NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess) – eMusic has announced a $70M token sale to build a decentralized music distribution and royalty management system.
As the first major music service to fully embrace blockchain, eMusic is essentially looking to balance the scales of the music industry by building a fair, simple and transparent music distribution platform for artists and service providers alike.
“For two decades, eMusic has been a champion of independent artists and their fans. However, today’s supply chain for music is broken,” said Tamir Koch, CEO of eMusic. “While streaming has made it possible for anyone to listen to virtually any song ever recorded at any time, its underlying economics are financially crippling to the most vital piece of the music ecosystem — artists. And on the other side of the supply chain, service providers are losing billions and struggling to stay alive. Most fans don’t realize that this is an unsustainable future with fewer artists and fewer providers.
“Today’s supply chain is full of blockers, middlemen and inefficiencies that create barriers for artists’ music to get from the studio to fans’ headphones,” added Koch. “eMusic is going to fix this problem using an all-new blockchain platform that provides a more streamlined, transparent and autonomous structure benefiting all parties.”
Using a system of simple smart contracts, the eMusic blockchain platform is set to include everything artists need to publish and distribute music and manage rights and royalties. Under this model, artists would simply upload their music, document the rights and choose where fans are able to stream or buy their music. When a song is played or sold, the revenue would be split 50/50 between service provider and rights holders, with the artists maintaining full visibility to plays and payouts to be issued whenever they like.
According to Bill Campbell, an advisor to the eMusic blockchain project and former senior executive within the global digital groups at both Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, “This technology will change the landscape for DIY artists, allowing them true creative freedom while simultaneously ensuring that they can continue to make a living creating the music that their fans love. The eMusic blockchain platform solves the most critical problems facing artists looking to release their own music, including fair, transparent and expedited royalty payments and the ability to fund new music creation. In short, the eMusic blockchain platform provides artists all the tools they need to survive and thrive in a tough marketplace.”
eMusic is planning a public pre-sale for its eMusic utility token (EMU) beginning in September 2018 with a token generation event (TGE) immediately following.
