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eMusic claims it will raise $70m for its blockchain plans

We reported earlier this year, somewhat sceptically, on digital-music service eMusic’s plans for a blockchain-powered relaunch. Now the company has given more details about how much money it’s planning to raise to fund its pivot to a ‘decentralised music distribution and royalty management system’.

eMusic says that it’s shooting for $70m in its token sale, which will kick off with a public pre-sale in September, followed by a token generation event (TGE, if you’re keeping track of these acronyms) straight after.

Cue rhetoric: “Today’s supply chain is full of blockers, middlemen and inefficiencies that create barriers for artists’ music to get from the studio to fans’ headphones. eMusic is going to fix this problem using an all-new blockchain platform that provides a more streamlined, transparent and autonomous structure benefiting all parties,” said CEO Tamir Koch.

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56% of companies running ICOs have crashed within four months

A new study by researchers at Boston College will provide more ammunition for people who are sceptical about the boom in blockchain startups and ICO funding.

The study claims that around 56% of crypto startups who raise money from token sales have gone out of business within four months. This is based on analysis of 2,390 ICOs up until May 2018. “These are stakes in platforms that have not yet been built, that have no participants yet. There’s a lot of risk. The majority of ICOs do fail,” one of the researchers, Leonard Kostovetsky, told Bloomberg.

Posted inReports

Report 414: Blocked Up

Our latest Music Ally report explores the outlook for blockchain music startups in 2018, after several months of bad news around blockchain firms, initial coin offerings (ICOs) and cryptocurrencies. Will the wobbles in the wider market hamper the companies hoping to use blockchain tech to solve some of the music industry’s problems, or will those […]

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Online audio-mastering startup CloudBounce to launch ICO

Drag’n’drop audio-mastering startup CloudBounce is joining the blockchain bandwagon, with plans to launch an initial coin offering (ICO).

The company, which competes with services like Landr, announced its plans tonight at the Abbey Road Red incubator’s demo event in London.

“We’re doing the next step in building a better community and better and faster audio-processing service,” said CEO Anssi Uiomonen, who was speaking in a session of the incubator’s alumni (he’s on the far left of the photo above).

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Valyou X wants to create a blockchain-based stock market for music

The idea of fans investing in music rights is enjoying a flurry of attention in 2017, and blockchain startups are all the rage. It was only a matter of time before startups started putting the two concepts together.

One of them is Valyou X, based in Australia, which is pitching itself as “the world’s first decentralised global stock market for musicians”.

It’s a riff on past startups that have tried to create a virtual stock market around songs and artists, except with cryptocurrency, blockchain technology and the possibility (and we stress ‘possibility’) of real rewards.