A blockchain application for selling music

Abstract

Digital Service Providers (DSPs) such as Spotify, Apple Music are playing an important role in distributing music and providing music services through online music selling platforms. However, the transparency of the purchasing record is low. The revenue and credit split of a sold song is unclear. This project aims to solve the problem of low transparency and unclear profit split by applying the Blockchain technology, a distributed and immutable database, in a web-based music selling platform. The blockchain stores the music purchasing records and the profit splitting information. These records are distributed to a private blockchain network which involves the copyright owners, record labels and the music selling platform. I design and implement our own data model and architecture of the blockchain application to match the use cases. The music selling platform consists of a website, a centralized web server, and a private blockchain network. I discuss the advantages of this design compared with a fully decentralized blockchain application. Our system implemented a system which allows users to purchase and sell music on the website. The DSPs can pay revenues to sellers according to the defined profit split. The purchasing and payment records can be checked in a block explorer.