hell maybe all three will “cross the chasm” and enter orbit as a mainstream “cryptocurrency” or “digital token,” just like how Bitcoin is already pretty popular.
Nobody can say for sure, you know? All I know is that this blockchain thing is happening and it’s real - after all, my full income is all in cryptocurrency - and I for one will be spending time working on these blockchain music platforms. I hope you will give it a try too.
This is how any artist, regardless of connections or current success level, can gain access to the tools of income generation for the future. It’s a way to move past the “rags-to-riches” musician lifestyle and get an actual steady income going, without sacrificing any of the things that make the mythical musician’s lifestyle so special.
I hope that this guide was useful for you. If you have any thoughts you would like to share, or any other music/blockchain related projects that you want to mention, please feel free to do so in the comments of this post.
Good post, very informative
This post blew my info bank open lbry is new to me tho is it like steem ?
Interesting article indeed. What's important not to forget is that blockchain is a good way for artist to make money out of their work. But when the advantages of being an early adapter becomes obsolete the same principles as earlier comes in play.
Build a following, create relationships and make those relationships flourish.
I think people will be disappointed if they believe that the blockchain technology in it self is the solution. That being said I'm sure the blockchain technology will benefit the artist making it easier to get a fair share of their work. And also the fans and consumer will have a direct access to compensate their favourite artists making them less alienated from the work behind.
Looking forward to read more of your thoughts and if you're up for deeper discussions I'm on Discord 😀
Yea you are right, blockchain is just technology its up to the people to actually utilize it in the proper ways to regain financial independence and general empowerment. Thanks for stopping by Jon, best place for deep discussions will be comments on my posts btw as I am already completely overwhelmed with discord chats
I get that. Not enough hours to the day. I'll put Gina on keeping track of your post 😉
Looks like I got back online just in time, haha, I thought I might have missed this article. Great work man.
I think I might have to look into Musicoin soon. LBRY, I'm not entirely sold on just yet, but it's coin/token seems to be on more exchanges than Musicoin's, so that is definitely a point in it's favor.
One thing that's missing from your otherwise fantastic article is any mention of how to turn the coins/tokens from the various platforms into something of real world value. Even just a list of the main exchanges where you can trade the coins at the end of each platform's section would do. Maybe it's just me, but I think that knowing how/where to exchange a platform's rewards into something more tangible will influence a person's opinion on how viable a platform will be for their own situation.
This really was a great article man, thanks for writing it. Hopefully next year there will be even more options to write about, haha.
Good point about having info on cashing out into USD, I'll keep that in mind for future articles / next years edition. Glad you got back online in time dude cheers mate @the-dagda
Serendipitous to come across this article, I have been dipping my toes into all three, checking them out, and have come to realize the potential, and as a musician and content creator, it’s truy amazing ... Glad to see others see what I see, super excited to be a part of this experiment. 🖖👁
Let’s make it happen!!
Nice! I'll see you around the chats on all of 'em
Cool dude . .. still need to figure them out hahah but super stoked to have found 'em ... talk to you soon !! peace.
You promised evergreen content and I'd say you have delivered.
Wow. I'm so stupid. I had not even thought of this. I've been wanting to buy a MIDI keyboard for a long while now but I hate to do things that feel like I'm splurging on toys for myself.
Instead I'll take the Steem I earn from all my music related posts and get an Amazon card from Steem Cards to purchase one with. I got some Orca love for my most recent Dsound upload so it might not take very long either.
Free musical instrument! STEEM IS AWESOME!
Thanks for the great post man. You really delivered for Steem and for the artist community.
Keep Steeming!
YES Doug! Thanks man. The best part about spending Steem on musical instruments is, not only do you get rad gear, you are being an intelligent financial investor by diversifying your wealth into music gear too so its basically winning on all cylinders.
Really interesting @heymattsokol and I am wondering how these will also threaten Steem in the coming years as I am more 'Steem' based than many others. It seems that the normal 'jump ship' approach of internet user bases will follow into blockchain platforms too but I am hoping that the monetary investments will help people be more willing to build and repair than abandon.
A lot of this will depend on how much traction they are able to garner but many seem to hear 'crypto' and expect to become millionaires in a few weeks.
I am not music based so I can't comment much on that side of things but I really hope that all kinds of artists see the potential to learn and earn early.
Hopefully Steem can be the Microsoft or the Apple or the Google of this space, the mega ultra huge platform that most people use. That's my dream. If anybody from this blockchain space can compete with them though, it's LBRY (platform 3 in the article) -- those dudes mean business!
Hopefully the people who are hearing crypto and getting millionaire dreams will leave it all alone... we have enough of that already. :-)
We can all dream. 😊 If i could pay off my violin loan and fix my car from the crypto earned, i would be more then happy. Ill check this out first hand to get a feel for the project.
For a lot of us, anything helps in becoming independant and free to create. Thanks for the post. 😊
Good luck, I think paying off the violin and car repairs is a very reasonable goal and the book will hopefully be helpful for you in doing that. Stick with it @silentscreamer - I think I saw you over at LBRY too right?
Reasonable or not im giving it a shot. But its damn tough. Yeah i was there im trying everything atm. There is so much to read and learn.
Akasha are another one trying to get in on this game too. They’re also download only atm, which is that big barrier.
Yea tbh I would not even put them in the ballpark of the platforms listed in this article.
If these platforms are tier one, and some others are tier two (UjoMusic, BitTunes, etc), Akasha is like tier five lol. "Early stage beta product that took 1.5 years to develop," idk, I wish them the best but I gotta see way way more from them before I start to care.
I think one of the biggest benefits no matter the art form is people get direct access to the workflow behind the finished product hence making them involved instead of alienated as is the case today.
