INTRODUCTION
Are you a Music lover? Do you practice music as a hobby or a profession? Do you have any challenge or hindrance towards fully tapping into this gift of nature? Have any artiste or band you had wished to have a one-on-one communication chain with? Are you an Artiste, Musician or a Band tired of the low income revenue derived from live streams of your musical portfolio? Are you an aspiring musician with great talent but lacking the optimal medium to distribute your musical contents to the right audience? If these questions fits your resume then the Imusify Smart Music Ecosystem was specifically designed with you at heart and if not, then feel free to read on and enjoy.
Imusify Smart Music Economy is a blockchain powered Fintech Start up with the sole intent to revitalise the world of music production and distribution. Built upon NEO blockchain technology, Imusify Smart Music Economy is an establishment of an online presence for all music lovers around the globe. The Platform is a community of music fans, Artistes and other industry players alike that fosters a direct relationship between Artists and music producers where these Artistes wield the right-down access as to what aspect of their musical contents they want to market and how they intend going about it and not the other way round where the decision of the music production and distribution cycle lies solely in the hands of record labels. Also Artistes and their fans would be granted an opportunity to correlate on a much more frequent basis on the platform. Without getting settled on these notable features of the Imusify platform, it also includes the very latest in tech (blockchain technology) such as smart contracts, a tokenization mechanism that largely increases audience and consumer engagements through an incentivizing scheme that rewards a Subscriber for carrying out simple tasks such as up voting or down voting a musical piece (lyrics, instrumentals and orchestras, albums, songs and the likes inclusive) and also reviewing (commenting) on such musical articles.
EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGES
Just as mentioned above Imusify Platform has amongst its major goal to ensure a guaranteed revenue stream for Artists on the Platform as well as an unrestricted access to these musically contents to music lovers worldwide. A few of the challenges posed upon the Music Industry at present that the Imusify Smart Music Economy aims to tackle includes;
- The Value Gap
This has being the most notable challenge to the Music Industry since the advent of the Internet which was originally introduced into the music sphere as a means to reach out to a vast range of audience to help bring about mainstream adoption of music. But on the long run this solution poses yet another problem in it's own entity in the form of "Value Gap". Value Gap in the Music Industry is referred to as a term that emphatically distinguishes between the revenue generated by the music community (Artists) for their musical contents being streamed online to the actual revenue generated by these online media houses such as Youtube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Itunes, Deezer and Pandora. It is believed that these media streaming platforms pays a meager percentage ranging from 0.1 to 0.5% to these Artists and Brands for every stream of their contents. Thus parting away with 0.5% of every proceeds per stream in most cases, whereas these musical brands have to redistribute this scanty earnings amongst the various stakeholders (labels, producers, managers, and band-mates) involved in the creation of such a musical content. The Imusify Smart Economy focuses mainly on the value gap issue as one of the major deterrent to upcoming talents and as such has proposed a solution to go about this colossal snag by providing a reliable and automated payment procedure that ensures that every Artist in the platform gets what they truly deserve.
- The Safe Margin Clause
Music Conglomerates and Big Multinational Recording Labels such as The Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment all have this particular target which is making profits at all costs and as such would go any length to demand first hand profitability rather than creativity from recordings Artists. This results to an increased want for already made Artists by these Record Labels and Music Distribution entities comparatively than new and upcoming act since 'developing talent and making great music takes time, dedication, and resources'. Hence as a money-oriented business entity these Labels wouldn't afford to risk supporting an artist who is less than a safe bet in terms of profitability. An organization's major objective is to maximize profit by providing reliable and top notch services that satisfies all parties involved and not at the detriment of another. Which is why the Imusify Music Platform provides a medium for upcoming acts to be able to control and monetize their musical contents themselves thus eliminating the pressure of doubt placed upon these upcoming Artists by established Recording Labels.
Inadequate Digital Rights Management and Licensing Laws
Such laws binding the digital rights management of an Artist, Band or any Musical Brand are lacking austerity in recent times. The licensing and rate-setting ecosystem in the music industry are way outdated in terms of the prevalent technology and as such do not possess the adequate resources needed to track licenses and deliver royalties in accordance. Artist's rights to ownerships and licenses of various types of digital musical contents online ranging from radio, on-demand streaming, radio-like streaming, digital purchases and much more are not at the disposal of these online streaming platforms thereby creating somewhat of a breach in the desired revenue streams for these musical brands. On the Imusify Smart Economy, Content ownerships are tracked on the go and royalties thus are distributed automatically since the system is built upon the latest in technology with smart contracts.An Opaque Payment Medium
Due to recent findings and the modification of Artists performance rights, right holders (Artists) now took up to registering with an intermediary organization known primarily as Performance Rights Organizations who receive these payments from the media streaming powerhouses on behalf of these Artists and subsequently apportions these collected funds at an industry standard royalty rate to the Artists in conformance. More often than not these distribution terms and conditions are being predetermined by the intermediary collecting societies rather than the rights holders. With insufficient information about how their content-related payments are actually issued, right holders are still exploited on yet another level as smaller Artists lack the resources to enforce control over their content and rights and also songwriters and music composers who originally own 25 - 50% of any proceeds from their composition gets exploited since they literally sell their composition copyrights to these intermediaries who thereafter owns the copyrights and receive a medium to a large amount for these contents leaving the original composers with little to nothing as a take home. With regards to this the Imusify Digital Content Distribution and sharing platform has taken into consideration the fact that even if Artists can now wholly produce, distribute and market their contents themselves all thanks to the Internet, there is still a rift between rights holders and their rights and ownership distribution over their portfolio throughout the Internet. Hence the development of a decentralized solution as proposed on the Imusify platform with an ability to record, track and distribute payments within a transparent and immutable ecosystem is the ultimate way out.
