Blog: Blockchain

Facebook was not the first web 2.0 company, but it was the one that took it mainstream to a global audience. Consumers’ digital lives would never be the same again. Whereas web 1.0 had enabled them to visit and read websites, much like a digital evolution of newspapers and magazines, Facebook enabled consumers to participate, to comment, upload photos, converse, etc.

Strike up a five-minute conversation with someone in the Web3 space, and any combination of the words “forward-thinking”, “revolutionary”, and “equitable” is bound to come up. Many proponents of NFTs, DAOs, the metaverse, and other Web3 concepts seek to use decentralisation to dismantle old systems and bring power to the people — and their intentions are, for the most part, good.

Last Thursday, a Royal NFT drop allowing fans to purchase a share in the streaming royalties of two Nas songs sold out within minutes. The drop was delayed by a week after high demand crashed Royal’s site, signaling potential for the concept of fans and artists co-owning music rights.

Soon after the #GameStonks event of January 2021 , Elon Musk reined in the increasingly investment-savvy digital sphere back around to cryptocurrency, using his Tesla company to purchase $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, and announcing that it planned to accept Bitcoin as payment.

Success in new business paradigms involves wasting what is abundant to capture what is scarce. The Industrial Revolution did this by taking advantage of technologies that used the finite resource of human physical labour (steam, electricity) and made it considerably more efficient, allowing for bigger factories and the advent of mass production.

Zuckbucks have landed, albeit by a different name. The simply named Libra (MIDiA is still holding out for Jeff’s Pesos being Amazon’s official coin) is Facebook’s first venture into the world of crypto.

If talk was cheap before, then the laws of supply and demand mean the advent of big data drove that value to zero. So overwhelmed with opinions are we that it is hard to know who means what anymore. This is not entirely a bad thing.

Last week, 15,000 people converged in Amsterdam for The Next Web’s annual two-day conference. This year’s event comprised streams covering music, the workplace, sport and social media. AI and blockchain’s omnipresence across these spheres was unsurprising.

MIDiA Research were one of thousands of delegates who arrived in Cannes this week to attend Midem; the annual conference addressing the latest developments in the music industry. Across 4 days of panels, here are three points we found most insightful: Still no consensus on streaming : Perhaps predictably, many of the event’s panels with regard to the recorded music business were geared towards streaming.

Independent label services company Essential Music & Marketing is no longer independent, having just been acquired by Sony Musi c and merged with Sony’s label services division Red to create a new entity: Red Essential.