Hey Matt, check out Opus. It's meant to be the blockchain 'Deezer' based on Ethereum. It's in early stages, but seems legit. We'll see how it develops.
http://opus-foundation.org/
Regarding LBRY, I like the project very much, but for me it has been very slow and unstable. I think I managed to upload something on LBRY only once. It failed me a couple of times. But I still see it as a promising project. Fingers crossed.
Whens the last time you tried LBRY? Ive noticed the last month or two have been 10x better stability wise than the prior year... most of 2017 was pretty brutal for me as well. I'll check out Opus, thank you for the the tip, would be cool to have a good ETH-based platform for musicians.
true, haven't tried it in a couple of months :)
Amazing post! Answered a lot of the questions I have. I just signed up for Muscoin, need to get verified. I agree with you its time for the musicians to grab the power back from the major players. It's been such an up and down ride for us and there is finally a solution. I will def check out LBRY, since I am a noob. Also, thanks for the shout out!!! You have reached legend status yourself !!!
LEGEND STATUS: CONFIRMED
I got verified on Musicoin last night woot. Is ent u a what up there....
This is fascinating. I'm new, so posts like these are all the more useful to me, as all the concepts and platforms discussed are unknown to me. I feel like something wonderful is happening, and I'm pleased to have found it and be a part of it. It inspires me to create, because there is an audience now, providing I'm willing to dedicate time to building my 'brand'.
I will spend time following up all the links in this post and see how many open browser tabs I end up with!
Something wonderful is definitely happening. Good luck @camuel thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts, lemme know if any of those browser tabs lead to something good
Great post mate. The options for musicians have really opened up now. Everyone has an opportunity to make something if they have fans to support them. The next year is going to be really exciting and I hope Steem has a big part to play
Damn straight, everyone has a chance and we're gonna get as many of em on steem as we can while its still early
That's amazingly comprehensive! I actually bought some musicoin and really hope it will kick off one day. I just found the user interface to be a bit tricky and not intuitive.
Totally agree with the Steemit part, especially now with DSound, you can easily share your music and listen to other talented steemians. Also it's easy to use, especially for those who've been on SoundCloud for a while :)
Yea musicoin's interface right now is just frankly 💩💩💩💩 i hope they make it better soon
Damn man, you beat me to the punch.
I'm working on a similar article. Have to rethink my article series structure now.
Really good post though. Well presented and put together, easy to understand and 3 good platforms that you chose here, their all on my list too. Musicoin is starting to become my favorite.
I beat you by more than a year to the punch lol since this is my second yearly edition. Theres plenty of room for more articles though, tons of other blockchains to explore - maybe look at Muse, BitTunes, UjoMusic, DotBC, maybe even TRON for some other options
Except TRON they're all on my list already. I have literally found over 20 blockchain based applications and projects that relate to music in some form or another. I expect to find some more. So much happening it's crazy. I'm also starting to think that steemit won't be that big of a thing for long, although it could still go on for a long time, it's the biggest right now, but it's got some problems.
Huh. We'll have to agree to disagree about Steem - but I'm greatly looking forward to your article! Im sure there is a ton that I should know about the other 17 projects, would be sick to learn more about those through your post.
Great info. Have downloaded LBRY now and just checking it out. It's definitely not for the feint of heart, lol. If you think getting around Steemit is bad, woooooff.
Thanks for the post.
TRUE. I can feel that LBRY will turn a corner soon with the interface / accessibility, within 2018 it'll be all browser / mobile app accessible I bet
In the grand scheme of things it is still such the early days of crypto and blockchain tech. So much of this is a learning curve that is hard for even those that are more technically inclined to understand. Platforms like Steem are doing a great job to help bring this tech to the masses. Musicians that are getting involved now are the early adopters. They can further their careers by taking the time and effort to really learn how to benefit form using this new technology. It would be in the musicians best interest to explore the different options they have before them. I do think you are doing a great job to help them find their way. Through blockchain tech I think we are finally witnessing the birth of the middle class musician.
"Through blockchain tech I think we are finally witnessing the birth of the middle class musician."
YES!
You should be presenting this information to the masses in your community if you're not already doing it. But as a guide this is good info for those here on Steemit to use to explain things to their friends who are not on the platform yet. Great stuff.. "Real name Skillz..." LOL!
Wow. Maybe the best article I e read so far. My hubs is a musician using musicoin and steem to further his career. I think it’s amazing that we can finally make a living off of passions(as long as others are passionate about our work as well. I see big big things in the future! Thank yo so much for this post, I’ve shared it to my facebook😎
thanks cryptocollege that share on FB is so helpful thank you!! cheers pal
Great little...ahh long ass article my friend lol.
Action packed with info and your solid perspective on some of the music applications of the blockchain(s).
I haven't yet checkout out LBRY (barring when i first heard about it and wasn't too interested in it lol). IT sounds like it's ready for a second investigation.
Have a track up on musicoin, however, I wasn't too interested in that either. It has been on my list of things to revisit though.
For me, Steem seems to be the easiest, most comfortable & effective way for to output creative content. It's probably why I haven't been too motivated to look elsewhere as of late...
Hope all is well and good!
Yo this rocks. I hope that all musicians can gain from the blockchain like you have begun to
ME TOO
That's a huge insight! I needed this! Thank you @heymattsokol! Knowing there's more ways to expand now, totally appreciated! Cheers!
Nice post beautiful presented and explained. detail oriented with nice blockchain information. thank you for sharing
Nice it
Great information, I think no matter which platform we use, honesty in posting and genuinely engaging always pa dividends. Its self-generated satisfaction no matter how you look at it. Its good time for the creatives out there.
Fantastic article, thanks. Sharing this on my blog.
Thanks so much, as musicians who work hard already this is very helpful :-]
Very nic music.
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