NOTABLE PLATFORM FEATURES
(i) Crowd-funding Engine
A crowd-funding campaign feature is open to Artist to fund music products such as albums, videos, and tours. Where they can also reward the community and participants with such incentives as exclusive access to certain aspects of their contents, tickets, merchandise, as well as VIP fan experiences. Also in existence are affiliate licenses open to active fans as provided by these Artists. A fans with such a license can successively earn some gains by promoting and selling contents within the Artist's networks. This feature tends to increase engagements and promote upcoming musical acts with the adequate exposure to foster sustainable growth and also provides music fans the opportunity to influence the growth of the music industry in their own little but significant way.
(ii) The marketplace of Music Industry Participants
Imusify platform is designed as a market hub for all aspiring entrepreneurs, artists and industry key players to network and subsequently creates a community that grants it's participants the ability to execute transactions with regards to various musical content developments and services ranging from videography, production, advertising, content design, promotion and all other media-related or creative content developments. Product advertisers and distributors can as well list their products on the imusify market community.
(iii) Reward System
Aside the conventional revenue generation scheme open to Artists in the form of royalties, the Imusify platform also rewards quality contribution and Curators for their social contents (posts, playlists and comments) on the platform. These Curator rewards are disbursed in percentages that are similar to Artists' Royalty rewards and is solely based on the quality of the content being distributed by the Curator. The quality of such contents are determined by the impact (like, shares and comments) of such content on the Imusify Economy.
(iv) Decentralized Exchange
Blockchain technology has slowly recorded numerous yet insignificant developments in almost every facets of the economy from E-commerce, real-estate, banking and finance etc. Paving a way for yet another blockchain related innovation but this time in a very promising aspect of the economy which is The Music Industry. Powered upon the NEO blockchain technology the Imusify integrates the NEON Exchange (NEX) API thus enabling Users on the platform to interact spontaneously with the ecosystem and also provides a much fitting approach to convert the in-house IMU tokens into fiat currencies as well as other cryptocurrencies by integrating third-party services such as Switcheo and B2Broker.
(v) Co-evolutionary copyright management
The Imusify Smart Economy employs the immutable feature of the decentralized ledger which ships in with blockchain technology to implement a multiple layered protocol security schema to keeps track of the ownership rights and license of all the content creators on the platform (Musical and Social Content Creators). Along with inbuilt tools and charts at the disposal of the platforms' Users which places the control of their contents and how the revenues generated from each content is being managed in their hands. Thus an Artist can recognize a Songwriter, a fellow Artist or Band that they are involved in any musical piece with while uploading a song by granting those involved ownership rights respectively such that any revenue generated from such a piece can be allocated accordingly to every party involved thereby providing an accurate digital rights management of an Artist, Band or any Musical Brand.
Imusify intends to introduces an online ecosystem where new and existing Artists as well as listeners can benefit from as it allows for a direct peer-to-peer relationship between the participants hence eliminating the dominance of the racketeering middlemen in the music distribution chain.
TOKEN DISTRIBUTION
Similar to every other cryptocurrency start-up project, The Imusify Smart Economy is scheduled to conduct a number of token generation events known as an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in order to raise funds as a start-up so as to get listed on the cryptocurrency market. This ICO is dated to take place within the first quarter of 2019 (1st of March - 30th of April), as the Pre-sale event kicks off from the 1st of March to the 31st of March while the Crowd-sale is scheduled for the 1st of April to the 30th of April with a total supply of 1,000,000,000 ϑ IMU tokens allocated for sale.
TOKEN ECONOMICS
The Imusify token generation event is scheduled in three phases as aforementioned above. The Private Sale event which is currently in progress would be conducted with 200,000,000 IMU tokens offered for sale to Institutional and Seasoned Investors who meet certain requirements at a discount rate of over 40%. The Public Pre-sale scheduled for Q1 2019 would have the remainder of unsold Private sale tokens along with an additional 100,000,000 IMU tokens up for sale at at a discount rate of 30%. This Public Pre-sale would be succeeded by a Public/Crowd sale where 350,000,000 IMU tokens alongside unsold tokens from the previous sale would be offered for sale at varying discounted prices. All other unsold tokens after the Crowd-sale would be added to the already reserved 80,000,000 IMU tokens which are to be earmarked for future platform maintenance and developments.
Maximum IMU supply: 1.000.000.000
IMU For sale: 650.000.000
IMU Price: 0.05 USD
Currencies accepted: USD, EUR, NEO, Bitcoin (BTC,) Ether
(ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Dash (DASH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Tether
(USDT), Monero (XMR), Ripple (XRP), OmiseGo (OMG)
NOTE: You can register to participate in the imusify Token Sale at tokensale.imusify.com.
Official Website:
White paper:
https://imusify.com/whitepaper.pdf
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