The music industry is a complex system of organisations, firms and individuals. It has undergone dramatic changes in the 21st century, with digitisation providing both new business models and opportunities for rapid growth of individual artist's popularity. This is a large and fast-growing industry in the UK, with \>6% growth in 2016, and a total economic contribution exceeding £4.4bn.
Much of the complexity lies within the interrelation between an artist, their compositions or recordings, music distributors (e.g. Spotify, iTunes and traditional record labels) and collection agencies (e.g. PRS for Music).
Artists are faced with two key challenges within the current system. Firstly, they lack understanding of the collection agency system, including how the assertion of copyright links to association with income. Secondly, the significant lag in payment of royalties to artists (often \>12 months). This is particularly challenging for emerging artists.
To respond to these challenges, we propose Evershare. Evershare allows artists to quickly raise money through fan investment and to optimally manage collection of PRS dues through clear copyright management, all underpinned by nascent blockchain technology.
Building on our Blockitdown.com copywriting service, we will create a platform that combines blockchain technologies with a modern digital framework to deliver a new, disruptive market offering for music creators and fans worldwide. Specifically it will:
1) Create a unique fundraising platform which auctions shares of the future income generated by individual recordings.
2) Provide a new mechanism for artists to ensure total collection of their owed income from collection agencies and full assertion of their intellectual property,
3) Utilise blockchain technology to allow detailed micro-transaction processing and automated, enduring, smart contracts on a large scale.
4) Create a new market of tradeable digital certificates/posters asserting part-ownership of a band's work.
Our prototype platform has two uniquely innovative elements, each independently novel:
1) The unique investment platform, which links crowd sponsorship to certificated part-ownership of artistic works - allowing fans to make money from sponsorship.
2) The creation of a secondary trading platform. The share certificates themselves, cryptographically protected, are a tradeable resource with both fiscal and 'memorabilia' value.
The importance of allowing fledgling performers timely access to their earnings cannot be overstated. The music industry is hamstrung by the entry barriers for new talent and digitalisation highlights the mismatch between opportunities for quickly distributing music and artist's ability and the time required to earn revenue from it. Evershare provides a solution.