Before starting Bitcoin Prediction Market my co-founder and I were iterating through a few variations of social/art/music betting webapps, which are no longer online. We tried gamifying the music/art/money interaction so as to take it a step beyond tipping, which many already had links for (paypal, buy me a coffee, pateron, etc). In gamifying the UX we thought we could make the money component more interesting.

We talked to hundreds of music producers and artists and they were intrigued at the idea of receiving money, but none were interested in actually participating in a v4v economy. Their main objective was more views and more fans—they wanted to publish to the widest possible audience and gain as much reach as possible.

Legacy music industry has convoluted publishing rights deals, and it gets even worse with labels. Artists are mostly chasing after fans because most people don’t care about their music anyways. Even big producers who got tiktok famous are not interested in a few sats here or there. They either want collabs with more famous artists (signed with labels and have convoluted publishing royalty deals) or they want to promote their music and get more views.

Beatstars and airbit already sell the dream of licensing beats so producers can make a living (and artgrab/redbubble does for artists), and some are succeeding. If u have over 1m listens per month spotify cheques can sustain you as a solo/small artist. 

When we tried communicating the new digital economy pitch these artists really didn’t care. They saw the current internet as that new digital economy that already existed. I was even making money off my beats from beatstars way before v4v was a thing. Creator economy is run on paypal.

The worst thing is when these artists said adding money convoluted the art and made it all about money. At the end of the day they r in the business of making art or music because they love art or music, not because they love money… They just want to make enough to do what they love, and that comes by creating a business. Unless they can find customers (fans or other artists willing to license their stuff) then u can’t make money as an artist, and it’s just a hobby u do for the love of it…