A Model to Support the Music Streaming Service Using Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts

There is a pattern that prevails in the music business for a long time. An artist writes, records, produces, and distributes a song so that the public can listen to it, and thus acquire financial compensation. This marketing and distribution effort is done collaboratively with record labels and companies that know the music business, because the artist alone cannot achieve a large audience. Because the actors involved in this process are too many, the main author gets the smallest percentage of the benefits. For this reason, this research proposes a model to support the music streaming service using blockchain-based smart contracts. For this, a prototype based on smart contracts is developed so that the author exhibits his musical works and gets an economic benefit. Using a web interface, a user can listen to a song by recording a monetary transaction within the blockchain. Consequently, this proposal allows a direct relationship between creators and consumers of musical content. Thus, blockchain was used to eliminate intermediation and directly reward the profits to the author of the melody. Conclusions and future work were presented at the end of the paper.