SEOUL, Feb 1 — Blockchain is attracting interest in the financial world for its promise of absolute security. The technology is also attracting interest from certain players in the music industry, who see it as an opportunity to facilitate transactions between fans and artists. But musicians are more measured about the real benefits they could derive from this innovation.

At least, that’s what Yujun Park and Seongcheol Kim, two Korea University researchers, claim in a paper published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. They found that the South Korean musicians they interviewed as part of their research have "ambivalent” attitudes to the adoption of blockchain in the music industry.

This is because the technology is both new and complex, even though the first blockchain in history dates back to the early 1990s. Blockchain has the potential to be used for a wide range of applications in the music industry, offering artists the chance to take (or take back) control of the use of their music by cutting out the middleman. Indeed, this is the argument often put forward by supporters of the use of blockchain in music.

But, in reality, doubts persist as to blockchain’s ability to offer fair remuneration to all artists and improve the often obscure management of royalties. "As much as the artists believed that the adoption of blockchain in the music industry could create potential ground for new opportunities, they also held a cynical view regarding the actualisation of the next paradigm in a realistic context,” write Yujun Park and Seongcheol Kim in their paper.

Rebalancing the music business?

Indeed, some experts, such as Tom Allen, CEO and co-founder of the startup Curve Royalties Systems, believe that there is still some way to go before blockchain can be deployed on a large scale. At present, the volume of cryptocurrency transactions this technology can handle simultaneously is limited, which has financial repercussions. "To harness the true potential of blockchain-based royalty reporting, the scale of the networks needs to be 100x bigger, and the cost needs to be 10,000x smaller,” he explained in a 2022 op/ed piece for Music Business Worldwide.

Generally speaking, the artists interviewed for this study do not believe that the deployment of blockchain technology would enable total disintermediation in the music industry, such are the technical and legal barriers. They do believe, however, that this technology has the potential to change their daily lives, by establishing a certain transparency and balance in the distribution of royalties linked to their music. Still, that’s provided that intermediaries (record companies, streaming platforms, etc.) play the game and also see blockchain as an opportunity to be seized.

Several signals suggest that the major music players are showing some interest in this technology. In 2017, the Swedish streaming giant Spotify acquired Mediachain, a blockchain-based company for managing royalties and protecting copyrights. A few years later, Warner Music participated in the US$11.2 million (RM52 million) financing round led by Dapper Labs, the company behind the Flow blockchain and CryptoKitties, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing digital cats, reports Forbes. As such, there’s good reason to believe that we haven’t heard the last of blockchain in music. — ETX Studio