Choon: Music and Streaming on the Ethereum Blockchain
Choon is a new music streaming service, and digital payments ecosystem developed to deliver new solutions for the music industry’s most fundamental problems, with industry veterans advising the project.
The platform is built to let artists earn cryptocurrency for each stream of their tracks. The platform offers a music streaming service and digital payments ecosystem powered by Ethereum’s blockchain. Using the blockchain technology allows solving some of the music industry’s most fundamental problems.
A New Way for Artists to be Paid for Their Work
The Internet has enabled a lot of innovative ideas for artists to expand their revenue and interaction with their fans. The blockchain is doing the same the internet did, but this turn, it is entirely removing the middleman and empowering artists to be their own agents.
Streaming is increasingly growing as a consumer product. Even if it is not that good for the artists, it enabled a versatile way for listeners to access their favorite artist’s content. With Choon, artists will be able to profit from the number of streams through the platform. Choon envisioned streaming has a monetization feature, and by implementing it, it is giving back the power to the artists enabling them to conduct all of their work, from producing on to distributing and marketing.
The mp3 changed music ownership as companies opened up a way new of sharing these files while the internet speeds were increasing. Soundcloud, Youtube and most recently Spotify, completely disrupted the way music is distributed and how artists can earn from their work. These companies have rendered downloads to as obsolete as streaming becomes more accessible at each the internet speeds increase.
Nowadays, listeners can access their preferred music easily. Music is becoming more accessible than ever. Today, anyone can easily collect music; this type of hobby is no longer just for outcasts and audiophiles. It is now something achievable to any listener.
Now, Choon is trying to monetize the artist’s content by making it available to stream and for each stream made, it will generate revenue. As part of the whole platform functionality, artists keep 80 percent of all the income while the other 20 percent is for fees paid to the platform which will then be used for the development and promotion of the service itself.
How Does it Work?
The platform uses an ERC-20 token called NOTES as its engine of the whole network. Using NOTES to deliver payments along “smart record contracts,” Choon is hoping to take away the music contracting and licensing practice from the traditional industry.
These smart record contracts store copyright credentials on the blockchain and then split the NOTES tokens between the creator and producer.
NOTES are programmed to be distributed according to the number of times a track is streamed. The payment will be made directly into an artist’s wallet.
Artists will be able to redeem their NOTES on exchanges that list the token. The platform will also try to maintain the price of the token by enabling a full suite of connections throughout the music industry.
The Man Behind Choon
Gareth Emery is the man behind Choon. He was the visionary who had the idea and was capable of putting it to work. Gareth Emery is a British DJ and music producer. He is well-known for his three artist albums; “Northern Lights,” “Drive and 100 Reasons To Live” and winning the prestigious “A State Of Trance” Tune Of The Year award three times.
Emery understood the power of the blockchain technology and what it could do for the music industry. Inspired by other artists, who used the technology for their own projects, Emery set on to start a project that would result in bigger freedom for music artists. By introducing a new Ethereum blockchain application tied up to streaming the platform hopes to solve the music industry’s most problematic issues by cutting out the third parties between artists and fans.
According to Emery, the platform already counts with a lot of artists, and some of them are quite well-known. He says that around 500 artists are already set up and willing to try the platform. Some of the big names are the famous dubstep DJ, Datsik, Darude, the creator of the popular trance track “Sandstorm.” The Choon project also has some well-known advisors, including Calvin Harris’ manager Mark Gillespie and artist RAC, who previously released the first ever album on the Ethereum blockchain. Moreover, BitGo’s Head of Engineering Benedict Chan is also on the advisory board.
Streaming is the Future
All of the innovative music platforms brought by the internet are now aging. They are not a novelty anymore. Deezer is 11 years old, Spotify is 12, Google Play launched nine years ago on Android, and even Apple Music and Tidal are both three years old. While these services are no longer something innovative, Choon, on the other hand, presents an entirely new way for artists to manage and profit from their work. By using streaming as its primary tool, Choon can provide a decentralized platform to musicians a free way of profiting from their work.
Choon’s music streaming platform was launched in early 2018, but investors could already buy NOTES in December 2017 during a pre-sale. Choon is currently in early beta testing with an ICO forthcoming and could be something to keep an eye on, given the involvement of industry veterans and the exposure it has received from music magazines such as NME.
