British blockchain music startup BlockPool is the company behind music-discovery service Aurovine, which has ben going since 2012.
It was one of the first digital music services to tap into blockchain technology, and now it’s launching a new way to reward fans for their actions on the platform, working with rock band Superfecta.
The new feature is called ‘Listen, Rate, Share’, and involves rewarding fans with the cryptocurrency AudioCoins when they rate and share an artist’s work – with the same cryptocurrency used to pay artists when their music is listened to on Aurovine.
“By developing Aurovine into a full service music discovery, sharing and monetisation platform, enabled by the blockchain, we hope to improve experiences for both artists and listeners,” said co-founder David Blundell. “We will also be extending the system to provide automated self hosted smart contracts later this year.”
The news comes as BlockPool is raising money to continue its development, again using cryptocurrency. So far its ‘token exchange campaign’ has raised the equivalent of $183.4k.
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This story would have benefited greatly from a closer look at any of the entities named, as I just did with Google and five minutes:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/audiocoin/
You could literally take it over for a bit over $1m. It’s a LiteCoin fork using Scrypt POW, so with a few spare LiteCoin mining rigs you could take over its entire blockchain and rewrite the artists’ payments to say anything you like.
I find as a rule of thumb, if something says “blockchain” it’s not a question of if it’s bad, but how it’s bad.
David, just wanted to respond to a couple of points you have made. First of all, AudioCoin is actually a Proof of Stake currency and therefore the only way you could obtain over 51% would be by purchasing that amount and then waiting for a considerably long time for your weight to surpass that of the rest of the network. As 60% of the AudioCoin supply is currently held and not available on the exchanges the amount of work and time to overwhelm the network would be excessive compared with the benefit to be gained. AudioCoin also has a diverse ownership which makes this even more challenging. Finally, when AudioCoin first launched into the market, the founders took specific steps to ensure that the cryptocurrency was spread around enough to preclude such attacks. Whilst “double spend” attacks that you reference have been written about theoretically, we have yet to see one happen. To be extra certain, we have upgraded the system to Blackcoin’s latest codebase which includes specific functionality to guard against these theoretical attacks.
As to your second point, if anyone suggests that Blockchain is the solution to every problem then they are guilty of exaggeration. With our music industry experience, along with over 5 years of research, we have determined a large number of areas where Blockchain can improve and transform processes and therefore industries. That is why Aurovine and partner company Blockpool are developing valid real-world solutions and proof-of-concepts with industry leaders to augment and not simply replace their current structures.