Towards Creating Transparency in Loyalty Payments in Music Streaming Platforms

In the music industry, the blockchain could provide indisputable record of song listens, i.e., the users listening patterns, duration of listening, location where the song was streamed, the radio/TV channel that played the song, etc., that could assist in transparent calculation of artists' royalties. This way, the music industry does not only benefit the middlemen, who introduce a lot of bureaucracy in the distribution and streaming of music, but the core music industry contributors - the artists. Thus, to ensure fairness and transparency, and to make musicians key players in loyalty calculations and payment, this paper proposes a blockchained based music streaming platform where the music lovers pay for what they listen to while creating transparency in payment of royalties to the music owners by the music streaming providers. The proposed mechanism is built on permissioned blockchain where the music streaming service provider, the music lovers and the music owners are members and each can create and commit to given records in the platform.