The lack of transparency in the music industry is regularly pointed out. The opacity and complexity of contracts, payments, royalties, and rights holders, contribute to create a feeling of mistrust and inequality among artists and their fans. Actually, most artists gave up trying to understand.
While the blockchain and NFTs are an opportunity to improve transparency, we’re glad to introduce our Public Revenue Split on every NFT sold on Pianity. From now on, anyone will be able to see the revenue redistribution of NFT sales, and know exactly how much each rights owner is going to receive.
Split revenues between rights owners
Over the past 20 years, the music industry has shifted from a music-as-a-product to a music-as-a-service, implementing less transparent frameworks, technology, and processes. Today, the music business involves millions of daily micro-transactions, generating revenues from music across many platforms. As a result of the private and financial relationships that exist between artists, authors, record labels, and publishers, our window into the revenue earned by musicians is obscured.
The $10 spent each month for a subscription to Spotify or any streaming platform goes into a common pot, then the platform distributes this money between artists and labels according to the success of their music, and their stream volume. This system, therefore, favors the most listened to artists on the platform, the more a song is listened to, the more money the artist earns. Thus, the money spent by each subscriber does not necessarily end up in the pocket of the artists he has personally listened to. So creating a direct channel of monetization between artists and fans through NFTs is already a revolution.
New technologies can make all the process fairer and more transparent. On Pianity, when an artist mints an NFT, he can choose independently who’s receiving a cut of the sale. They can share the revenue with their label, another artist, the creator of the cover, or anyone involved in their project, and this repartition is now public. The Revenue Split appears in the copyrights section, on the left sidebar of the music page.
Transparency is one of the keys to make the entire industry fairer and give back value to the creative process.
