RE: Steemify? Steemsound? Last.steem.fm?
I really like the ideas you present in your posts. Several services are already available that allows payments of the producer of music. I think most of them are working with crypto currencies as payment currency.
Years ago I was working with a friend to create a workable concept for a very similar service, but then based on fiat currencies. What we found out in our market research is that many producers of music do prefer to work with the big channels and music re-sellers. The main reasons are: 1) re-sellers and publishers have the network to promote the music 2) reach of publishers 3) user preference to use the big service (itunes, beatport, spotify, soundcloud) 4) progress in increase of revenues per track to the artists shown by the big players such as itunes, beatport and so on. Although streaming services are users favourite, artist do not particular like services like Spotify since most of the artists do earn next to nothing. Therefore it is extremely difficult to setup a new service competing with the existing channels, since building and marketing of any new service in a market that is dominated by big players with deep pockets, is most likely suicide.
But I do love to hear when someone want to invest time in building technology of a music service that allows artists to make direct revenue, since music is a passion of mine, I love to participate in projects to create new services and models for the music producers and music fans.
Would it not succeed if you reward big musicians and listeners alike? That would kill spotify in the long run I think. If you set it up with even more options then the competitors the competitors would need to change or die. And I forgot about a itunes and all of that! HOW can I forget that! I would love to eventually invest in something like this but I am way way way low. Many others have higher then me. I need to build up everything before I invest anything. iF YOU want drop me a line lets talk a bit you seem to be in the know and these are just ideas I am shooting out there!
The business case for Spotify is very thin, with only 10 Euro/mnth subscription fee there is simply not a lot of money to share with the artists. Spotify as an organisation has huge costs in terms of technology and labour costs. Even Beatport, the number one seller of electronic music has 10s of people just making the contracts and handling the content management side of things as well as marketing. They offer artists already a much better fee than the traditional vinyl and CD resellers and distributers. I know a few known electronic artist who skipped all the traditional channels and started selling there tracks through their own website and used FB and other channels to promote and sometimes even a local artist promotion agency, but they saw the revenues drop dramatically. Selling music requires channels to plug/promote the music, and that is what the distributers have, they have connections with the radio stations, with TV stations, with billboard owners etc etc. As mentioned already in my previous comments, there are parties who created service for direct selling by artists to consumers, but they need to have deep pockets. Even Spotify is not running black numbers as far as I know. As well as Soundcloud as far as I know the rumours; They had to lay off quite a few people very recently and also had to close a couple of important offices throughout the world.