Empowering Artists, Songwriters & Musicians in a Data Cooperative through Blockchains and Smart Contracts
This addresses challenges in the music industry for artists and musicians, but it is incremental as it applies existing blockchain technology to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of declining trust and unfair data handling for gig workers like artists and musicians by proposing a data cooperative using blockchains and smart contracts to share IT resources and manage license tracking.
Over the last decade there has been a continuing decline in social trust on the part of individuals with regards to the handling and fair use of personal data, digital assets and other related rights in general. At the same time, there has been a change in the employment patterns for many people through the emergence of the gig economy. These gig workers include artists, songwriters and musicians in the music industry. We discuss the notion of the data cooperative with fiduciary responsibilities to its members, which is similar in purpose to credit unions in the financial sector. A data cooperative for artists and musicians allows the community to share IT resources, such as data storage, analytics processing, blockchains and distributed ledgers. A cooperative can also employ smart contracts to remedy the various challenges currently faced by the music industry with regards to the license tracking management.